| > It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma. No, this wasn't it. DEC actually had a quite good PC business which died when everybody died to the Asian manufacturers. DEC also had plenty of technical stuff as well as cash flow to ride it out. DEC was purely a result of executive level and board level malfeasance. After the board forced the founder Ken Olsen (who wasn't a great CEO but actually did have vision) out, Robert Palmer (who had no vision AND was incompetent) (and not the singer--the singer probably would have been better as CEO) was given marching orders to sell off the company. Which he did--with no vision whatsoever. Lots of people tried to fight against it, but any division which started righting itself immediately got flogged off. The patent lawsuit allowed DEC to jettison a bunch of the fab to Intel which then made them an attractive target to Compaq. People love to comment that the merger killed COMPAQ when the reality was the entire US domestic PC industry was completely collapsing. HOWEVER, to give you an idea as to how badly the "hostile giveaway" was managed, Compaq effectively bought DEC for less than their enterprise service annual revenue--about $2 billion per year. HP later milked this stream for more than a decade. So, in the middle of a PC industry collapse, no executive could figure out how to convert a $2 billion annual revenue stream for enterprise services plus a whole bunch of leading edge technology into a profitable company. This shows just how shit-tastic the executive management for both DEC and COMPAQ really were. But, hey, the DEC board got their stock bump and cashed out. |