The apparent death of Gateway

I read an interesting article on the impending death, uh, sale of Gateway to Acer.  Gateway is a computer manufacturer that is best known for their spotted (like cows) boxes that their computers used to ship in.  Spotted boxes to look like cows because the computers that Gateway made were put together in the mid west, where you'd expect to find cattle, rather than a high tech manufacturer.

Gateway was, at one point in time, one of the largest computer manufacturers in the U.S.A.  Competing hard against the likes of IBM, Dell, and Compaq.  Before HP and Compaq merged and HP became better known as a PC manufacturer than as a workstation/Unix system builder.

I hadn't realized that, according to the story I read, Compaq had offered almost $7Billion to acquire Gateway back in the 1990s.  An offer that Gateway turned down at the time.  An offer that is hard to imagine now considering what Acer is offering as the purchase price of Gateway now.  Literally pennies on the dollar, and low numbers of pennies at that, in comparison to those billion$.

Gateway made some decisions along the way that obviously cost them over their lifetime.  They never seemed to be able to get business customers to buy their systems, and instead seemed to rely much more heavily on end users and especially home users.  Something that Dell has gone after very heavily over the last few years, but Dell had also long since wrapped up the Government and Business market before working to bring in the home user business.  With little or no acceptance in the business place, and very few government buyers ready to sign off on purchases of Gateway computers over choices from other companies (Dell and HP as examples), Gateway watched their business get smaller and smaller.

They tried consumer electronics sales for a while, and even had retail stores at one point, but just about everything they tried seemed to be too little and too late or going right up against other, well established, companies that weren't so easy to knock off.  Without the deep pockets, and piles of cash to hold them through tough times, Gateway shrunk from a company with many thousands (10s of thousands) of employees to one with just over a thousand.

I've paid attention to the stock price over the last few years just for grins.  Since the bust of the tech market at the end of the 90's Gateway has floundered down in the low single digits.  Customers just didn't line up to buy their products, and they just didn't seem to find any one product that they could corner the market on or at least dominate the market for.

I'll miss the competition in the marketplace, but realistically I'm not sure that Gateway had added that much to it lately.  You could find their products in some stores, but typically they were just among the lower end systems and normally were passed over in favor of something cheaper, or something with a more established name (HP as an example).  I guess there may not be much change it the marketplace anyway since Acer is buying Gateway and they too tend to produce systems found at the lower end of the scale.  While there may be some loss there, there are still other systems manufacturers that put out systems, and even companies like Microcenter that sell their own house brands that tend to offer choice to bargain shoppers.

Anyway, as always the marketplace moves on.  Plenty of companies in the IT world have come and gone over the last 20+ years.  Several names that the younger crowd may not even recognize.  Will anyone really care here?  Probably not, but it is yet another sign that the PC manufacturing world is still a cut-throat business.