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Troubled Times at Gateway
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at the future of Gateway in the light of the recent announcement of the departure of their CEO. The article revolves around the question: 'Will the sudden departure of Wayne Inouye and a slumping stock price leave the computer maker open to a buyout or takeover?'"
And then gives Gateway.com back to the guy they stole it from.
Will the sudden departure of Wayne Inouye and a slumping stock price leave the computer maker open to a buyout or takeover?
Probably not. Nobody really cares about Gateway anymore... They aren't doing anything innovative and the only thing they've ever had going for them was that stupid cow.
We just bought a backup system from them. 2x 2U servers with 12x500GB drives each, plus an autoloader tape system with 75 LTO 800GB tapes. We got the extra warranty et. al. because we're expecting to put the hard drives through their paces... I hope we still get warranty service in 3 years...
sig?
Balanced Technology Extended (BTX) is a more efficient desktop system design that was developed as a follow-up to the ATX form factor specification. Since its introduction in 1995, ATX has been the industry standard in chassis design.
It's also proprietary stuff like this that is keeping Gateway down with the other bottom feeders.
But uh. Gateways have always sucked. So uh... suprise? Gateway has failed to do anything special for years, so simply being around in the 'make a crappy PC, set a low price, sell by the millions' game isnt enough. Remember Packard Bell?
Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he were the CEO of Gateway:
"I'd butcher the cow and have a barbecque for the shareholders."
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
They have to be worth something first.. I doubt they are worth the $ for somone to buy them at this point.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One unrealistic possibility for Gateway is to focus on the developing countries like China, but companies like Lenovo have the home-court advantage. Lenovo has close relationships with Taiwanese computer-chip manufacturers (who also sell their wares to the Chinese military in Beijing). Lenovo can also exploit ultra-low-cost labor in China.
How can Gateway compete against Lenovo? Gateway cannot. IBM could not and sold its PC division to Lenovo.
Hmm... And I was just thinking their new Core Duo laptop looked like the perfect mobile linux solution.
I wonder if this will make them cheaper or more expensive in the near future....
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Dude, you're getting bought out by Dell.
No matter how hot a girl is - some guy somewhere is sick of her shit.
Exactly how sudden was Wayne Inouye's departure? That is, did he have shares still to vest, and did he walk away from holy fsck amount of money .. assuming that the company was worth anything by the time they vested?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Can Wayne Inouye Save Gateway? ... Apparently not.
Gateway's sales have been declining for a number of years now. Actually, before HP bought Compaq, I thought that Gateway would have been a good acquisition for HP. If I'd been on Gateway's board then, I sure would have looked into the possibility.
Spokesbossy for ominous cow herds everywhere.
Gateway's profit after deducting Microsoft's payoff was only $9M.
They paid the CEO $19 and bonuses for one year's work before he bails.
But, probably the real reason why he couldn't make a go of it at Gateway was inteference from Snyder and the rest of the board.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Can you think of even one at this point?
Their 'service' is pretty dismal. I cant comment on distribution as we no longer include them in our approved vendor list.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe now no more cows will have to die to provide the material for their PC boxes. Vegetable rights and peace!
If they convince the media to call them the "beleagured Gateway Corp." perhaps, just perhaps they can turn it around.
Why not fork?
They're done.....
Gateway has been dead for awhile now as evidenced by the $2/share stock price. Remember the local Gateway store where you could go to the factory showroom and order a custom computer? The main problem that Gateway had was inferior parts and poor after-the-sale customer service, which resulted in customers not returning again and again for upgrades and second time PC purchases.
:)
An ancedotal story. My mother-in-law wanted a new computer and I offered to build her one. She insisted that she wanted a large company like Gateway standing behind her in case of a problem. I groaned and let her buy from Gateway. The PC had problems out of the box, most noticably skipping when playing audio CD's. Grinning, I told my mother-in-law just to call gateway and they would take care of it. She called and they ran her through the reboot your computer, click this irrelevant non-related thing, then that irrelevant thing. To make a long story short, the CD-ROM drive was defective and Gateway refused to replace it, but gave her a code and 1-800 number to call periodically for more information regarding a fix.
I just laughed, and laughed and laughed. Yep, the big company was standing behind (sic) it's brand new defective product. Soon after than the video card died, but Gateway did replace that after 2 agonizing calls, and then close to the end of the warranty period the monitor died, which was also replaced.
