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MPC Computers Shutting Down
davidphogan74 writes "MPC Computers (formerly Micron's computer division) notified the Idaho Department of Labor in a letter on 12/29/2008 that it would terminate its remaining employees. The company had been operating under the protection of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy since November, after it laid off 200 employees in October. MPC said 147 employees would be terminated immediately and 51 would be retained while the company liquidates its assets. Last year, MPC bought the professional business unit of PC company Gateway, which itself had been bought by Acer earlier that year. MPC had sold business technology hardware to mid-sized business, government agencies, and education organizations since 1991."
Micron always made rock solid, good performing machines. They even had a high-tech name. Anyone know why they failed?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
TRON strikes again! Eat it MCP! Oh wait...
:(
Come to think of it, I bet TRON caused a bunch of layoffs too. Gosh, that kinda makes the movie more of a bummer
Well, this certainly makes me feel secure about the hundreds and hundreds of Gateway computers we've got at work. I'm sure warranty repair parts will be easily available.
*cough*
--saint
I for one believe that firing the employees in question would be enough, instead of termination. Perhaps it'd even be cheaper choice.
This explains why my MPC salesperson didn't bug the crap out of me like other salespersons. I faxed in a P.O. in September but never heard from her again. Perhaps she'd been laid off early or quit. I wasn't worried about it because there were more critical items I was dealing with at the time. There's one contact I'll be deleting on Monday after Christmas break.
Micron made some bullet proof laptops. About five years ago, when I worked as a civilian for the Department of the Navy, they gave me one bangin' Micron laptop. My friend had a Micron full tower back in college and the thing was bullet proof. It ran Linux flawlessly. In fact, I was going to purchase one because they are clearly superior to Dell but I they were out of my price range at the time. I guess everyone is now looking at their bottom dollar so quality has lessened. Still a shame, but people would rather pay less than a small amount more. In the three years that I had that laptop, I put it through hell and never once did its hardware fail. It survived rough handling and, an embarrasing slip out of my hand.
This is going to be a pain in the ass especially for business customers who i guess now have no support. They were also having issues delivering machines with massive delays months.
This is.....good? Bad? Catastrophic? On a good day I'm a severe depressive and major cynic, but life is slowing inching toward an hero territory.
Anyone want to give me a brighter picture?
Great, so a new company can get their property and hope to profiteer from it.
We can start it all over again.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Don't scare me! What with all the Zunes freezing, you can't be too careful nowadays... the last thing I need is trusty ol' MPC to crash!
No Bailout for You!
in spite of the spectacular summary, I chose not to RTFA. too gory for work.
I remember reading a bunch of PC magazine reviews in the mid- to late- 90's and Micron PCs always seemed to be near the top of the editor's picks. Which led me to wonder: what the hell is a Micron PC? I knew HP, Dell, Gateway 2000, and Compaq back then, but I never saw a Micron PC in person. I guess I never will...I'm getting all choked up.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Unisys had a contract to do MPC computers. I think it was a hold over from the "oh fuck the customer is MAD, send a tech out there!" contract we had with gateway before they bought them.
There was one case where they sent motherboard after motherboard. (5 in total) to a gateway customer. Looked like someone in shipping kept substituting the wrong board. Though how you could substitute an ATA interface laptop board with with a SATA interface and expect it to work is beyond me.
But that was their laptops, there servers were very solid and support was GREAT. Always got on the phone with an experienced techs. I just think they shouldn't of bought the Gateway stuff.
MPC didn't have a big foot print though. Its hard to be the little guy in a bit Dell/HP world. Hate to see them go.
I, for one, happen to be rather pleased that MPC bit the dust: We hired one of their former employees back in November, and he has proven to be a great addition to our (currently growing, amazingly) company.
We used MPC in a higher-ed setting quite consistently over Dell since they had better deals, more configuration options, and USA tech support.
Once they purchased Gateway however the service was horrible. Installing XP on a RAID-enabled SATA controller required the RAID drivers which Gateway/MPC techs refused to send to us. It took 10 minutes for them to find the system in the database and over an hour for one of their techs to scour their website for the proper driver.
MPC's only original 2 flaws were their oddly-interfaced website and their billing. You know how you get configuration errors if you have more cards than PCI slots? Well, their "default" configurations would always have a configuration error right off the bat. Things like that, plus poorly-updated tracking info made it useless.
