[legion]

I was kind of tongue-in-cheek about a curse. When Compaq took over DEC, it tanked. Same thing appears to have happened now with HP. I agree with you 100% LubeMaster77. The Alpha processor seemed to be designed to brag about how advanced it was, not to actually run any software.

I am of the opinion that most big mergers are a bad idea. They limit consumer choices; they make big and innefficient companies even bigger and more innefficient. The justification that a company needs to be bigger to compete is total BS...it's having a good product that matters. True, some smaller companies get shut out by predatory practices of bigger competitors, but I think that mergers of smaller and mid-size companies is generally okay. I think the types of mergers we've seen in aircraft production, airlines, telecoms, banking, cable, and oil (to name a few) have helped no one. They've provided some short-term hype and long-term problems.