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EDITORIAL: Will the second EDS marriage work?
(Dallas Morning News, The (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) May 16--Marriage isn't easy.
Maybe it's never more than messy clothes piled in the floor; maybe it's the deal-breaker of not seeing eye-to-eye on much of anything -- including being together.
Stuff happens. And sometimes it's not good.
Electronic Data Systems, which is embarking on its second marriage, this time to computer maker Hewlett-Packard, knows this all too well.
In the mid-1980s, Ross Perot married off his corporate first-born to a suitor from Detroit only to see the union dissolve in an acrimonious divorce. General Motors was comfortable sitting on the front porch; EDS preferred to run. In many ways, those styles reflected their backgrounds. GM was a smug corporate giant in gritty Detroit, while EDS embodied its founder's hardscrabble background and his indefatigable thirst for success in thriving North Texas.
Melding two strong-willed and generally successful corporate cultures is never easy. As in a marriage, someone has to want to balance the checkbook, cut the lawn and make dinner. GM and EDS never quite mastered that division of labor. For most of their union, the firms kept separate checkbooks and lived in different bedrooms.
Hewlett-Packard isn't General Motors circa 1984, and, for better or worse, EDS isn't the swashbuckling company whose founder once led a legendary rescue mission to free employees imprisoned in Iran. Both firms are older, presumably wiser and no longer industry upstarts. They're industry icons.
Hewlett-Packard is the symbolic parent of the Silicon Valley, and its corporate culture bears the imprint of co-founders William Hewlett and David Packard. And while Mr. Perot is long-removed from his offspring, it is impossible to mention the company's name without recalling his legacy.
We'll leave it up to the Wall Street smart-money folks to figure out whether this marriage is with Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now. But we're curious to see whether EDS will become a part of Hewlett-Packard in a way that it never really did with GM.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Dallas Morning News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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