Conspiracy theory time
After thinking about this merger for a while, I came up with one semi-sane motivation.
One effect of this merger is to create a huge collection of obsolete platforms that are going to be phased out. Alpha, Mips, HP's old stuff, all of DEC's other stuff. These are all platforms waiting to be replaced with something.
What if Intel is secretly supporting part of this merger as a way to buy platform for IA-64? For Intel is makes perfect sense, HP is the one company that you can be sure will fully support IA-64 even if it doesn't turn out to be that good. By buying up the renments of old platforms, it can be sure that they all will have transistion plans over to IA-64. But doing so directly would be far outsides Intel's buisness charter.
Thus Intel makes some sort of secret agreement with HP to provide it support, money and cheap chips, and HP agrees to buy a bunch of dead platforms to make sure they all transistion to IA-64.
Jay Mehaffey
