Hewlett Packard has taken pre-emptive action against its rivals IBM and Compaq and taken the axe to a number of its product lines by as much as 20 per cent. The cuts cover corporate PCs, its Brios, its Kayak workstations, its Omnibooks and some of its high end server products. Said HP, it can now sell a VE corporate machine with a Celeron 333MHz chip, a 4.3Gb hard drive, 32Mb of synchronous DRAM and Lan card for $774. Compaq and IBM were not prepared to say whether they would follow suit on the reductions, although The Register is aware there is much slashing and burning in the lead up to a large number of product introductions early next year. ®