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Reuters News Service also contributed to this story.
Four years ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. vowed to go from a marginal personal-computer maker to a top-five player by 1997. Yesterday, it announced an even more ambitious goal - to be No. 1 in four more years.
With sales of both its office and home products surging, H-P ranks as the world's No. 3 supplier of PCs, according to both Dataquest Corp. and International Data Corp., the leading computer-industry market-research firms. That's a dramatic change from 1993, when a series of marketing failures had left H-P out of contention in the No. 11 spot.
At that time, H-P publicly promised it would retool its efforts to join the top five by this year. Despite considerable initial skepticism within the industry and among analysts, it succeeded through a series of expertly managed sales offensives. The company finally is attaining the sort of leadership position with its PC business that it long ago attained with its mainstay printer line.
As part of its plan, Hewlett-Packard unveiled two new commercial PC brands and a new family of PC workstations. The workstations are aggressively priced and targeted to the fast-growing market of personal workstations, which run Windows NT software instead of the older, more costly UNIX software.
H-P also plans to streamline its supply and...