So when it came time to upgrade to a better PC? Did my mother-in-law go back to Gateway? Nope, she called me to come and take care of it.
Gateway had a strong lead and should have spun itself off into a world-class service and support organization. They could have been the first "Geek Squad", but they chose substandard customer service coupled with the cheapest parts available to make margins. Shipping defective monitors around has got to cut into profit margins.
Because of this, everyone has already bought a Gateway and isn't going back for another. I wonder if I could sell a T-Shirt, which read: "Been there, bought that, Got the Cow-Box."
And create Silicon Gateway Inc. The executive teams are perfect for one another.
It would be totally craptacular.
Gateway reported that their retail sales (though Best Buy, etc) rocketed and their direct sales (via gateway.com) plummeted last quarter.
Retail sales are mostly AMD-based. They have some very neat looking Athlon 64 X2 desktops these days. (For people who don't custom-build their desktop PCs. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
Direct sales are 100% Intel. Let's face it, Dell pretty much owns that market.
I had hoped that their CEO could straighten out Gateway like he did eMachines, but now... ugh. I fear that the old management is going to screw up the progress that was made in the retail channel. Hopefully I'm just being overly cynical. HP needs the competition.
Of my friends who did not first consult me and bought a computer from Gateway, they all had problems with the machine once it arrived... Motherboard smoked during the first bootup, one had a defective CD drive, etc. Friends don't let friends purchase Gateway computers. I'd be interested in seeing a pro list for reasons to purchase Gateway. I am imagining it is quite short.
How can Gateway compete against Lenovo? Gateway cannot. IBM could not and sold its PC division to Lenovo.
... though it would be interesting to see one of these failing legacy manufacturers attempt a line of high quality workstation & notebooks. Something along the lines of American Megatrends, which still survives due to the niche' high reliability market needed for things like motherboards for industrial equipment. Currently, I can't find any manufacturer to match the quality of my old IBM 600E Thinkpad and I'd gladly pay for the quality if offered.
They're a gonner
Sun should acquire Gateway and get into the PC market. This would let Sun increase its enterprise reach -- not sure that Sun wants to get in touch with Consumers, though.
BR,
~A
Way to go Apple! What a great time to let your company be forced into the 'lucrative' x86 OEM market.
Google should buy Gateway... it'd be a good move for them... :)
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Has anyone else noticed how all these companies are starting to have troubble. Gateway, SGI, even GM and Ford.
IMHO, the problem is that the US economy has more debt than it can pay off at face value so this is just the beginning. What will most likely happen is that the fed will monitize some debts in order to prevent massive bankruptcies. But it will make the problem worse, because watering down the value of the money will drive up commodity prices like gas and food, but it likely won't drive up pay. So people will have the same debts, but costs that are several times higher. This will cause more bankruptcies, which will lead to more monitization, which will lead to more bankruptcies and so on in a vicious cycle.
It seems to me that these next few years will be hell. Also, I think the dollar is doomed as a global reserve currency, and I wouldn't be suprised if the dollar ceased to be a currency at all. Put extra money into precious metals.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
AOL Silicon Gateway, with George W. Bush as CEO and Cheney as VP. They would kill their customers, not Iraqis.
One of the big box vendors will eventually do it, ship linux on the desktop as the default OS installation. It would give the industry a nice kick in the pants. A partnership with any of the major refined distros would do it, that and work with the peripheral vendors to offer devices that would work on plug-in without alot of hassle. It's been "there" potentially for a couple years now. There are many smaller vendors doing it, just none of the larger ones.
I'm a university IT tech. Last month I had a fairly GW desktop PC's hard drive die. The drive was an IDE model. GW tech support not once but twice sent me a Serial ATA unit instead. That would be fine because the computer supports SATA as well, but they didn't send me a cable. After the first SATA drive was sent, I told the tech that I wanted either a cable or the correct drive. He refused me a cable.
Complaining to customer support got me a cable. Turns out the techs ordered the correct drive both times, but the warehouse was out of IDE hard drives so it failed silently and sent a SATA drive instead.
That said, the techs I chatted with (using their Java client) were professional (a bit too professional, if you know what I mean) and knew their jobs.