And then their billing...I moved to a different department and therefore had a new purchasing card issued to me (and the old one canceled). 3 Months after a PC purchase I received a threatening e-mail from their accounts Receivable stating that the payment on the system was denied and that we'd better pay up now or go to court. A quick e-mail and a call with the new card number resolved things quickly, but waiting 3 months to bill for a system is a little odd.
MPC had a good thing going right up to that point (for the most part anyhow). The Gateway curse continues.
"This food is problematic."
You're gettin a Dell... or an IBM, or whatever.
And that's why Apple is doing so well. Oh, wait...
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
Netcraft would confirm it if they themselves weren't in the process of closing up shop.
They didn't even notify their customers. We had ordered hundreds of PCs (all-in-ones) for a new South Tower at our hospital and they didn't even have the courtesy to give is a head up! Just Plain rude!
Yeah, With it being a new year and all, I thought at first the computers themselves were shutting down a la Zune. Maybe "MPC Computers Going the Way of the Dodo" would have been a better title.
this is like Michael Dell swatting a gnat.
MPC had been essentially non-player in the PC business for years, even after it's acquisition of the business unit of Gateway.
They had contracts with the V.A. Coast Guard, Army, L.A. County school District. It is just another company fleeced by their CEO and other executives.
We purchased some Gateway M275 tablets a couple of years ago and were pretty happy with them, but then MPC took over the business from Gateway and everything went down hill...the service we received was terrible and when we were looking at new tablets earlier this year, we were promised a lot by MPC and they didn't deliver on any of it. We had an order placed with them in August and they choose not to tell us they were out of business until two weeks ago...
How am I going to get on the Game Grid now???
I worked for Micron for a while. It has a somewhat confusing history. I was there in the mid-late 90's when it was called Micron Electronics. It was tethered to Micron Tech at that time (the memory maker). Micron Tech in hindsight did well to spin off Micron Electronics (MPC) in 2001.
Micron Electronics had previously acquired ZEOS computers along with a small groups of engineers from a little town in Minnesota that had expertise in chip design, specifically north bridge chips. It was these engineers that I worked with.
It was no secret that their strategy was to create performance/gaming PCs. They did that by going up against the Intels, VIAs, and SiSs in creating the fastest northbridge ICs for a given CPU. They also designed their own motherboards and extended the commercially-obtained BIOS to take advantage of features in their chipsets.
Even though they were based in Nampa, Idaho, they had significant operations in Minnesota (in fact all design was in Roseville, MN). Nampa had a larger workforce, but it was primarily production.
I'm somewhat sad that they folded, though I'll admit I haven't followed them for a while. My thoughts are that Dell/Alienware and the DIY market took away the high-end customers. Micron (Electronics) attempted to get into servers with the purchase of NetFrame in the 1997 timeframe. I don't think they ever got any real traction with those products, though.
R.I.P. ZEOS/Micron Electronics/Micron PC
They're in different situations. SCO has Microsoft behind the curtain pumping money when it's needed.
I work in higher education. We've had a few MPC-Gateways (my area is mainly Dell, thank goodness, but other techs are not so lucky), and nearly every time we've needed support on a Gateway box, it's been terrible. I've had an incompatible drive sent to me, twice. They have refused to send me restore DVDs for in-warranty machines, when the restore partition failed[1]. It can be difficult to find the correct drivers on their website.
And now, we've got this then-expensive 22" widescreen monitor that went bad a couple months ago and is putatively still under warranty. Except now that they are bankrupt and dissolving, there is no warranty. We've got the money that he already bought a replacement, but that's a regular burr beneath my saddle that we paid for something which we'll never get.
[1] A problem because of said machines needing XP Tablet Edition, and us not having a site license nor media for that version.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
We used them as our primary computer provider. When the bailouts were just going out to banks they were filing for Chapter 11. It's been well over a month or two since they were processing RMA's normally, and it's been up to 6 months since we first started noticing increased delays with service.
Hell, just a week and a half ago the Judge made a ruling that allowed them to take care of 'preferred customers'. Luckily, that included us. The downside was only the stuff that was back ordered could be put in and they "lost" several RMA orders (they redid many of those).
We received notification on Sunday I think that they had told their employees to make a phone conference Monday morning before coming in to work. They laid off all but 20 people who are doing nothing but closing their doors.
