In a couple years, Compaq will be supporting SCO on IA32, Monterey on IA64, Tru64 on Alpha, VMS on Alpha, probably Linux on all three, and NT on both IA32/IA64. That's lots of products that function in the same market space. The bottom line is that something has gone horribly wrong with the Compaq DEC merger, from a strategy perspective.

The theory was that Compaq-DEC would be able to compete with IBM. While supporting lots of OSes, IBM at least has a coherent product lineup from top to bottom. Compaq probably just has confused salespeople.