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Comment: Is that really a good enough franchise, Carly?

"Compaq is more than just a name on the Williams-BMW Formula 1 racing car," we're told every time the advert runs. Well, more, or maybe less. It's going to be a name that vanishes. I'm not the only one who thinks this is far from obviously a Good Thing.

It's not a matter of brands. It isn't a question of whether you want to buy a Compaq Jornada or an HP iPaq PocketPC. It's a question of corporate dreams, fantasies, and accounting systems.

You can do the sums, if you like. Both Compaq and H-P have costs. Merge the two companies, and you can merge a lot of the costs; specifically, 14,000 or more staff costing an estimated $400 million a year, or more, who will lose their jobs, and several expensive buildings to home them, and all the infrastructure to support them.

The simple problem is, all these costs are a proportion of income. And if the income stays the same then the profit goes up enormously.

If the stock market thought the income would stay the same, then Wall Street would not be showing such a drop in the share prices of both companies. So why is Carly Fiorina, HP boss, so sure it's a good move?

Having listened to her explanation, I'm less convinced than Wall Street is.

I could understand a plan which made (say) Compaq the retail brand, and HP the corporate, enterprise brand, sold direct. I'd even suspect that people would buy Compaq printers in stores if they had an HP logo discreetly tacked on. What I can't grasp, is the idea that the Compaq name should go. And no, this is not because I think everybody loves Compaq. Far from it.

Products like the old Tandem are now called Compaq Non-Stop, but they could just as easily be sold as HP Tandem; nobody stopped buying Tandem just because it was bought by Compaq in the first place, so why would they object to going to HP? And HP has several PC brands which, frankly, the buyer in the street has never heard of - "Vectra" is a motorcar, and anything else, is "probably a printer" if you ask someone in Dixons.

The problem is, nobody inside either company is going to tell their boss the truth. The truth, as perceived inside Compaq, is that Compaq is a market-leading brand, with huge recognition; but the rest of the truth is just as valid: "Compaq is a company I will never, ever buy from again," according to one very large IT specifier. If you're a middle manager in Compaq, you will not regard it as your job to explain this to your vice-president. He'll say: "Don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!" or "It's your job to change those perceptions!" but what he won't say is: "Yes, it's a problem, isn't it? I'm buggered if I know what to do about it, mind ... "

But he won't say that, because he's being carefully shielded from the truth. Yes, Compaq is more than the name on the wing of the Williams car; it's true that it's a valued brand in many senses. And, also, it's something that some people will never buy from again.

And the same applies to HP. When the two companies merge, all the customers who left Compaq for HP because HP wasn't Compaq, will unite with those who left HP for Compaq, and join with the already huge legion of Dell customers, who buy from Dell because Dell isn't either HP, or Compaq - or, for that matter, IBM.

As long as IBM, and Compaq-HP, see the personal computer the way they do - that is, as a necessary evil, a sort of loss-leader you have to have in the catalogue so as to be able to sell expensive enterprise server systems, a low-margin, high-risk business and an opportunity to annoy people in large numbers when you get it wrong - then there will always be a flow of dissatisfied PC customers for Dell.

Nothing is certain about the merger except this: when the merger does go through, if it does, Dell will get more business than it knows what to do with. And what is left of Compaq and HP will be so much smaller than the two put together, people won't believe it. After all, how much of Digital Equipment is left from that takeover?