An anonymous reader writes "HP and 3Com Corporation today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase 3Com, a leading provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions, at a price of $7.90 per share in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors."
... what happened to 3com. Some of us remember "back in the day" when 3com was one of the top brands for network cards (3c503 or 3c509 anyone?). Then their cards disappeared from the market some years ago, apparently they decided to focus on other areas. I guess it isn't a huge surprise that they would become a target for acquisition.
No Vista driver because the card doesn't support the HD DRM requirement for the ability check that you haven't physically modified the card in the last 1/30th of a second...
Started with them in Massachusetts in '93. They had some of the worst and most disorganized upper management ever. The guys doing corporate strategy must have been ADHD. They would buy a new (usually startup) company every year...some good, some bad. Kept the original management for a year, then, after all the developers and original management had gotten PO'd and left, bought another company and did the same thing. Year after year. I'm not sure what they got out of it.
I was laid off after they'd spent several years developing a gigabit enterprise switch, sold the first few, then made s surprise announcement that they were leaving the enterprise business. You can imagine how their major customers, who'd started to build new infrastructure using these switches, took that news.
They did give out great clothing, though. Still have a collection. Great co-workers, good projects, extremely poor corporate management.
Remember Bob Metcalfe and all of the FUD he used to spout about Linux and Open Source?
Bob used to answer the phone when I had a problem with the 3com card in my VAX-780. Then he was riding high for a while. I'd imagine he took out lots of cash while the company was a leader.
PCI appeared, and with that the 3c905 and 3c900. Their primary distinguishing feature was that the actual chip used on the card changed every few months requiring a new driver without a change in product number.
Don Becker came one time to do a demo at work. He brought a stack of CDs to clusterify a bunch of PCs (I don't remember exactly what he was trying to accomplish, to be honest. It's long enough ago that it's fuzzy)
Anyhow, when his CDs booted, they didn't recognize the revision of the 905's in the machines. I always got a kick out of seeing Becker himself get bitten by that. Made me feel a little better about running into problems myself.
See, i remember the 3c509's well - that's all they would support at my university (no generic isa NE2000 cards allowed in 1996...)
$ORKPLACE (a university) mandated the 3c509 because we apparantly had lots of problems getting Banyan Vines to work properly through generic NE2000 clones. When PCI came along we moved to the 905. Then we went Netware, and the on-board Intel and Tulip chips got really good, and separate NICs became an un-needed extra cost for most applications here - I could easily believe the same thing happened elsewhere, too. A couple of years ago I fished about 20 new-in-box 3c509b's from a skip; don't know what I'll us
At the telemarketing company I worked at in 1995, the Tandem mainframe interfaced with the rest of the world through interface computers called MLADs (Multilan Attachment Devices). The MLAD required a 3c503 coax interface card configured to a particular IO address & IRQ for the Tandem side interface an a 3c509 TPE interface card on another particular IO address & IRQ. It wouldn't work with any other card.
There were 4 racks of those machines. All transporting NetBIOS over IPX between the Tandem an
As somebody who was forced to use dial-up at home until 2005 (no broadband was available), I can attest that US Robotics modems were the best after the buyout as well. Connections virtually never dropped, they worked in every OS I threw at them, and they always made the best of the fact that the phone line wouldn't accommodate better than 28.8... Now that I think about it, the two I owned were outstanding, but I still don't miss them even a little.
I remember when everyone knew who Hayes was, and nobody knew who USR was. USR was the underdog in that battle, and eventually switched roles from the David to the Goliath. But anyway 3COM was hardly a no-name company when they bought USR; Bob Metcalf invented Ethernet and founded 3COM and at the time was the God Of All Things to network geeks. He put ethernet adapters into VAX machines that had previously been stand alone systems in Universities, connected them all up, and made the Internet go. By the time of the buyout, 3COM was riding high on the sales of NICs and USR was the king of dial-up. It was a match made in heaven. Until both markets collapsed, for different reasons. I miss those days.
Somebody talked. The options market started heating up hours before the announcement.
It looks like it's going to be a good fight, as the traditional tech companies merge transformer-style into a pair of consolidated all-in-one providers. Maybe they'll battle to the death for every server room dollar.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
Apple does nothing in the datacenter or networking and these companies do little in consumer electronics. I doubt the merger will mean much to Apple.
That would be the "profitable" niche - and they appear to have taken over the "profitable" corner of every game board they play on.
Back in the Dot.Com era, there were plenty of companies out there that were all hype with little to show for it. I would continuously ask myself "Why does this crap sell?". Then the crash came, the companies that were nothing but hype were the first against the wall, they went away, the world went back to normal, and I said "Oh, now I understand!"