I'm not recommending my clients order GW machines for the time being. Our other major vendor for desktop PCs is Dell, and while their techs make me jump through the same hoops to get replacement parts, at least I get the right gorram parts sent to me.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I worked for Gateway when they had all the retail stores. The only thing that helped us sell the pc's were the promise of US based tech support when the rest of the PC world sent it to India. That and the random Profile and Tablet computer sale helped. Honestly before they bought EMachines, Gateway was doing ok with the consumer electronics dept. as well. We sold TONS of their cheap plasmas before the rest of the market came down to their prices. Their number one source for cash flow was those stores. Not their most profitable source but the most sales. When they changed everything to go with retail outlets and the Emachines business model, everyone thought they went out of business. I didn't talk to a single person that knew that they still were selling computers. How can you recover from that? Their biggest asset was their customer base. Look at their stock come April 04'. That's when they closed their retail stores and it was all down hill from there. They did this to themselves, not the flopping PC industry.
(who also sell their wares to the Chinese military in Beijing)
Let's face it... the military industrial complexes around the world doesn't care much about ethics. The site you linked to is highly anti-Taiwan, but you could easily write a similar site about any country in the world. There are rotten people all over the world, and just because some egghead in Taiwan opens a restaurant with a nazi theme, doesn't mean that all Taiwanese people are nazis, okay? Just as little as all people in the U.S. aren't racist and bigots because of a few bigots in the south, or Sweden being a nazi country because 50 neo-nazis gets permission to march down a street to show their stupidity.
I don't know when the Tech Support went to hell but the machines quality dropped off right around the time the Pentium 3 was launched. Gateway was effected by the Capacitor Curse and knew it (thanks Siebel!) but wouldn't do anything about it. If you had a FlexCase system with an MSI board you were screwed, they didn't even have enough for warranty service so they gave huge discounts to those customers.
HP will INNOVATE and INVENT the computer of the future! While other clone makers like Dell and IBM have their computers built by third party sweatshops in China, HP will BUY Gateway, and LEAD the world into a technical future of INNOVATION and EXCELLENCE.
RS
ps: if HP *does* buy the rotting carcass of Gateway, I'll laugh so hard...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
At least we can thank them for introducing a 42" Plasma for $3000 when they were $6-7000 everywhere else. Brought the price of all plasmas down almost overnight. Yes, they were only EDTV, and might not have been good at all, but all that mattered was the fact that consumers could say "Why should I buy your 42" for that much when they have one over here for 3 grand?" and everyone else had no choice but to follow suit.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Does that mean they'll finally get a quality control department?
They didn't design the stores in the best way, so the Service area was the first thing you saw when you came in. With all the paperwork (legal, etc) and Siebel crashing, backups at the front of the store were routine. The average customer waiting for service was there at least 20 minutes, and Gateway didn't even supply magazines to read. Needless to say by the time they got to the Customer Rep. they were bullshit.
I brought this up with my Team Leader and even Christian Tortillo, who was the head of Service (hey, I was young and foolish) but they couldn't or wouldn't do a thing about it. The managers knew they were losing sales over it, too.
Perhaps the worst offense the Service management did was intentionally understaff the department, so the average repair time was more than a week. Then they had the balls to offer "Rush Service" for "only $50 more!" Meanwhile Dell could ship the part to you and have someone install it faster.
We were so understaffed we couldn't handle nearly any incoming calls, so people would call the Sales team for an update on their repair, and the Sales team didn't have access. Gateway's solution was "call India" but that didn't stop the calls.
Every part from the Warranty Parts center was shipped separately, even though they did manage to have us send back the bad parts in a single box.
They emphasised perfect diagnoses by the Techs, so if a Tech had a hard disk they thought was bad they'd slam the drive against the floor to ensure their rating would stay high.
The worst thing was the neverending stream of FFR (Fdisk, Format, Reload) where Gateway wanted $60 per CD of data backed up. There were TWO boxes that had to be initially to OK an FFR, but in the Customer Reps. rush, and the customer who's been there for 20 minutes it would often be glanced over. The end result was anger on the customer's part: "What do you mean ALL MY DATA IS GONE?!"
You signed here and here, see?
Even if they brought the drive to a recovery company, Gateway had a policy of zeroing out a part of the drive anyway so the customers were fucked.
From the year I spent there I could see the ship had been taking on water for a while. Before I worked there they used to do all service free of charge, with no electronic paperwork, and without even an option for saving data.
I'm suprized they've survived this long.
I guess the universe will eventually right itself, after all.
http://outcampaign.org/
...Except for the fact the keyboard was missing an 'O' when I opened the box.
