HP and Compaq merger: more stupid people?

In a stunning move, the NY Times is reporting that Hewlett-Packard to Acquire Compaq in $25 Billion Deal. While they’ll be the number two computer company after IBM, independently they are 2 and 3 now. Compaq recently killed their non-Intel business (throwing all that money they spent acquiring Digital Equipment and Tandem away) but they do bring a big consulting group to the table. HP still has servers based on their PA-RISC chips although those are going away since HP help Intel develop the 64 bit Itanium line. Both companies get major revenues from PCs and I wonder how that number will hold up in a consolidation, and will they be sold under the HP or Compaq or a new/combined brand… I just don’t get the benefits of this deal other than lower operating costs.

One note: the article mentions “a new operating system for computer servers that was developed by Intel (news/quote) and Hewlett-Packard.” But this is a mistake, they co-developed the chip as I mention above.