The HP Compaq merger as well as the Agilent spin-off in many ways marked the transition from an engineering company to a bunch of vacuum cleaner salespersons.
PS: Yes it's unfair to blame all this on Compaq, probably more a result of increasingly expensive semiconductor R&D.
My rule of thumb for buying laptops (since the mid 2000s) has been that compaq is the bottom-rung cheap brand that should always be avoided. Not sure their survival has been a good thing.
In 2006, every single one of my coworkers bought a brand-new MacBook, and within a month every single one of my coworkers had a MacBook in the shop.
I bought a Compaq laptop with a 64-bit CPU for under $1000. It ran flawlessly for over a decade, needing only a new battery. I eventually gave it to my parents who still have it.
Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at Compaq.
Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the best.
Counterpoint: my Compaq Presario 1210 survived for about 20 years before it finally stopped POSTing. Even the original hard drive still worked (albeit with a range of bad sectors around which I had to partition).
The consumer gear was trash. The server lines were an entirely different story. Also worth noting that by the mid 2000s, Compaq was just a branding on the consumer side. The hardware was all the same old HP consumer junk.
Compaq is what ruined HP after they ruined themselves by going from a quality-focused builder to pulling parts out of the seconds and thirds bins to cut costs in the early-mid 90s. They absorbed DEC and ruined it then proceeded to infect HP (with Carly's help) with that culture. Not that HP was blameless either. I was done with HP when we received a $10k LH3 Netserver in '99 or '00 with both of its CPUs dangling inside the chassis from their fan cables. If my memory is right, they'd outsourced most of their building to Ingram Micro by that point.
That was years ago. The HP that exists today is certain a place things go to die. I'm not sure what HP does these days but like IBM it keeps tugging along on its brand name without dying.