It's a real shame too. Their ClientPro series was pretty useful for an all-in-one. Wall mountable, and didn't suffer the heat damage that most all-in-ones do. We've had several installed without any real care at various places across the US for up to 3 years without issue!
And on the ones WITH an issue, we usually just send a hard drive since it was in a tray and swapped it out to fix software issues. Cheaper than sending a technician since a janitor can do the swap.
It's sad news, but its OLD news if you were a customer of theirs.
But if MPC owned a large number of warranties, and they are now defunct, why is this allowed to affect the consumer at all? If I buy a warranty from company 'A', and company 'A' sells their warranty department to company 'B' a year later, why can I as a consumer not go back to company 'A' and demand that they honor the warranty that was originally purchased under them? Company 'A' likely was paid for those warranties, and I don't find it unreasonable to expect that money from company 'A' be used to cover their decision to sell what was their responsibilities to company 'B'. After all, the warranty was between company 'A' and myself. If company 'A' didn't handle the decision to sell to company 'B' in the best interest of the consumer, then company 'A' should be held responsible for them.
Businesses should be aligned to honor and treasure their customers. If businesses do not want to make those decisions willingly, then laws should allow customers to go and file a lawsuit as applicable. I'm sorry but the customer shouldn't be allowed to lose without recourse because a few people were selfish assholes. I'm sure the business owners have been reimbursed quite well for running their business into the ground. If the decision makers made a bad decision, then the business owner should be walking away from the business with the clothes on their back and their tail between their legs. Nothing less than this should EVER be acceptable.
It's situations like this that make me somewhat leery of buying one of those 3rd party warranties. If ABC computers wants to warranty my Dell PC for 3 years for $349.99 will ABC computers really be in business for the next 3 years? If they flop a week later, do I have any options for recourse?
It's a fact that when the economy is down, more people will actually use their warranty options rather than just buy a new computer and justify it saying "Well, the computer is 2.5 years old. Why not buy a new one instead of the hassle of warranty". Money is tight, and consumers will use their warranty to the maximum extent possible.
I feel bad for the employees at the company that were effectively jobless days after christmas, with no warning of their impending 'layoff'. I find their letter justifying why the couldn't give 60 days notice unsettling. They're admitting they screwed up, and i'm sure their former employees are comforted by this fact, right? I hope they ban together and demand those 60 days paid, as is required by law. Who pays their salary for those 60 days? The people in charge that decided they'd gamble with people's jobs and try to get 'financial assistance' to keep those higher-ups a job.
It all stinks of shit to me.
I've had to call in a few gateway laptops and didn't have any problems at all until I called in on the day someone over at MPC decided to change their input applications and database. I was on the phone for 2+ hours and was eventually cut off and had to call back the next day when I was on the phone for another hour or two. Every time after that I've had nothing but problems from MPC. Every call took way too long and one person even told me to have the user I was supporting call them so submit the support request. WHAT?! After telling them how completely unprofessional that would be on my part and how angry my user would be, they created the ticket.
Indeed, and now there is even a template now on how to do just that:
Read my blog.
It's for old Windows testing like 9x and 2000. The only that failed was its HDD and CD-ROM drive.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We just bought another 35 of their All-in-ones over the summer, for the computer lab at the university... MPC had a great warranty on their machines, and a great service dept., which let us keep things running smoothly. So much for that!
If you can not be the price leader, then you have to learn to be the market leader. Companies like that need to create their own markets. Sadly, business ppl today are worthless.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I work for a school system that used Gateways. After MPC took over, getting warranty parts was a hassle. And since October, we haven't received any.
Not so much a problem for standard desktops, since we can use standard parts for those, but we have labs full of their Profile 5.5. The power bricks on those die all the time, and we've only found a few sources to buy them, for $120 to $150 each.
I had a friend with a Micron PC way back in the day and I'm not sure where he got it but I never-ever saw one sitting on a shelf anywhere at the big box stores, nor have I ever seen one advertised in a place where non-geeks frequent (on TV on the big 4, Newsweek/Time magazines, sporting events).
For the average consumer; they would have had very little way of knowing why they'd want a Micron over a Dell (if there is a reason; didn't seem any different than any other beige-box late 90's PC) and secondly, no convienient avenue to get one if they did decide it was what they wanted.
