View from the Hill:-

What If?... Speculation About Mergers Which Might Have Been

Although the official count for the HP-Compaq merger could take weeks, it's likely that both companies will do better this year, regardless of the outcome, because of the IT recovery that's already started. Maybe it's the Spring weather, or maybe when a market has already been in recession for a year, the quarterly comparisons with the year before don't look so bad any more. And even PCs do start to look a bit tired and need replacing if you hang onto them for a third or fourth year. If the options are to replace old systems or decomputerise, then eventually companies will have to buy some new stuff.

There have been over 100 mergers and acquisitions in the storage market since January 2000, and this got me speculating about matches which, unlike the HP-Compaq merger, wouldn't be so synergistic.

In the mid 1990's there was strong speculation that Sun Microsystems was planning to buy Apple Computer. Imagine what the results would be now, if that had gone ahead. When a customer buys a iMac they have to go on a two week systems administration course on the SunMacOS operating system before they're allowed to turn it on. Or when you order your next SPARC mainframe for the datacenter there's a four week delay before delivery, because the color you wanted (to match your carpet) is not in stock, and you don't want to risk the faster delivery but tatty appearance offered by a gray Sun VAR of an ex-stock model with a garage respray.

Then there are those other possible mergers, which even their managements haven't considered yet, and I want a percentage of the proceeds if this article gives them ideas.

Suppose EMC were to merge with Palm? You'd get the amazing PalmBack, a PDA with 10 Terabytes of data including all your favorite DVDs, CDs and business reports etc (much more than 4 hours of music!) connected to your neat little hand sized device connected via a BlueTooth wireless interface to a backpack weighing 60 pounds which straps to your shoulders. The PalmBack standard model would run for 30 minutes with its built in power source, but you could get an optional UPS based on ten car batteries strapped together which you pull along on a little trolley behind you.

Then there's the merger between Microsoft and the entertainment industry which we've been waiting to really happen for the last ten years or so. Only let's give it the proper name, the Content Delivery Industry. If Microsoft merged with Lucas Films, you'd be half way through watching the next episode of Star Wars, delivered down your broadband pipe, when, fifteen minutes from the end, the screen would go blue with a message saying "There is a fault with this system, please press control-alt-delete to restart, and contact your software vendor." You reset the system, but like Groundhog Day, it doesn't resume from where it crashed, instead you have to start watching the movie all over again from the beginning... That's what you get for being a beta site, and buying the new content delivery system in the first year after it came out. You should have known better. Version 4.3 will fix that problem.

OK maybe those later mergers might never happen, so I won't get any credit for proposing them. But you never know, if the Nasdaq heats up again we're going to see some crazy things again. (I'm going to watch CNBC tonight to see if my suggestions get a mention, just in case.) And maybe the HP-Compaq merger doesn't look so strange now that we've had enough time to get used to it.

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