Compaq Brand Licensing
compaq.com
compaq.com
On this day of looking forward to new Apple products, and looking back (Steve Jobs archive on the HN front page at the moment) let us not forget one more thing:
For anyone else looking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32760695
(Although they offer 24 internationalized keyboard options, I don't know how thoroughly the "Astro Slide" brand was researched for global markets: in the US, it's similar to a major brand of adult intimate products.)
The company ignored its core competence in electronics and semiconductors, and attempted to become a conglomerate.
In the end stages, it was known as "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" (RCA).
The one good thing that RCA did at this end was to train the engineers behind TSMC, UMC and Mediatek.
https://www.eetimes.com/rca-taiwan-workers-victory-too-littl...
https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Management-Core-Competencie...
A relevant study of DEC and Microsoft is the "Showstoppers" book by Zachary.
I worked for HP in 2003-2004 in the storage network division. HP stocks lost half of their value under her "leadership". Yet the CEO still got bonuses [1].
> In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.
> Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”
> However, before Conservative Political Action Caucus in February, Fiorina proclaimed that under her HP command, “We would double its revenues to $90 billion, triple its rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, and go from a laggard to a leader in every product category and every market segment in which we competed.”
> Sure, she doubled revenues—through a massive, ill-conceived, controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002—but Fiorina did nothing to increase profits over her five-year term, with the S&P 500 showing net income across enterprises concomitantly up 70%. Furthermore, shareholder wealth at HP was sliced 52% under her reign against the S&P, which was down only 15% in that bearish period. She modeled the old joke of “making it up in the volume.”
> Fiorina rammed the Compaq deal through despite intense opposition by analysts, employees, and shareholders. When it appeared that she would lose the proxy vote, the balance was tipped back the other way using hardball tactics that would make Donald Trump wince.
> Despite such carnage, Fiorina pocketed over $100 million in compensation for her short reign—including a $65 million signing bonus and a $21 million severance. I have studied comebacks from adversity, but she’s not shown the required contrition nor earned the needed exoneration, and she’s not served as a CEO since. Upon leaving Taiwan Semiconductor’s board, the firm disclosed she only attended 17% of the board meetings.
She looted the place. And destroyed what was left.
The commercial jets were another pitiful incident. The existing fleet of Gulfstream jets were unable to fly non-stop from America to India. So she had the company purchase new Gulfstreams which ran about $55-60M each. The story going around my division (in Colorado Springs) was that the older planes had older pilots and she wanted younger pilots, so the existing pilots were laid off even though the transition from Gulfstream IV to 450/550/650 (I forget which new model they bought) would be covered by the same type rating.
So many people were being laid off that an entire department existed to try to comply with WARN Act compliance [2]. Every Friday there were lots of going away parties where things like "Joe Bloggs here is the last guy who knows how to do X". Los Alamos laboratories had the largest installed computer base of DEC Alpha chips [3][4]. All those folks who worked with Alphas were laid off by 2003. Los Alamos National Labs had to hurry up and replace those computers ahead of schedule because repair parts and tech support disappeared in the layoff frenzy. This was the first job I had where H-1B visa workers were present. Chatting with some, their paychecks said "Digital Equipment Corp" even though Compaq bought DEC in 1998 and HP bought Compaq in 2002. They explained it to me that it was almost impossible to rename a company in India (this might have been true back then, or they might have been pulling my leg). They were asked to work remotely on Fridays, or to come in on Saturdays instead. This was due to fears of disgruntled ex-employees committing violence. I got to learn PERL because the previous guy wanted to learn it and that jerk wrote all of the build scripts in PERL [5].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura
[1] - https://archive.ph/ewfsG [Fortune magazine]
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
[3] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/509058.509130
[4] - https://www.top500.org/site/48276/
[5] - Along with APL, PERL is a write-only programming language.
I guess not, the brand Mercedes Benz is almost a hundred years old but is still desirable...
She worked in accounting so that's probably what she used every day, and might have had a bad experience with some other (also now-defunct) brand.
Compaq, DEC, HP... all great companies that became not what they used to be.
(IBM's eventual 386 PC was the PS/2 Model 80, using an MCA bus for expansion instead of 8/18-bit PC ISA, so it was maybe less PC-compatible than the Compaq.)
Their great coups are more about timing than anything else, I'd say.
By showing up shortly after the very first generation of "PC Compatibles", they managed to miss the tendency to build something "better but not compatible", and had a chance to plan a strategy for when IBM's lawyers came calling.
Getting a 386 to market was inevitable; if they didn't do it, someone else would. Without Compaq, the PS/2 Model 80 might have been the first 386 PC, but it would still have had a hard time fighting off cheaper and more versatile ISA-bus clones.
Maybe I'm still resentful of the mid-late 90s days, when the dream was a standard AT chassis and power supply and its reliable upgrade path, rather than manufacturers like Compaq with their zany form factors.
https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/innovation/ips/brand-licen...
Basically these are meaningless companies riding on their past fame any manufacturer can slap their logo on any product for a fee. What a scam...
More and more people will eventually notice like I did, people aren't stupid. When the exact same generic product is sold 10 times more under a known brand than under some obscure one, one will realize that paying more doesn't yield better quality.
Brand Licensing provides the permission to trademarks, under defined conditions.
Really doesn't read well to me, feels like they omitted a verb, like it should be "the permission to USE trademarks" or something. Being permitted to a trademark feels very chopped-off.