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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?'"
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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 ----
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.
Can Wayne Inouye Save Gateway? ... Apparently not.
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!
Maybe now no more cows will have to die to provide the material for their PC boxes. Vegetable rights and peace!
Apple doesn't innovate, but they bring innovations to consumers in a form they can actually use.
English is easier said than 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."
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
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).
Whoa! Better check for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy first!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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 was always disappointed that the Cow boxes didn't have Cow-print computers inside as well. The trouble is going far enough that you've crossed the line from "tacky" to "camp". People would be trolling EBay for a genuine, 1996 P90 "Gurnsey" or "Hereford", instead of Mac Cubes.
Obligatory Gateway Bashing Story: Back around 1993ish, my boss bought a Gateway 486 laptop. He added a PCMCIA modem which never worked right. After some back and forth with heavily accented (Dakotan) tech-support, he finally got them to admit that they hadn't quite implemented the entire PCMCIA spec that was current at the time, meaning that it worked with many, but not all, adapters. That was our last Gateway.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.
That's hardly true. Gateway's got the most innovative website I've ever seen. Rarely does navigating a site equate to taking a Mensa IQ test. Every other OEM has relatively easy support pages, but Gateway takes the high road, demanding that you improve yourself in order solve whatever problem you may have. Dell, Apple, etc... all represent a "dumbing down" user experience, while Gateway is helping us help ourselves. After all, the smarter we become using their site, the less we will have to use their site at all. This must be working, because after using the site to find drivers, I've given up and vow never to return.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, brilliant idea, those keyboards. N00bs were constantly reprogramming them by accidentally hitting the key combo that turned on macro recording mode. Sort of like giving people a massage table that doubled as a band saw when you shift your weight just right.
Insert witty sig here.
Well, seriously, I have **never** had problems with Gateway for computers. I bought my first computer from them back when I was 12. As a child with non-technical parents, any "problem" we had was software-related (read Windows) and they were more than helpful in fixing that too. Recently, my hard-drive from a 4-year old computer died and they sent a new one after one call.
Last year, I bought a laptop from them. ALL their hardware is 100% non-proprietary (i.e. not their own; Pentium M, IPW2200 Wireless, etc). That means I can run Ubuntu Linux on it pretty much out of the box (had to configure volume keys etc.) That for me was a great plus.
I suppose this isn't really a "pro list" but is just my positive experience.
I've often wondered why CEOs aren't paid a modest salary and a heap of shares that they are not allowed to sell for 5-10 years. This would encourage them to ensure that the company is in a good shape until about 5-10 years after they leave (at which time their successor would be trying to make sure the share price was still high after he retired).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.