The major companies provide a end-to-end sales/service/support model where I have a "Dell shop", "IBM shop" or "HP shop" where every computer is made by them and has convienent tools for central purchasing and quick repair/warranty service. Extended warranties with next day parts are huge for "medium" size businesses who explicity buy one PC per seat and don't have much in the way of part inventory except for outdated salvaged parts or are in an environment where departments are very independent and retain their equipment and aren't keen on sharing with other departments/business units. (e.g. if a computer is sitting idle in accounting I can't physically take it and install it in R&D until I get the broken one in R&D back online.)
As smaller companies like Gateway started to let quality slip, and couldn't get replacement parts or onsite service in 24 hours, and weren't any cheaper than Dell or HP, there is no reason to buy from them. Eventually, you get to the point where you can't even find them unless you're looking real hard, which is where I think Micron was. I've seen this happen to Gateway, Acer, Packard Bell/NEC and others when I used to do desktop support, and it always seems to be when the company decides to go "consumer" grade and expect that the buyer is going to go to geek squad or throw the thing away like any other consumer good; and lets them sales/support/service go down the toilet where no business buys them; and most folks buy what they see on TV or what they have at work (if they are happy with their machine at work.)
You don't want to know how hard it is to get replacement motherboards for an Acer tablet PCs versus getting anything from Dell when you've got 1000 of their boxes on site with gold support.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
A year ago, Gateway kept me so busy with service calls that I had to hire a temp! There's a school system around here that got real disgusted with Gateway because the motherboards had to be replaced on all of them. The model they purchased had a severe design flaw in that the motherboard around the cpu was not reinforced underneath, allowing the heatsink to flex the board in that area.
I knew that it was nearly the end when I tried to return some parts in October. The FedEx office refused the packages. (UPS didn't look, just took them) Come to find out that MPC didn't pay UPS or FedEx.
Those of us in the field understood that the cost of maintaining the support of Gateway equipment was going to eventually drive someone into bankruptcy. You'd think that MPC would've considered it.
It's a pity, though. When we had Micron for a customer many years ago, they were an excellent company. I learned many things from their helpdesk.
Went off to college with the machine and it worked extremely well...until I got tired of screwing around with windows and linux and bought a Mac. For it's day, it was comepetitively priced with dell on the high end and offered a better video card and more RAM. Of course back then 256MB was a lot of RAM screaming fast for Windows 98. Especially with a 32MB video card.
At some point I stopped reading PC magazines and all their fluff pieces on technology and stopped paying attention.
So long as Crucial is still around, I'm not too worried.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
As a Unisys Employee I can tell you MPC service calls made up less then 5% of our work load. And, yes, from what I hear who ever had the MPC service contact before was not very good and caused people to bitch. As for them going under, that prob means we will no longer be seeing MPC or Gateway calls from this point on unless whoever picks up their assets also honors the service warranties. Ohh well, back to replacing Dell Latitude D620/D630 boards with Nvidia chips.
Unless you happen to be one of the 1300 RIFed...
Good luck, my friend.
51 would be retained while the company liquidates its assets.
I've called them several times this last month for RMAs or server issues, and the support has been horrible--which is unusual for them.
On Christmas Eve a client called me with a server down--apparently the RAID card just decided to eat it. I called MPC for an RMA around noon and was told "the server guy should be in around 8:00 tonight if you could call back then".
WTF? I'm not calling in for an RMA at 8:00 PM on Christmas Eve. Bastards!
There's no place like
Back in the day Micron PC's were certainly top notch but as I understood it the PC business never really made much money for Micron. Micron PC was rolled under the umbrella of "Micron Electronics" which contained other segments that did in fact make money and supported the PC side for years. Once the PC business was dumped off to Gore Technologies in 02 or so I think the death spiral began. It's a sad story, but Apple aside, I think for most folks surfing the net and paying bills the only consideration in a PC anymore price and connectivity.
The first windows based computer we owned, after several Apples, was a Micron. Back in 1997, their customer support reps had the patience of Job and spents hours on the phone with us, helping us understand Windows and the hardware. If anyone reading this used to work there, let me just say "Thank you very much." We still have two Micron machines in use around here. They just last.
For MPC or Gateway Tech support, check this out: http://mpctechsupport.blogspot.com/