Knowledge@Wharton published an analysis – The H-P Compaq Merger Two Years Out: Still Waiting for the Upside – about the results of the merge between Hewlett-Packard and Compaq for a while. Interesting to see that there are still two different entry points for the new company (hp.com, compaq.com)…

Different quite opposite views are expressed in this, which shows that it is still difficult to know after 2 years is this huge merge was/is worth or not.

George Day

“Wall Street may say, “Break the damn thing up’. Analysts [often] have good insights, but they made the same proposal in 1992 when Gerstner came on board. It’s a nice parallel. Gerstner was confronted, when he first arrived, with the idea of, ‘Let’s break up IBM into six or seven different businesses.’ Well, it would have been the worst possible decision for IBM. If Carly’s going to make this thing work, she’s going to have to do something like Gerstner did: pull things together and create solutions at the level of market segments. Each part of the organization that reaches the customer should have the autonomy to pull together whatever the customer wants, supported by product groups. That’s not a bad strategy. H-P is really a product-centric company. If they can move to become a customer-focused company, with the products feeding into those customer groups, then they may have a chance. But the problem with that strategy is we have a player [IBM] that’s already done that. HP is trying to be cost competitive with Dell and be the same kind of integrated-solutions provider that IBM has become. If that doesn’t work — if it’s clear IBM has too big a lead — then HP, which has this hugely profitable printer business, has to think about breaking up.”

Saikat Chaudhuri

“H-P has to be more focused on its marketing, not just saying, ‘We provide everything,’ but ‘We can cater to all your needs and this is how were going to do it.’ The beautiful part of IBM’s e-Business strategy is everything else can revolve around it. The challenge for H-P is to extend its brand. High quality and innovation need to apply to servers, services and storage systems as well as PCs.”