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?'"
Stupid Cow (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Oh Boy, Oh Boy! (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
I hate to be negative... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only 1 Choice: Liquidation (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [geocities.com]). 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.
$9M sales, $19M payoff? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I hate to be negative... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because you don't remember Gateway before they went mega-commerical. Many of us remember Gateway as being the mail-order company that always built PCs to the highest specifications of technology and quality. When everyone else was shipping 2x CDRom drives, Gateway was shipping 4x. When everyone was shipping 4 megs of RAM, Gateway was shipping 16. When everyone else had non-existant technical support, Gateway had excellent service that got your problem taken care of right away.
THAT is the Gateway I remember. The Gateway of today is nothing more than some other megacorp abusing the namesake of a company who knew how to build computers.
Is it time for acquiring Gateway ? (Score:2, Interesting)
BR,
~A
Re:Second time buyers didn't return to Gateway (Score:3, Interesting)
I was working in I.T. for a mid-sized company that was using exclusively Dell, but got irritated at the long hold times just to get parts replaced under warranty, and some billing mistakes they made. So they asked me to consider alternatives. We opted for Toshiba for some of our laptop purchases, and as an experiment, tried Gateway. They had a number of new slim-line desktop PCs out that they were selling through their "business division", pre-loaded with Windows NT 4.0 (which was what we ran at the time).
The first shipment arrived, and out of the box, they were having issues. When we installed certain software packages on them, they repeatedly crashed with the blue screen of death, and wouldn't reboot properly if you applied one of the NT service packs on them. Calls to Gateway technical support did no good, and I was referred to my local Gateway Country store. So there I was, a corporate customer, expected to hand-deliver these PCs to a consumer-oriented retail store and leave them there for "warranty service". I ended up bringing them just one of them to troubleshoot for us. First, they told me the hard drive was bad and replaced it. (Obviously, that didn't fix anything.) Then they swapped out the motherboard and blamed bad RAM as the problem. Nope! Finally, someone realized Gateway had just released a new BIOS for them that fixed the issue - but the new BIOS version wasn't posted to their web site yet for some reason, so I was told I've have to bring all of the boxes in to the store to let them flash upgrade them. (Umm, no. Not an acceptable answer!) So I just kept combing the web site until the upgrade was finally made publically available and got the systems updated myself.
After that fiasco, we never used Gateway again. Heck, even their web site was difficult to navigate to get drivers and BIOS updates compared to Dell.
GW service sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Stupid Cow (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I hate to be negative... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fast Food (Score:3, Interesting)