Stock dropped 42% during her, what, 6 years at HP? Leo managed a 40% drop in 13 months. They gave him millions to leave, too. I wonder: what is the common denominator in both their tenures? Oh, I know, the Board.
At the time HP bought Compaq they were going downhill fast, I couldn’t believe they or anyone would buy Compuke. Some of the worst computers I ever saw, and I worked on dozens of them.
Both Compaq and HP were doing the same thing, building proprietary computers. That’s one area companies like Dell and Toshiba had an advantage. With those, you could go out and buy a power supply at any computer shop and it would drop right in. The power supply in your HP or Compaq went belly up and you had to order one from the company at 3X the price.
As an example I worked on one that had a bad motherboard. Compaq. I had one in the shop for $85. Customer decided to order the right one from Compaq. $212. And it refused tpo let me install Windows from the restore CD. Compaq tech support refused to help me figure it out. The guy kept telling me to call the company I bought the motherboard from. Compaq ended up getting a nastygram. Tech support superviser on phone got a piece of my mind too.
That’s what Carly bought, and why Compaq was going down when HP bought them. I knew nothing about Carly at the time. Proprietary computers, more Compaq machines came in the shop than anything else, motherboards, power supplies and sometimes even CD Rom drives could only be bought through Compaq because they made them specifically to fit only in their cases. Some also had video cards that were not full height, same thing. Standard video card would not fit. Any of those parts cost 3X what the standard ones we had on the shelf cost. Plus I had to figure out how to get into their weird cases...Sometimes I had to look it up online, while any standard case simply has 2 or 3 screws on back. Bad air circulation causing it to overheat? Too bad, no place for an extra fan. Want a better cooling fan on the CPU? Better hope you have room...then you find out it has a different power plug and your new fan still won’t work.
HP was doing the same things. Dell later did a few proprietary machines, but mostly standard parts in general.
All these were building a bad reputation, plus tech support was beyond awful. Call them and you’d get some guy in India you could barely understand. Last time I called concerning the Compaq motherboard problem above, I made 3 of them put someone else on the phone, I couldn’t understand a word. Finally demanded they put a supervisor on. I could barely understand him and got nothing done about the problem.
That was what HP bought. A failing company with a reputation for low quality proprietary computers and horrid tech support. Customers were getting sick of it and moving to other brands already.
I know nothing about the politics of the buy, or the stock situations involved, I just saw it from a repair tech’s view, I wouldn’t have touched Compaq even with someone else’s money.