The really big overhead issue is the merger. There's just a tremendous amount of uncertainty around that. It's hard to get people excited about, or confident about, the stock given the uncertainty around the merger. If it goes through, there's uncertainty around pulling off integration. If it doesn't go through, the leadership of HP is in question.

The fourth quarter is likely to be filled with anxiety-provoking rumor and speculation - not fun for investors. Moreover, we do think that many investors may feel that they have heard too many excuses about execution to buy into the stock now, even at levels around $100.

Xerox would present such an unfathomable integration challenge. Really, when you think about it, Xerox would like to be more like HP. The page volume is moving more to printers, and you wonder why HP would effectively want to take on a business that's principally in decline when they effectively have a business that's increasing.

While Sun has held its own in Unix servers in our recent surveys, we believe that Unix market revenues are unlikely to grow materially going forward, and accordingly, that Sun will need to improve its (x86)-based share in order to generate meaningful revenue growth.

As much as we had hoped that our reseller checks would have been more encouraging, the fact is simply that demand continues to remain weak, with no imminent rebound.

Suggesting that quick fixes are likely may be underestimating prevailing market dynamics.

Our channel checks do suggest that overall IT spending is fairly strong ... but that [Sun's] quarter did not experience a material acceleration.

This is consistent with our February 2002 worldwide IT spending survey results, which indicated that IT budgets remain highly uncertain and that IT capital spending growth in 2002 is likely to be modest.