Compaq Executive Leaving for Internet Firm
A top executive at Compaq Computer Corp. said Thursday that he was leaving the world’s biggest personal computer maker and joining an Internet start-up, giving credibility to the start-up and setting in motion a realignment of Compaq’s sales managers.
The executive, Ross Cooley, is leaving a position where he was in charge of Compaq’s $7-billion North American computer business for a job at a 4-month-old company with the high-tech name of pcOrder.com.
At pcOrder.com, Cooley, 55, will fill the positions of chairman and chief executive and have a salary of $1 a year, plus stock options.
His move from an executive suite at a Fortune 500 company to a technology start-up mirrors that of several other executives over the past few years, notably, the departure of Alex Mandl from AT&T; earlier this year.
Cooley’s move provides instant credibility to Austin-based pcOrder.com, which provides a marketplace on the Internet for buying and selling personal computers and related equipment.
Cooley’s retirement had been rumored in the industry for several months, and Compaq announced that James Schraith, formerly president of the Cerplex Group Inc. and president of AST Research Inc., is replacing Cooley.
“Ross’s plan to retire has been in discussion for a while and there were some rumors flying,” Eckhard Pfeiffer, president and CEO of Compaq, said. “The time has come, and, obviously, as you can see, the succession is already in place. . . . Ross has been a great leader.”
At the same time, Houston-based Compaq created a new sales infrastructure, hiring Richard Snyder, a Dell Computer Corp. executive, for a newly created position of general manager, worldwide sales.
“My feelings in joining pcOrder are similar to those I had in joining Compaq almost 13 years ago,” Cooley said in a statement. “Back then, I saw the irrefutable logic of the PC as a new paradigm in computing. Today, I believe pcOrder’s technology and vision represent an irrefutable value proposition.”
Before joining Compaq in 1984, Cooley held several sales and marketing positions at International Business Machines Corp., where he worked for 18 years.
