Page "Compaq" Paragraph 22

However, Pfeiffer had little vision for what the combined companies should do, or indeed how the three dramatically different cultures could work as a single entity, and Compaq struggled as a result of a strategy that had the company caught in between the low end and high end.

Mark Anderson, president of Strategic News Service, a research firm based in Friday Harbor, Wash. was quoted as saying The kind of goals he had sounded good to shareholders -- like being a $ 50 billion company by the year 2000, or to beat I. B. M.

-- but they didn't have anything to do with customers.

The new C. E. O.

should look at everything Eckhard acquired and ask: did the customer benefit from that.

If the answer isn't yes, they should get rid of it.

On one hand, Compaq struggled to compete in the PC market with the Dell Computer Corporation, which sold directly to buyers, avoiding the dealer channel and its markup, and built each machine to order to keep inventories and costs at a minimum.

At the same time, Compaq, through its acquisitions of the Digital Equipment Corporation last year and Tandem Computer in 1997, has tried to become a major systems company, like I. B. M.

and Hewlett-Packard.