Eckhard Pfeiffer
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Eckhard Pfeiffer (born August 20, 1941, Lubań, Poland) is a business executive of German ancestry, and a former CEO of Compaq from 1991-1998. He joined Compaq from Texas Instruments, and established operations from scratch in both Europe and Asia. He was named as one of TIME's "Cyber Elite Top 50" for 1998.
His leadership in the early 1990s was successful. At the same time as Compaq began to dominate the server market, they entered the retail computer market with the Presario which one of the first manufacturers in the mid-1990s to market a sub-$1000 PC. In order to maintain the prices it wanted, Compaq became the first first-tier computer manufacturer to utilize CPUs from AMD and Cyrix. The price war resulting from Compaq's actions ultimately drove numerous competitors, most notably IBM and Packard Bell, from this market.
Under his tenure, Compaq made several major acquisitions. In 1997, Compaq bought Tandem Computers, known for their NonStop server line. This acquisition instantly gave Compaq a presence in the higher end business computing market. In 1998, Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corporation, the leading company in the previous generation of computing during the 1970s and early 1980s. This acquisition made Compaq, at the time, the world's second largest computer maker in the world in terms of revenue.
However, Pfeiffer had little vision for what the combined companies should do, or indeed how the three dramatically different cultures could work as a single entity, and Compaq struggled as a result. Pfeiffer was forced out as CEO in 1999 in a coup led by board chairman Ben Rosen and was eventually replaced by Michael Capellas, formerly CIO of the company. Capellas was able to restore some of the luster lost in the latter part of the Pfeiffer era, but the company still struggled against lower-cost competitors such as Dell.
Pfeiffer was one of the founders of Accoona, an Internet search engine provider, and has been its Chairman since December 2004.
Pfeiffer serves on the boards of several major corporations including General Motors, Ericsson, and DirecTV.
