I so look forward to answering the phone - 'Good morning, EDS - An HP Company, how may I help you'. :(

So now the NuLab's Gov't contracts will be screwed up by HP instead of EDS.

Why are civil servants so stupid over commissioning IT contracts - and why is it anathema to them to actually ask the end users what they actually need & what they actually want?

This is obviously a rhetorical question, as we all know Whitehall to be the last refuge of the terminally incompetent and the otherwise unemployable.

Paris, 'cos she has the intellectual capacity of which most Whitehall occupants can only dream...

Just to do my geeky duty and be anally retentive: Silicon Valley (in the guise of HP) already was in Texas, courtesy of COPAQs (R.I.P.) old Houston Headquarters that they still keep around.

Mines the one with the "Beckmessers guide to the Galaxy" in the pocket...

RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

I love da EDS long time go EDS go u muthas. When will these HP hombots just leave the EDS alone.

Smack me with a shovel cat face

Surely this was an inadvertent typo, your opener makes much more sense if written as

>"Hewlett Packard has bought EDS for $13.9bn, dooming its services business at a stroke."

There. Fixed it for ya.

It said WOO! I'm still waiting for a rely.

HP Printers - OK, HP Laptops - Good, HP PC's - Err........ Compaq - ????????

After spending thousands of dollars on a new advertising campaign entitled 'I am EDS...' only to sell itself to HP.. What a waste of money!!

Proof that EDS managers cannot even run a pi** up in a brewery let alone a multi-national IT Outsourcing company!

It'll be Neo and Agent Smith in real life.

Will I get outsauced?

@Alan Davies: RR's probably still trying to figure how to open your mail - either that or his PA is on vacation. LOL

@Rodrigo: I'm with you mate, like someone else said:

Pre-deal you get a mail "Dear ex-employee. Your work has been transferred to a Brown Shore. Have a nice day. Signed, useless-USA-based-self-abuser@eds.com"

Post-deal you get a mail "Dear ex-EDS-employee. Your work has been transferred to a Brown Shore/replaced-by-Wintel-cluster (delete as appropriate). Bye! Signed, useless-USA-based-self-abuser@hp.com"

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose... (apologies for the lack of accents, and the poor French).

HP wants to compete with IBM.

HP needs services arm.

What's next? Sun and Accenture?

Or maybe Sun might make a bold move and buy out Tata?

Does this mean El Reg can get back to spreading rumours and speculation about HP, like the great days of Fiorina and the Compaq buy?

Yes - Houses of Parliament Sauce company.

I have the 'pleasure' of working for EDS and I wouldnt touch it with a barge pole.

EDS is big on talk but rarely delivers either to the customer or its employees. The management spin the truth more than the NuLabour UK Government, I think the phrase is 'economical with the truth'. Most of them couldnt run a welk stall. If EDS was well run it would be making a fortune from its apps business but it will never get there while the YES men and women are in charge. The numbers dont lie but the managers do - transformation is an illusion.

HP has bought a company with many good clients but terrible management and a demoralised work force. As they say ''things can only get better' although I am expecting more of the same given HP seem to have the same 'cheapShore' business model.

Otherwise they would have got rid of Ron RittenMeyer - he would sell his own mother if he thought he could get a cheaper one.

I don't want to insinuate that EDS are cowboys, but I've personally seen them go live for large govt dept , on the day some whitehall mandarin came to visit, with no trained staff , no PC build, and, in fact -no pcs or phones on the desk....well, you get the picture. Sharp exits all round - HP, what are you thinking you clowns? Michael Dell will be laughing his nuts off -and good luck to him!!!

"So now the NuLab's Gov't contracts will be screwed up by HP instead of EDS."

