What?!?!
You mean it wasn't for bottom feeders, earlier in life?
Compaq returns to Germany - as brand for bottom-feeders
From January, HP is to start selling Compaq PCs in Germany again - because it needs a downmarket brand to help it better compete with the local market leader Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC). Compaq, you will recall, always charged more than its competitors, but it was not particularly strong in Germany, where the brand …
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Saturday 22nd December 2007 07:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
New to the industry?
How long has the author been in this industry? Maybe Compaq was a rather expensive brand in the last years before it was acquired by HP, but that was not the case earlier. Initially it was one of very few competitors to IBM in PC hardware, and being cheap was a key component of the package.
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Saturday 22nd December 2007 18:33 GMT Henry Wertz
Yes...
Yep, Compaq really has no case for charging a price premium now. Both Compaq and HP's higher-end brands were previously able to charge some price premium due to innovative designs (in some cases) and good technical support (in others).
Well, first things Fiorna did when she took over HP was to cut technical support costs by outsourcing it to the lowest bidder, and decide that HP can just put together off-the-shelf machines and cut the R&D. So, really, what makes a Compaq worth a price premium over some random machine? Nothing really.
Now that she is out, it's possible HP can turn it around I suppose -- they aren't bankrupt yet by a long shot. But it'll take a while.
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Monday 24th December 2007 09:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Digital blast from the past...
I had a digital Ultra Highnote laptop (486 sx2 50, 350Mb hdd, dual scan colour screen, floppy drive no CD and a trackBALL). I still think that this was the most comfortable laptop I have used for any length of time (since had; IBM TPs, Compaq various, Dell various). The little wedge for the floppy drive that you could unscrew was genius (back in the mid-late nineties at least)...
Aside from that I always saw Compaq and Toshiba as somewhere near the same level, maybe Toshia a touch better and they usually were move expensive than say your Gateways/Dells, and UK brands that were around at the time (your Eveshams, Elonex', Time, Tiny etc) (though not as pricey as IBMs Thinkpads). But having had a Dell and then a second hand Compaq M300, I could see why, the Compaq was far better made (infact the M300 is still going strong even though it is a PII 300~Mhz, long after the Dell bit the dust).
Just my tupence worth...
Dan
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Monday 24th December 2007 09:56 GMT Pete James
I tell you, this cheese came from Walsall!!
Blimey, this is a blast from the past! I was in a big reseller of Compaq tin for over 6 years back in the late Nineties and it was damned good stuff priced to fight. They gave Sun a good hiding when they brought out their rival workstation at under half the price of a Sparc and the tussles with Dell were huge fun to be involved with. The Digital notebooks were very classy bits of work - if I remember correctly the designer moved to IBM? - and to me it was the dying days of real thought in creating laptops with original thinking instead of incremental improvements.
Here's a Christmas quiz for everyone; What did Compaq stand for?
No Googling!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