I've thought the same for years, there needs to be one simple change to the laws, you must hold a stock for x-years (one or two anyway) before it can be resold. That would do a tremendous amount of good to put "investing" back into the stock market as opposed to wild speculation and programmed trading, etc.
Take a look at this thread:
1 8204
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/03/23
I've particularly liked the following post:
>> Can Wayne Inouye Save Gateway? No!
>> Like any desk jockey executive, he will kick back, collecting a
>> multi-million dollar salary plus bonuses that will bankrupt the company,
>> and laugh all the way to the bank. Gateway will be kaput by 2006, and that
>> is a generous estimate.
Bangalore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Toronto, Aukland are places you start businesses. Ohio is in the middle of a united poverty disaster. Gateway was another rediculous 90's contraption to let people work wherever they wanted for no reason.
If you were to ask most people, I would wonder how many of them even realize the crazy computer company with the cow boxes was still in business. Maybe GW2K or whatever they want to call themselves should start putting other brands from the past on to crappy computers. Something like what GM has done. Instead of Buicks we could have Commodore, Compuadd, E-Machines, Intellivision, Sinclair, or any other defunct company. While on the subject of defunct companies, how many of these have Gateway purchased?
Go back to the direct model, bring back Waitt, and try to be cool again.
The stupidest thing I've ever seen is a company change thier name from cool to fucking lame. Biggest reason I wanted a "Gatway 2000" was because it sounded cool, sounds like a good computer, "Gateway" by itslef sounds lame and bland.
You start going proprietary parts, you sell in retail outlets, you join up with fucking e-machines, all that ruins your reputation as a good computer maker and just makes you king of the bargin bunch. Meaning you don't make no money but sell alot of computers alla COMPAQ.
REally sad to see this, I used to like Gateway 2000.
The similarities to the plot of the Final Destination films are uncanny. You buy Amiga Corp and sell it off before anything "bad" happens thus cheating (financial) death but it turns out you can't cheat death after all...
I've just read two pages of comments about declining sales figures, market places, quality control issues, etc. etc. And, I'm left starring bleakly at my monitor wondering WHEN IN THE FUCK SOMEONE WILL ACTUALLY POST SOME GOD DAMN NUMBERS TO EITHER BACK UP OR DISPROVE THE LOOSE BOWEL EMISSIONS THAT PASS FOR DISCUSSION AT THIS ARTICLE.
... anyone care to provide 'the goods' as the expression goes? How is gateway actually doing in the marketplace? How has their quality evolved historically? How is customer satisfaction? How are profits and margins? Employment levels? Supply chain timeframes? etc. etc. etc.
:)
You see, it's a phenomenon that, unfortunately, I find myself running into on a rather incessant basis -- vapid talking heads spouting off anecodtes or personal opinions with no hard statistical substantive facts to foundationalize what they are saying (and this applies to both sides of the argument)
So
If you can't provide this substantive information, perhaps you should question the validity of your beliefs? Food for thought
Instead, the reason why U.S. manufacturing companies are moving elsewhere (both big and small) is due to a deliberate policy on the part of the U.S. Government to kill manufacturing in the USA. At least if it was policy I don't see how it would be any different.
Besides H.R. bulls*** rules and a corporate tax system from h*** that strongly discourages innovation with a strong emphasis on short term earnings, it is no wonder that companies are leaving the USA for elsewhere.
Where I live, the local government is quite quirky in regards to accepting companies from outside, but there is a huge manufacturing base from local citizens who simply knew how to build a better mousetrap and created a product that was better than anything else in that market. This ranges from bio-tech, heavy vehicle manufacturing, electronics, and even textiles. I have watched over the years as even these middle and sometimes even small (about 50 employees total in one company) businesses have closed up shop with only a small sales team left behind to deal with existing clients, but the manufacturing has gone elsewhere, mainly Mexico but sometimes China or Singapore as well. The ones that are left either have U.S. Government contracts where they don't necessarily have to be very cost effective and the contract requires them to make the stuff in the USA, or requires such specialized skills (often with a PhD as a minimum requirement for employment) that making the stuff can only be done here.
It is disapointing, and eventually the USA is going to have to "pay the piper" for this loss of skills. That is the critical thing now, because many people don't even know how to manage a decent manufacturing company, and the only real growth industries are health care, law firms, and accountants. I don't know how much longer the rest of us can help support this type of service industry when there is nobody left to buy their services except each other.
Gateway is shit and the market has proved it, so STFU asshole.