Why Dell-EMC Won't Follow in HP

Why Dell-EMC Won't Follow in HP
Welcome to a Biomedical Battery specialist of the IBM Laptop Battery
Why do some big mergers succeed while others fail? This seems to be a common question, and some of the research I've read about the Dell-EMC merger tries to connect it to the HP-Compaq merger, which apparently cost Carly Fiorina her job.
I covered the HP-Compaq merger at length, and I was not a fan. I actually spoke to Compaq's CEO and argued he should pull out to save his firm. There are some interesting backstories here that I think will provide color for the Dell-EMC merger.
I'll close with my product of the week: the Surface Pro 4 -- my current favorite 2-in-1 since Microsoft fixed every problem I had with the Surface 3.
I'll start off by saying that as big mergers go, the HP-Compaq thing really wasn't that bad with battery like IBM ThinkPad X61 battery, IBM ThinkPad T61 battery, IBM ThinkPad X41 battery, IBM ThinkPad X40 battery, IBM ThinkPad X20 battery, IBM ThinkPad R60 Battery, IBM ThinkPad T60 Battery, IBM 40Y6797 Battery, IBM 40Y6799 Battery, IBM FRU 92P1139 Battery, IBM ThinkPad T21 battery, IBM ThinkPad T20 battery. Prior large-scale mergers that I covered -- like IBM-ROLM and AT&T-NCR -- had to be reversed. The latter contributed to AT&T's collapse at the time.
I was an outspoken critic of the HP-Compaq merger, but not because it didn't make sense. A good chunk of the HP board opposed it, and a major portion of that chunk consisted of the founding families. Given how difficult it would be to pull off a merger like that, I felt that it was impossible to execute it if powerful members of the board would be looking to kill it or cause it to fail.
The irony was that when I did the post mortem, I found out some interesting things. One was that nobody had done an initial merger plan. That alone would have meant disaster, regardless of the board's position. However, the proxy fight that resulted between Carly Fiorina and Walter Hewlett forced her to commission one of the best merger plans ever seen at the time.
Another interesting tidbit was that none of the big investors in HP trusted Carly as far as they could throw a tank (which isn't far). So when Carly came in to sell the deal to win the proxy fight they pretty much didn't believe a thing she said. Then they'd meet with Walter Hewlett and conclude he wasn't really any more credible than Carly was.
Finally, they'd meet with Michael Capellas, who had been a high-level management consultant before taking the CEO Job at Compaq, and he sold the deal. The reason I knew this is I had these big investors as clients, and I typically followed those traveling executives because the investors wanted our opinion of the deal.
Carly later forced Capellas out of the company, and she was fired largely because she sucked at what he did but she refused to let someone like Capellas work for her. My guess was she was afraid the board would give that person her job. (One interesting thing was that Carly was very similar to Steve Jobs in many key ways -- one of which was she sucked at ops. So, much like Steve desperately needed Tim Cook, she needed someone like Capellas.)
So, the board conflict actually ensured the merger rather than killing it, and Carly's effort to protect her job by getting rid of Capellas contributed heavily to her getting fired.
Granted, as with all mergers of this type -- I call them "Frankenstein mergers," because the process is like mixing and matching body parts -- a lot of value was lost. Still, it didn't kill HP, and HP did take over market leadership in a couple of key areas as a result.