no one see this coming? have we all forgotten Compaq/HP? HP Invent/Synstar?

HP are IT's biggest asset strippers, just a shame their are no assets in EDS worth stripping....

Aim for middle management, you can't go wrong.

If it was the plonkers the ran EDS getting the chop I'd have no problems. Looks like its the grunts though.

Plus ca change

...for any union to have any effect. - Having personally been on the receiving end of HP's

corporate steamroller, I can assure you that they will do whatever the hell they like, and will

throw money from bottomless pockets at eager lawyers until they have what they want, how they want it.

There are IT Unions ???? , I thought Thatcher did away with all those 1970's relics in the 80's.

Cull away HP, but don't let the finance people do it, they often get rid of the best and brightest with random strokes of the pen. Any wholesale changes to dinosaurs like EDS can only be welcome.

Nothing upsets me more than a Union. Gunpoint negotiations often deliver short term gains for its members, but ultimately they prove pointless in the long run, only adding delay to necessary changes and thus reduced competitiveness

It's like keeping an old UNIX server that's been doing it's job for the last 15 years, it still works , but consumes 400% more power and generates a lot more heat, instead of virtualising many legacy systems onto a blade, lowering support, power, cooling and floor space costs.

Well I assume that's how HP will spin the 're-structuring'

... but I feel for my ex-colleagues, this is the wrong time to be cut loose. And not just for them, but for me too! I'll be looking for a new contract shortly, I can do without all those extra people in the market...

Black helicopters because by the sound of it, the first most people will know about it is when the axe falls... presumably these will be of the super-silent variety.

.....You mean EDS has "some" assets to strip? When I worked for EDS, they owned nothing, manufactured nothing, sold nothing, all software belonged to the customer, absolutely nothing. Even half the workforce were contracted staff from manpower/kellys.

HP cull away, maybe you can deliever my thoughts of revenge I never had the courage to enact upon.

Get rid of the weighty management structures and maybe the bright talented excellent IT grunts at the "coal face" can get on with it. trouble is HP are just going to wield a large axe and anyone caught in its sweeping arc will be gone management and workers alike.

I can just imagine HP looking at area and department titles and saying "ah ... we don't need this one we already have one of them"

My thoughts go out to those skilled technical people and their families who will be affected by this.

Being out of out of work at this time of year is really bad and it is going to be particularly bad this year with the financial turbulence we are experiencing.

So many managers have been appointed in the Antipodes lately that I thought some bulking up was being done. Unless so many managers have read the tea leaves and departed quietly and been almost as quietly replaced, in the hope the serfs dont notice panic stricken managerial flight. The IT equivalent of canaries, good contractors, are also leaving.

The paperwork, virtual and otherwise, appears to have doubled in the last 3 weeks for even the simplest tasks.

This is usually a sign of reductions in coal face staff in any large business.

AC because I want to keep my cool and my career is dead.