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Gateway Completes eMachines Acquisition
ryanjensen writes "Gateway just completed its $289.5 million deal to acquire Irvine, CA-based eMachines Thursday according to News.com. From the article: 'Many analysts believe that Gateway ultimately will abandon some or all of its namesake stores in favor of selling products at third-party retailers. However, they expect the company to continue selling Gateway-brand products, including PCs and consumer electronics, directly to its customers.'"
Does this mean that they will start selling AMD processors? Great - all they need to do now is get Microsloth to stop delaying 64-bit Windows for Intel.
It'll be ready in January my ass...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...will be called e-Cows, now with twice as much ugly.
Let's hope these rumors are just that - rumors.
-L
Don't Panic.
Maybe Gateway will fix what's wrong at Gateway, too.
Over the last few years, I've been awfully disappointed with Gateway. Dell and HP have their problems too, but Gateway puts together overpriced crappy machines filled with cheap parts. You're paying for the 1-800...
At least with e-Machines, you get what you pay for. Gateway produces the same level of machine, but charges you a lot more for them.
Apple is a marketing genius - Gateway is a computer company that sells computers just like everyone else.
When Apple wants a good MP3 player - they create one from scratch and THEN create a market for it (iPod + iTunes Music Store)
Gateway wants an MP3 player - they copy the iPod or actually copy a clone already on the market.
Gateway wants a camera, they rebrand a Canon, Gateway wants a printer, same thing - rebrand.
When Apple was rebranding, they were in dire straits - HP inkjets - 630c rebranded as Stylewriter 4500 - Canon Inkjets - rebranded as Stylewriter 2500 Quicktake Camera (developed by Apple and exclusive to them for 6 months) but really just a rebranded Fuji DS7 camera. Apple chooses to cater to the base and to innovate. Gateway - what base do they have to cater to - a PC is a PC is a PC - if someone offered the same box $5 cheaper 2 miles closer than the Gateway Store, they'd buy it. Apple has a brand and they market and please it's customers (mostly)
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
wtf?
i thought gateway was on the verge of bankruptcy maybe 6 months ago. i was actually happy when i heard they were tanking . . . and now they've dropped nearly 300 million on eMachines? what?
did their plasma screens really sell THAT well?
i must have missed something here.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
Despite your experience with a single unit, eMachines has truly gotten their act together in recent years.
In the early fall when I was looking for a laptop, I found the eMachines M5310 (I think it is) to offer the best bang for my buck, XP 2400+, 40 gig hd, 802.11g wifi. It's not the smallest or lightest unit to say the least, however it does it's job wonderfully, hell, I even use it for lan parties from time to time! If only Battlefield would take advantage of the wide screen.
I too back in the day came to despise the name of eMachines, but I gave them a shot. When people first see my laptop they say "I didn't know they made laptops" and walk away quite impressed.
But now Gateway... the definition of crap.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Actually, it was $189.5 million with the mail-in rebate...
True, however you've got to admit, from the marketing prospective, there is a great advantage to rebranding... the final product has your name on it! Another major advantage, this time for the customer is tech support from a single house.
Like it or not, most of the people who buy from a company like Gateway are not going to drive down the street to see if the same camera costs a few bucks less, they'll buy it from Gateway or even along with their desktop or laptop and have support from the same company.
A couple of years ago while getting a tour of the Gateway tech support center in Sioux Falls, SD, I was surprised when many of the end calls would end with the tech asking if there was anything else the customer needed like an scanner or digital camera, I was even more surprised that there were quite a few who would want to be transferred to a salesmen to be sold on such a device.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I've bought 6 of these things for my parents, inlaws, and friends. They're been great. My father has 3 at his small food processing business, I gave one to my inlaws, one to a friend and have one running my mail server.
Aside from the last one, each is essentially used for word processing, email, and web. And they do that well. Each has been in use for at least 2 years, and I've only had to perform one hardware related task on any one of them. (To be fair, my father jammed a screwdriver in the floppy drive to help get the disk out. Argh.)
They've been great machines for the non-computationally-intensive tasks that these people use them for.
I'm 6 for 6 and will continue recommend these machines for the casual user.
True, however you've got to admit, from the marketing prospective, there is a great advantage to rebranding... the final product has your name on it! Another major advantage, this time for the customer is tech support from a single house.
Neither is an plus. For the first, you're giving your name to a product you don't control. If a company makes great products, they're going to want to keep their name on it. The only way you'll get to rebrand something is if you drop a lot of money for something good (not up Gateway's alley) or get something inferior (more common by far). So, bully, you've just attached your name to a bad product. Now, your second "advantage", you have to support it. This crappy thing you have no control over is now taking customer service away from supporting your primary product. Disaster all around.
Like it or not, most of the people who buy from a company like Gateway are not going to drive down the street to see if the same camera costs a few bucks less, they'll buy it from Gateway or even along with their desktop or laptop and have support from the same company.
Ever been to an Apple Store? They have cameras and other stuff all over the place, they're just smart enough not to label them as Apple products.
Gateway horror story:
Company exec decides he doesn't like the IBM thinkpads we've speced and goes out on his own and buys a Gateway laptop (this is roughly 2000).
We say fine, but we aren't responsible for hardware support as it breaks the standard...right...like that works... For some reason exec can't get his Palm to sync up over the serial connection.
Enter me: 4 long frustrating days spent trying everything under the sun to get this beast syncing. Palm syncs on three other desktops and two other laptops with no problem, install it on gateway and nothing.
Tech call #1 to gateway...OS is corrupt reload from rescue disk. Tech call #2, palm is bad...explain that it works everywhere but on gateway.
Tech call #3...CSR almost gets the balls to tell me gateway doesn't support palm, I inform him that I aint yo mammys foo.
Tech call #4 after talking with 2 differnt people I am finally transferred to "level three" support. Guy comes on the phone, reads case notes and says simply "That model's serial port is defectivly impemented, it will not work, you'll need to get later revision..blah blah blah..."
Laptop goes back the next day for full refund, exec gets a fsking thinkpad and has to explain why the seinor IT guy spent 4 days fsking around with his crappy out of standard laptop. He was gone a month later.
Apple free since 1990!
It has alot to do with luck and expectations. The real beef with Gateway is that they play a numbers game, as do most of the mass marketed computers. They use the confusing nature of PC marketing to sell overpriced computers that have higher fail rates for each part and run slower than they seem like they should. They sell a 2.4 Celeron with PC2100 RAM and their consumers are happy only because it's faster than that 866 they upgraded from, if only just barely. They have no idea they could get a MUCH faster machine by using an AMD 2.4 Barton with PC2700 RAM for roughly the same price, because they do nothing to educated their users. As someone else said about emachines, when chosing between quality and cheap, they always always always chose cheap. You just got lucky and got one without a flaw.
Never confuse volume with power.
Other than the power supplies going out, there's not much wrong with the eMachines. As a former Best Buy employee, some of my friends and I still have Linux on the first eMachines still chugging away in our dorms/basements.
They only had 2 PCI slots? 5400rpm drives? Integrated sound card?
They were only $299!!
What did you expect?
They basically created the sub-$1000 PC market. Remember what it was like before? PC, monitor, printer, you'd walk out of the store with a $2900 dent in your VISA, and all you'd have to show for it would be an IBM Aptiva or a Packard Bell.
You could buy an eMachines for $299, get a monitor and inkjet and a copy of Deer Hunter, and you still have money to buy the kids christmas presents. We'd have people drive from 80 miles away coming to buy the new cheap computers.