I can't rationally explain any of that based on a balance sheet, sales forecasts, margins, or even forecasts of earnings and average brokerage recommendations. If you look at the fundamentals, CPQ's aggressive pursuit of market share and broadening of its operations into allied markets seems very rational and a growth path that makes intuitive sense for a Company that is destined to be the dominate computer producer. DELL's situation seems more of a risky business, build to order, JIT, and a narrower focus than CPQ's seems to incorporate some limiting characteristics that, while effective now, does not bode as well for future performance. Only a few hundred years ago these observations would have resulted in someone being burned at the stake. Black magic, consorting with the devil, or witchcraft would certainly have been the accepted cause of these things, end of discussion, get out the barbecue sauce.
Psychology is a tough line of causation to follow.
I suffer from all three, we all do. It is also very obvious that the market is made up of buyer and sellers, that are no better with their perceptions than most of us are. Sometimes they have more facts to confuse them a little more, or perhaps, if they're lucky, help dispel some of their pyschological constraints. The bottom line, is that the psychology plays a role, one that takes us away from our nice, neat little economic models which reduce everything to nice smooth, continuously differentible functions that always produce, data supported answers that confirm the underlying fundamentals. Simply put, in an economic sense, the tech sector is not well behaved most of the time.