Troubled Times at Gateway 152
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?'"
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:2, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is top ten; it's actually sixth in U.S. marketshare, IIRC.
Buyout? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Just the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Gateway Had it commin' (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is a form of innovation in itself.
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:GW service sucks (Score:1, Insightful)
I work for a company performing Gateway on site service.
At least 40% of the gateway service calls we get, Gateway totally fucks up on their end. I've seen everything from the right part, sent via UPS, to a FedEx drop point, THREE TIMES, each time when I called to have them reissue the part they confirmed it was going direct to the customer.
They also send the wrong part regularly. I've also seen them send THREE MOTHERBOARDS AND FOUR CPUS for a single service call on a single uniprocessor system.
Their laptops are horribly designed from a technicians standpoint. IF you run across a broken out of warranty gateway laptop, open it up for a good scare. Two laptops with a rougly equivalent featureset... the Gateway will typically take three times as long to perform equivalent service. On a few models specific repairs might be easier on the gateway, but thats hit or miss- there is no consistency at all to how Gateway puts together a laptop, which further hurts quick servicability. Dell is at least somewhat consistent within a given series. Consistent enough that you believe it was actually the same company putting it together.
Their phone techs are competent, but they do need a better system to coordinate between field and phone techs- we have to call the general customer tech support line. Their field techs are competent.
Their shipping department is absolutely fucking clueless. If it was a military operation, they'd all be executed for dereliction of duty. Thats how bad they are.
Institutional Insanity! (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Institutional Insanity! (Score:1, Insightful)
As for data recovery, that is there own fault for not backing it up, and not reading contacts.
In the time that I was there I knew that they were going under the only reason I stayed around is because I knew they would lay me off and apply the WARN act to the entire group.
Scary accurate prediction from 2003 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.