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday November 11, @07:49PM (#30068008)
As a current HP bastard (who didn't post this, BTW), this pissed me off. We've endured pay cuts, benefit cuts, no raises, mass firings, hell, my local office can't even purchase paper plates & disposable spoons, and somehow there's enough money to purchase another company.
It's not limited to IT. We matched last years numbers (which were record setting, by the way) and increased profitability. But... because our sister division's numbers sucked, No bonus for us, expansion is on hold, and capital expendatures on equipment we need for production is on hold. Meanwhile the parent corporation is buying up compatible businesses. So, why was it we busted our collective asses this year? Someone?
'So, why was it we busted our collective asses this year? Someone?'
Because you are young, foolish, and naive and believe that hard work and diligence means something to a corporation. But don't worry; you will grow out of it:)
It's all about budgeting. They put in a line item for 2.7B acquisition, whereas you did not put in a line item for paper plates and spoons. Next time be more aggressive and the company picnic should be a little less messy.
As someone who is going through HP's Work Force Reduction, it was a shock to me too. I'll just bet my 88K salary put them over the edge for this buy. - HEX
It's highly unlikely that HP will make money on that one. 3com doesn't have anything which HP doesn't have a better version of already. This makes even less sense than the Compaq deal
Shit like this is why I left 5 years ago. Get out while you still can, the old HP is dead and the zombie remnant doesn't give a shit about its employees.
I'll give you a hint. The company is referred to with a two letter acronym that starts with an "H". They've spun off all but one of their best divisions over the last decade, and they're about to fold their printer division (The last that makes anything innovative or of any quality) into the division that makes their worst-in-class PCs. They also just bought 3Com.
Her $20m golden parachute is indicative of why so many companies are badly run these days. CEOs incentives are not aligned with the company. It is very easy for the CEO do choose actions that benefit him or herself directly but don't benefit the company. It ought to be the responsibility of the board of directors, when considering a renumeration package, to ensure that the CEO (and other executives) only benefit personally when the company does well.
The ether cartridge that comes with the NIC is just a starter, it'll run out within a few hundred thousand packets(less if the packets contain more than ~50% 1s). Of course, only genuine HP ether is supported, for best possible data fidelity
Why is anybody surprised by this? Cisco announces a server product with very strong networking abilities. This is pretty much one of the few large areas of the datacenter (hardware wise) that Cisco hasn't moved into (besides disk arrays). HP sees this as a huge threat to them (bigger than IBM, who makes most revenue from services including running datacenters comprised of non-IBM equipment).
HP now realizing that they don't have the networking expertise to go after cisco directly in the networking space (one area they need to expand into to gain marketshare in the datacenter beyond servers and HDS rebranded storage, or that midrange Compaq based arrays). Well, they could go after the #2 enterprise networking company (Juniper, but they have a market cap of ~$13B), so they pick up 3com and whatever is left of it (remember they used to be partnered a while ago with Huauei, that partnership is gone tho), so they can better fight against Cisco for networking.
For these big companies it's all about expanding your presence and finding new revenue streams. Cisco can't seriously increase it's core routing/switching marketshare very easily any more than HP can increase its server marketshare.
It's not always easy to grow your company organically (from within). Look at cisco, they buy security companies, storage switching companies, WebEx. Hell, when they were a router only company, they bought an ethernet switching company (Crescendo) which later became the bread and butter business for them.
I've found HP's ProCurve Switches to be great with a lifetime warranty and free software updates compared to the Cisco equivilents which need SmartNet (maybe smart on Cisco's part) and cost 2-3 times as much.
However with alot of my clients rolling out the Cisco Voice solutions the idea usually is they standardize on all Cisco kit including the switches. I wonder if this is HP's play to get into the IP telephony market (which 3Com's website indicates they are in) to complete their offerings so a buisiness will go all-HP in a similar fashion?
i don't get it either. what can 3com possibly provide that HP doesn't already have? if carly hadn't of destroyed hp's RnD labs they could have built anything 3com have for a lot less then 2.7 billion.
They have a ton of IP, such as the patent for connecting VOIP calls to a regular PSTN [google.com], and didn't they just start flexing on their ethernet patents earlier this week? They had previously settled with Realtek for something like 70M + licensing and pretty much every other chip out there uses buffering. Obviously 70M is chump change to HP but I could see them getting 2B worth out of the rest of the 3com IP at least.
Calculators are a small part of HP's business and definitely not driving this merger. Someone was saying that HP might be doing this to better position themselves in the datacenter. I guess that they see the networking products of 3Com as another way to sell HP services. In other words, look at the high margin parts of HP. They are printer refills and various support services. I don't see the 3Com merger selling more printer refills, but it does look likely to open the door to more HP services.
I was recently wondering... (Score:5, Interesting)
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3C905B-TX
Possibly the most compatible card I have ever used. (Every OS except >= Vista supports it). Now they're super cheap on the electronic bay.