EDS is the prime contractor for the US Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), which has a few more years of life (contract to 2010, plus probable extensions). It was the bady executed early NMCI buildout that lead to EDS's $800m "financial curb kiss" for *one quarter* 4 years ago. That alone should have stuffed EDS but the contract was renegotiated to keep EDS in play since NMCI is too important politically to let die. Not to mention only M$ desktop software are allowed by the contract. (As well as the [ahem] "commodity" Dell hardware noted by a prior comment.) Does HP *truly* understand the game they bought in to?

PS: HP's CEO is Mark Hurd? Of the GNU/Hurd family? Just curious is all. ^_^

I don't think Sun have enough money left in the piggybank to buy Accenture after blowing it on StorageTek and MySQL. Sun was down to their last $4bn back in 2003, and haven't made a profit since, just bled more and more red ink (hopefully HP ink!). If they lose the big chunk of business that EDS used to bring them each year I expect Sun would have problems buying the whelk stall someone mentioned.

I am a bit confused though - how does the Compaq merger rate as such a disaster? Pre-merger, HP was a $40bn turnover company and seemed stuck at that figure, and Compaq was less; post-merger HP has taken the best of both companies and grown to be the largest IT company with a turnover of over $100bn! After the StoregeTek fiasco, that sounds like the kind of disaster Sun would dream of, and even IBM look at enviously.

Rodrigo has got a fair point, but I'm quite looking forward to watching all the mid level "managers" running around worrying if their jobs are safe or not :) Be the most active they've been in years ! Also fun to watch them as they try to justify their existence.

Maybe they'll get rid of all the over "engineered" processes that we're forced to use too, like that useless SharePoint system.

How many re-orgs between now and the final hand-over I wonder ?

Flames, because it's going to crash and burn !

EDS is managed for quarterly shareholder orientated results. The Plano management couldn't give a monkies about the morale of it's work force. Which is sad, because there are some very frustrated good employees who are overworked and underpaid. These are overbalanced by the complacent ones that are far too expensive to get shot of!

So HP have spent all their money on buying EDS. They will then trim the EDS work force through redundancy payoffs. That leaves negative cash (by my maths) to try motivate and reinvigorate the employees that you need to turn the business around.

And there are some good and successful projects worth keeping; which HP will probably break up and sell.

I guess EDS folk will be waiting a while for morale to improve. But for now we ask, "can we have some pens please Mr Hurd? This stationary purchase freeze has be going for too long!".

The new (and very expensive) EDS advertisement campaign majors on the company being "behind success". How far behind is the question.

Couldn't HP have borrowed some extra $billion and bought success outright rather than second rate.

As an EDS-er I'm hoping this will signal a cull of the myriad layers of unneccessary management that paralyse the company.

IBM is laughing i know i am. Now i don't have to remember two names of companies that i hate and wouldn't deal with if the payed me.

As for Sun, well, i don't think this is going to affect their install base much via EDS. UNIX admins and IT managers that know see a clear direction from Sun but HP-UX? Everyone knows that its a leaky boat caught in a squall (not insinuating theres anything wrong with the OS itself) but HP shoving 'Industry Standard' LOL Intel drek on the NIX world has not been a cake walk now has it?

The only company that is truly grinning from ear to ear is IBM. You know the old saying "No one every gets fired for using global services" I've seen it happen using HP services and EDS ; funny isn't it?

Oh I'm with you on that brother, as my name indicates!

Long live the Texas Instruments TMS9900!

SWPB

Mark.

Must be a good word made from the letters EDS & HP. The best I could get for HP AND EDS was HAD SPEND.

WOW

Talk about deja vue, who would have thought that the cock raoches that declared the demise of HP back in 2001 would be brave enough to raise their heads again with similar rubbish?

What a disaster the HP/Compaq merger was!

Biggest IT company in the world

No 1PCseller in the world

Sales up

Profits up

Customer satisfaction Up

As was said before, a disaster like that I can live with.

And why would anyone hate a company?

A company is an inanimate object, it is like saying "I hate the stop sign at the end of the road" just plain stupid. If you don't like the products don't buy them, quite simple realy.