After the last two years, possibly (probably?) not - but surely that brand value is incredibly contextually relevant anyway. For consumer electronics, I probably wouldn't buy Oracle's tablet the Elisson-3000, but if I were building a server farm I'd be more inclined to go with Oracle over HP given the apparent management issues, the current Autonomy debacle, and their flip-flopping in the consumer PC space.

Irrespective of that, presumably an acquisition decision has more to it than , "HP is a better brand so we should buy HP" (this is not rhetorical)?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, especially given your background, I'm just genuinely interested as to your reasons.