HP & EDS

It's not surprising that HP was interested in buying EDS. Companies need to grow regularly to keep shareholders happy, and IBM has shown that profit in the IT industry is in services, not in making equipment. HP is itself something of an amalgam of various companies - Compaq, Bluestone, Mercury, Snapfish, VoodooPC, etc. (see a list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HP_acquisitions). I didn't list those companies by market cap, but by companies that I remember that produced or continue to produce products I use. I'm not a shareholder in HP, but as a user of technology I have not been very happy with HP's use of acquired companies. At best they seem to continue on doing pretty much what they did before. All too often they seem to disappear, their names might survive in marketing, but no other traces of them.

But my concern with the HP/EDS merger isn't really what HP will do with EDS or the state of innovation and development of hardware in America, though those are really important issues. Mine is a local one. HP is a major player in the Dallas area where I live, and EDS is based out of Plano, which is part of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex.

This site's comments are a play by play of effected EDS employees worldwide documenting being laid off: http://advice.cio.com/stephanie_overby/hp_and_eds_let_the_layoffs_begin

I don't know how many people will end up being laid off, but I'm fairly sure it will be a lot and will have a local impact on this area that many here seemed to think was free of the brutal lay offs of the telecom days and somewhat insulated from the recession hitting a lot of the rest of the country so hard.