Comment Articles

HP-Compaq Branding

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 07 Sep 2001 11:29 BST

Everybody seems convinced that Hewlett-Packard will "dominate" the new organisation, and that this means the end of the Compaq brand.

This is partly because this is what the senior executives of both companies are saying. Of course, it's quite possible that this is what the two sets of senior executives are currently saying to each other, never mind what they say in public; but my instinct is not to be too sure.

It might happen. When Compaq took over Digital Equipment, the d i g i t a l logo disappeared from all but legal documents very quickly. Tandem stopped being Tandem NonStop and became Compaq NonStop. And there is, often, a sort of "corporate team" attitude to these things, which says "We want to sing from the same hymn book".

Of the two company names, it is probably true that Compaq is the better known as a PC brand. I certainly know people who own HP printers, who express astonishment when they discover that there are Hewlett-Packard PCs.

But it is also probably true that Compaq has more enemies than friends. It has flourished for years, because it refused to talk to middle-rank managers at all; it did deals "over their heads" with corporate buyers and IT directors of only the largest organisations, and left the rest to its distributors.