Word: compaq
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Since founding Dell Computer in his Texas dorm room in 1984, Michael Dell has steadily, inexorably grown his company into the largest PC manufacturer in the world. The firm, based in Austin, Texas, has overtaken the box business's best-known makers-IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard among them-by executing its unorthodox, build-to-order manufacturing formula. Dell Computer isn't known for product innovation. It wins by being efficient, relentlessly so. In the competitive and increasingly commoditized computer industry, Dell's cherub-faced founder and CEO may be the closest thing there is to an irresistible force...
...arrive, a system that solves the credit-card problem. Today, Dell offers next-day delivery from its factory in Xiamen to 400 cities and towns. And Dell's China market share has grown from near zero in 1998 to 4.4%. That may not sound impressive, but Dell has eclipsed Compaq and is pressing IBM for the top foreign-brand position. In the lucrative segment for corporate server computers, Dell has risen to fifth spot with an 11% share, behind Legend, IBM, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. "Everyone always predicts our failure," says Richard Ward, Dell's vice president of China...
...Witness the carnage after the sharp, unexpected crash on corporate I.T. spending late in 2000: losses convinced IBM to all but abandon in-house PC manufacturing by farming assembly out to subcontractors. Hewlett-Packard and Compaq are trying to merge. Dell was hurt by the downturn, too. The company laid off 1,700 workers last year, its first redundancies ever. But it still managed to increase sales by 18.3% in 2001, showing a profit of $2.1 billion...
...Fiorina bristles at the suggestion that HP doesn't innovate enough (indeed, the company recently introduced the first photo printer that prints directly from a digital camera's storage card). She slams Hewlett's alternative as a waste of opportunity. Roughly 25% of the profit a combined HP-Compaq would make, in the best-case scenario, would come from printing and imaging. "It would be an easy course if we were focused on the short term," she says. "We're looking 10 years ahead...
...course, that sidesteps the question of whether HP and Compaq can successfully merge without leaving the floor slick with blood. Most large-scale tech-firm mergers have been hideous disasters. Compaq's last acquisition, the Digital Equipment Corp., was a textbook example of how not to do it. Good products died, top talent fled and resentment lingered for years after management cut 15,000 jobs. Now HP plans, upon the merger, to lay off 15,000; it also hopes for cost savings of $2.5 billion. A team of 500 is working full time on integrating the companies, though most...