Global CIO: Dell Trumps HP For 3Par, Saves Know-Nothing Columnist

Give up, Dell: HP will never let you win the fight for 3Par, I was about to write. Then, proving I'm a fool, Dell won the jackpot. Or did it?

Bob Evans, Contributor

August 27, 2010

3 Min Read

Dell defied the odds and defied the know-nothings like me and continued to slug it out with HP and in a rapidly escalating bidding war that investors could only have dreamed of, 3Par picked Dell.

Yes, 3Par picked Dell. Not HP. Dell.

And that's a huge win for Dell, for 3Par, for 3Par investors, and for Dell customers.

And it's a huge win of a different sort for me, because the news of 3Par's decision arrived just in time to prevent me from demonstrating my foolishness to the world. So thank goodness I didn't publish that column about how "HP Squashes Dell Dreams" because boy oh boyzee would that have made me look like a jackass.

Yeah, it's funny how things turn out sometimes, and luck saves us from ourselves. So excuse me but I've got to go dream up a column filled with clever back-dating and vaguely unrelated inferences that I'll string together to prove that I, from the get-go, was the lone voice in the wilderness saying "Go get 'em, Dell! HP doesn't have a chance! They can push all their chips into the middle of the table but I know you'll still win the pot!"

Sure, I can make this work—as long as nobody ever knows that I was 100% certain that in the battle for 3Par, HP would mop up the floor with Dell.

P.S.: Just to keep things interesting, this news flash from the Wall Street Journal came in just this second: "Hewlett-Packard raised its offer for 3PAR on Friday to $30 a share shortly after the data-storage company accepted an increased $27 a share takeover offer from Dell. H-P's latest bid values 3PAR at $1.88 billion."

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