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No Vista driver because the card doesn't support the HD DRM requirement for the ability check that you haven't physically modified the card in the last 1/30th of a second...
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They started buying companies (Score:5, Informative)
Started with them in Massachusetts in '93. They had some of the worst and most disorganized upper management ever. The guys doing corporate strategy must have been ADHD. They would buy a new (usually startup) company every year...some good, some bad. Kept the original management for a year, then, after all the developers and original management had gotten PO'd and left, bought another company and did the same thing. Year after year. I'm not sure what they got out of it.
I was laid off after they'd spent several years developing a gigabit enterprise switch, sold the first few, then made s surprise announcement that they were leaving the enterprise business. You can imagine how their major customers, who'd started to build new infrastructure using these switches, took that news.
They did give out great clothing, though. Still have a collection. Great co-workers, good projects, extremely poor corporate management.
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Parent
Remember Bob Metcalfe (Score:5, Interesting)
Bob used to answer the phone when I had a problem with the 3com card in my VAX-780. Then he was riding high for a while. I'd imagine he took out lots of cash while the company was a leader.
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Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
*breaks down sobbing*
I need a hug!
PTSD or nostalgia?
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Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the world of computers it's usually a bit of both.
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Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
Stockholm ptsd--when you can't distinguish it from nostalgia.
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Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
PCI appeared, and with that the 3c905 and 3c900. Their primary distinguishing feature was that the actual chip used on the card changed every few months requiring a new driver without a change in product number.
Don Becker came one time to do a demo at work. He brought a stack of CDs to clusterify a bunch of PCs (I don't remember exactly what he was trying to accomplish, to be honest. It's long enough ago that it's fuzzy)
Anyhow, when his CDs booted, they didn't recognize the revision of the 905's in the machines. I always got a kick out of seeing Becker himself get bitten by that. Made me feel a little better about running into problems myself.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
See, i remember the 3c509's well - that's all they would support at my university (no generic isa NE2000 cards allowed in 1996...)
$ORKPLACE (a university) mandated the 3c509 because we apparantly had lots of problems getting Banyan Vines to work properly through generic NE2000 clones. When PCI came along we moved to the 905. Then we went Netware, and the on-board Intel and Tulip chips got really good, and separate NICs became an un-needed extra cost for most applications here - I could easily believe the same thing happened elsewhere, too. A couple of years ago I fished about 20 new-in-box 3c509b's from a skip; don't know what I'll us
Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time... A long time.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You realize that Banyan was "collaborating" with MS on AD correct?
So much of AD is direct from Banyan... still.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At the telemarketing company I worked at in 1995, the Tandem mainframe interfaced with the rest of the world through interface computers called MLADs (Multilan Attachment Devices). The MLAD required a 3c503 coax interface card configured to a particular IO address & IRQ for the Tandem side interface an a 3c509 TPE interface card on another particular IO address & IRQ. It wouldn't work with any other card.
There were 4 racks of those machines. All transporting NetBIOS over IPX between the Tandem an
Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Informative)
Oddly I'll always remember 3com for having bought up US Robotics.
Does that make me old? :(
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As somebody who was forced to use dial-up at home until 2005 (no broadband was available), I can attest that US Robotics modems were the best after the buyout as well. Connections virtually never dropped, they worked in every OS I threw at them, and they always made the best of the fact that the phone line wouldn't accommodate better than 28.8... Now that I think about it, the two I owned were outstanding, but I still don't miss them even a little.
Re:I was recently wondering... (Score:4, Informative)
I remember when everyone knew who Hayes was, and nobody knew who USR was. USR was the underdog in that battle, and eventually switched roles from the David to the Goliath. But anyway 3COM was hardly a no-name company when they bought USR; Bob Metcalf invented Ethernet and founded 3COM and at the time was the God Of All Things to network geeks. He put ethernet adapters into VAX machines that had previously been stand alone systems in Universities, connected them all up, and made the Internet go. By the time of the buyout, 3COM was riding high on the sales of NICs and USR was the king of dial-up. It was a match made in heaven. Until both markets collapsed, for different reasons. I miss those days.
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Parent
Awkward (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody talked. The options market started heating up hours before the announcement.
It looks like it's going to be a good fight, as the traditional tech companies merge transformer-style into a pair of consolidated all-in-one providers. Maybe they'll battle to the death for every server room dollar.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
Apple does nothing in the datacenter or networking and these companies do little in consumer electronics. I doubt the merger will mean much to Apple.
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Yeah, I'm not impressed with 2 billion billable downloads either....
I don't want to be rude, but that has nothing to do with what I wrote.
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And they're selling more of them than ever.
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Back in the Dot.Com era, there were plenty of companies out there that were all hype with little to show for it. I would continuously ask myself "Why does this crap sell?". Then the crash came, the companies that were nothing but hype were the first against the wall, they went away, the world went back to normal, and I said "Oh, now I understand!"
