Shares of 3Com Corporation (NASDAQ:COMS) rose more than 31% after financial traders applauded Hewlett Packard’s acquisition offer for $2.7 billion. The deal was announced late Wednesday night and indicates HP’s strategic direction in competing with Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO).
The $2.7 billion offer is a 39% premium offer on 3Com’s valuation based on the share price on Wednesday closing price of $5.69. The close of today’s share price was $7.46.
“We have a favorable view on this proposed acquisition,” stated J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz. The deal “provides an important building block to becoming a one-stop shop for IT convergence,” added Moskowitz in a report.
The news of the deal also caused 3Com competitor stock prices to drop such as Juniper Communications and Brocade Communications. Juniper’s stock price dropped 2.56% and Brocade Communications dropped 12.65%.
Meg Whitman isn’t the only former tech CEO running for a government position. Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced that she is running for a U.S. Senate seat in California. Fiorina was the CEO of HP from 1999-2005. Before working at HP as the CEO, she was an executive at AT&T. While at AT&T she helped coordinate the spin-off and IPO of Lucent. At HP, she coordinated the merger with Compaq in 2002. Fiorina most recently survived breast cancer.
The state governments of West Virginia, Vermont, Wyoming, and Washington were sent netbooks by HP and Compaq from a mystery buyer. These laptops were sent back to either the manufacturer or local investigators in order to make sure that there aren’t any malicious files on them. About 3-5 machines were sent to each of those states, many of them ordered by fraudulent credit cards. This definitely beats your typical senior high school prank.
Last week a winner emerged for the bidding war of Data Domain Inc. EMC agreed to buy Data Domain for $33.50 per share which ended a bidding war with NetApp. Data Domain paid a $57 million termination fee under the tems of agreement with NetApp after they cancelled a merger deal.
Through the acquisition, EMC will be challenging Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard may even make an offer to buy out NetApp, the loser of the bidding war. NetApp said that they gave up on Data Domain because they would not be able to justify the escalated bid to shareholders.
The total amount for EMC’s acquisition was $2.1 billion in cash. NetApp went as high as $1.9 billion.
Microsoft Corporation has confirmed that Windows 7 will be available for purchase starting on October 22, just in time before the holidays. “The feedback from the release candidate has been good” stated Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte. The nearly final release was available for testing as early as last month.
The beta testing of the operating system will no longer be available starting July 1. The release date matches what Veghte said in the past, the operating system is “tracking well to a Windows 7 holiday.”
Hewlett Packard CTO Phil McKinney said that he is looking forward to the new operating system. “We’re locked and loaded for the launch,” stated McKinney. “The quality of code is just absolutely stellar.”
Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is rumored to be considering building a netbook with the Google Android operating system built-in. If proved to be successful, HP could cut costs by not using the Windows operating system in future netbooks.
Currently many netbooks have Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. Windows 7 may eventually be added to future netbooks as well. The Google Android platform was intended to work better for mobile phones, but people have been debating that it could work well for netbooks as well.
This would be a big win for Google if their open source operating system hits the market. This would open up a new set of opportunities for Google to license a more advanced version of their operating system to major corporations as discounted prices.
“Every Dell machine we buy at home that comes with the Google toolbar, it’s not a good day in my family when that happens,” stated Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft gathering on May 1.
A couple decades ago, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) signed a deal with IBM that gave them the leg-up for operating system market-share against Apple Inc. And then in the 90’s, Microsoft developed their own browser called Internet Explorer which became the default with all Windows operating systems giving them the leg-up against Netscape’s browsers.
Today Microsoft signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) to spread Live Search Toolbar which could give take some marketshare away from the Google Toolbar.
Through this deal, HP will install copies of Live Search Toolbar on all Internet Explorer browsers and the toolbar will link to various HP services such as Snapfish, a photo website that HP acquired in 2005.
Google has similar deals with Dell Inc. and the Firefox browser. About 40% of those who surf the web use the browser default search as their primary search choice according Angus Norton, senior director at Microsoft Live Search.
This deal comes shortly after Microsoft pulled away from the negotiation table for acquiring Yahoo!
Information Source:
[1] Associated Press: Microsoft signs search distribution deal with HP by Jessica Mintz
 Tabblo, a social network where users can upload photos and integrate stylish templates along with those photos has announced today that they are being acquired by Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ). Hewlett Packard’s appeal in the purchase was fueled particularly by Tabblo’s large network of 150 thousand tabblos (users) and 5 million uploaded photos. The company started in May 2006.
Tabblo.com will stick around and will be applying new technologies as a result of the acquisition. HP also owns Snapfish.com, which is also a photo-sharing website.  Tabblo and Snapfish will remain independent of each other. The founder of Tabblo is Antonio Rodriguez.
“Tabblo is a very cool company with a great product. They’ve got Flickr-like community, they blogged critically about Yahoo while sponsoring Techmeme and I’ll tell you – I often show off the Tabblo of the kids in my family to people who visit my house. Naysers called them an also-ran but they deserve a big congrats today” stated Marshall Kirkpatrick, Director of Content at SplashCast.
The announcement was made official by the Tabblog.
