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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?'"
> 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.
There isn't a computer maker in the top ten that is really doing anything innovative anyway it's all copying or refining what has gone on before them before and marketing it as something people will want. If they get that right things fall into place.
Nobody knows gateway exists any more so their marketing is has been.
Question: Does Apple do anything innovative? Does OS X count as "innovative"?
Apple is top ten; it's actually sixth in U.S. marketshare, IIRC.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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 ----
Apple doesn't innovate, but they bring innovations to consumers in a form they can actually use.
English is easier said than done.
Apple gets a reasonable amount of patents, so I suppose they are innovative, but it is hard to tell in a world of obvious patents.
How many patents do Dell, HP, Gateway, etc, get?
Apple tend to innovate more at the package level than the component level. They might make products that other people have done before, but they make the whole package palatable to the purchaser, and thus desirable. They make it look good, work simply and easily, and these are things that PC makers are going to have trouble with as they don't have their own software stack incorporating an OS up through high end applications.
And they do these things with rapid speed. Another respondent says it is just a nicely packaged nano-ITX system. Problem is, nano-ITX is barely available a year after the Mini was released. I think he meant mini-ITX, although the mini's motherboard is smaller than that. Again, the mini is more integrated and more powerful (I guess a 1.5GHz G4 is twice as powerful as a 1.2GHz C3, and that's before SIMD).
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.
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.
they bring innovations to consumers in a form they can actually use.
Which is a form of innovation in itself.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Apple aren't a computer company, they're a marketing company. About the only innovation you see from Apple is stealing products from other companies and repackaging them...
Hmm. That reminds me of somebody else, their name starting with an M or something. Can't think of it right off of the top of my head...
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
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.