Now, while Apple continues to
FU HP (Score:5, Interesting)
As a current HP bastard (who didn't post this, BTW), this pissed me off. We've endured pay cuts, benefit cuts, no raises, mass firings, hell, my local office can't even purchase paper plates & disposable spoons, and somehow there's enough money to purchase another company.
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Re:FU HP (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:FU HP (Score:4, Interesting)
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Parent
Re:FU HP (Score:5, Insightful)
'So, why was it we busted our collective asses this year? Someone?'
Because you are young, foolish, and naive and believe that hard work and diligence means something to a corporation. :)
But don't worry; you will grow out of it
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Re:FU HP (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:FU HP (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who is going through HP's Work Force Reduction, it was a shock to me too. I'll just bet my 88K salary put them over the edge for this buy. - HEX
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FU HP (Score:4, Informative)
It's highly unlikely that HP will make money on that one. 3com doesn't have anything which HP doesn't have a better version of already. This makes even less sense than the Compaq deal
Patents.
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Re:FU HP (Score:4, Informative)
Shit like this is why I left 5 years ago. Get out while you still can, the old HP is dead and the zombie remnant doesn't give a shit about its employees.
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the suspense is over... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:the suspense is over... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll give you a hint. The company is referred to with a two letter acronym that starts with an "H". They've spun off all but one of their best divisions over the last decade, and they're about to fold their printer division (The last that makes anything innovative or of any quality) into the division that makes their worst-in-class PCs. They also just bought 3Com.
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No, Compaq bought 3Com (Score:5, Insightful)
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Next on her agenda: governor California.
Oh well, if she splits California in two it might not be a bad thing. Unless one of them winds up like Agilent.
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Actually, she is running for the U. S. Senate against Barbara Boxer.
Maybe I'll send Senator Boxer a campaign contribution with a note:
"I was laid off by Carly."
You know, you can give money to campaigns out of state. So there are
a good 15,000 potential donors right there.
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Joy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Joy (Score:5, Funny)
The ether cartridge that comes with the NIC is just a starter, it'll run out within a few hundred thousand packets(less if the packets contain more than ~50% 1s). Of course, only genuine HP ether is supported, for best possible data fidelity
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Re:Joy (Score:5, Funny)
Kids, this is what happens when sniffing ether.
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Maybe HP is for real... (Score:5, Funny)
Adding 3com networking know-how to HP computing products may actually produce better products?
Hey it could happen!
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That name is getting clunky fast. (Score:3, Funny)
3ComHPaq?
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Combating Cisco's Server Push (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is anybody surprised by this? Cisco announces a server product with very strong networking abilities. This is pretty much one of the few large areas of the datacenter (hardware wise) that Cisco hasn't moved into (besides disk arrays). HP sees this as a huge threat to them (bigger than IBM, who makes most revenue from services including running datacenters comprised of non-IBM equipment).
HP now realizing that they don't have the networking expertise to go after cisco directly in the networking space (one area they need to expand into to gain marketshare in the datacenter beyond servers and HDS rebranded storage, or that midrange Compaq based arrays). Well, they could go after the #2 enterprise networking company (Juniper, but they have a market cap of ~$13B), so they pick up 3com and whatever is left of it (remember they used to be partnered a while ago with Huauei, that partnership is gone tho), so they can better fight against Cisco for networking.
For these big companies it's all about expanding your presence and finding new revenue streams. Cisco can't seriously increase it's core routing/switching marketshare very easily any more than HP can increase its server marketshare.
It's not always easy to grow your company organically (from within). Look at cisco, they buy security companies, storage switching companies, WebEx. Hell, when they were a router only company, they bought an ethernet switching company (Crescendo) which later became the bread and butter business for them.
Reply to This
Did they do this for the VoIP? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found HP's ProCurve Switches to be great with a lifetime warranty and free software updates compared to the Cisco equivilents which need SmartNet (maybe smart on Cisco's part) and cost 2-3 times as much.
However with alot of my clients rolling out the Cisco Voice solutions the idea usually is they standardize on all Cisco kit including the switches. I wonder if this is HP's play to get into the IP telephony market (which 3Com's website indicates they are in) to complete their offerings so a buisiness will go all-HP in a similar fashion?
Reply to This
Re:Valuation (Score:4, Interesting)
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They have a ton of IP, such as the patent for connecting VOIP calls to a regular PSTN [google.com], and didn't they just start flexing on their ethernet patents earlier this week? They had previously settled with Realtek for something like 70M + licensing and pretty much every other chip out there uses buffering. Obviously 70M is chump change to HP but I could see them getting 2B worth out of the rest of the 3com IP at least.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
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Parent