Submitted by Taiwan’s leading computer seller Acer is to take over US PC maker Gateway in a USD 710m deal. The takeover will create the world’s third largest producer of personal computers, with shipments of more than 20 million PCs and sales of USD 15bn. The deal may also see Acer try to block Chinese rival Lenovo from buying Packard Bell’s operations in Europe.
I am not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. As far as I can see, Gateway has been medicore for quite some time. My question would be to Acer’s CEO, why take a chance in a medicore at best?
Its a wait and see game, hopefully Acer knows what they’re doing.
They’re not interested in any Gateway technology or anything like that. They have all that themselves. What they want is Gateway’s distribution, sales, marketing and support network in the US, and a name that people recognize and has some support among normal consumers. Building all of that from the ground up would take considerable amount of time and effort, this way they get it all at once, and lets them concentrate on building hardware to sell in the US market.
well they are better than Packard Bell
Seems every major pc maker trying to consolidate their position by owning a weaker outfit. Dont know if its more about economics or corporate image.
this is a good move for acer as gateway is a more established name in the US market.
Only 710 million? I didn’t realize Gateway had fallen so far from their height of the mid to late 1990’s.
I wonder if Acer will change its name to Gateway. A few year ago the video game maker Engram (I believe that was their name) bought “Atari” (whatever was left of it) from Hasbro, and then changed their name to “Atari”. So the stronger company bought a weak one and changed its name to that of the weak one because that name was better known.
Hehe, MollyC, and Gateway owns Amiga trademarks IIRC 🙂 So it is still possible, they will change its name to something else, starting on “A” 🙂
btw – I really doubt it, Acer would adopt GW’s name. GW is completly unknown here in Europe for e.g.
@-pekr-
Yes, Gateway owns Amiga IP, it’s a shame Acer won’t use it nor the name. I’m asking myself if they will ever see that they own the Amiga trademarks.
The Amiga trademark/copyright sitch is a wee bit confusing to me. Did Gateway just buy the trademark or the underlying tech as well?
Gateway bought everything Amiga back in 1997, and licenced to third parties like current Amiga Inc.
It was Infogrames. They bought Hasbro (who owned Atari) and then renamed their US subsidiary Atari. I don’t know if the brand name really did much for them. I played a number of games they published (Hasbro owned the IP).
I don’t know about most gamers but I pay more attention to the developers (both studio and individuals) than I do publisher.
With computers it’s kinda similar. I look at the hardware a company puts into their computer. Who’s video card, what chipset & MB, who’s RAM and so on. The big name on the computer box has less of an impact.
Gateway’s corporate PC’s are quite good. They have standard Intel Motherboards, and standard BTX cases so working on them is quite easy.I don’t know too much about their consumer line, they may be of lower quality.
I’m using a Gateway right now at home — I have no complaints with it; nice, solid speedy machine, beautiful widescreen monitor.
I’m really ambivalent about Acer buying Gateway. I think that, unless Acer keeps the Gateway brand as its own separate business unit, that it’s going to be subsumed and wither away to nothing. People in the U.S., at least, aren’t as familiar with the Acer brand as they are with Gateway, Dell, Compaq (yeah, I know, Compaq is pretty much gone now) and Apple as computer brands. Unless Acer handles this very carefully, I think their investment is going to be for naught.
The first time I heard of Gateway was when I saw their ad in PC Magazine with farmers selling PCs out in their field with cows grazing in the background. From that day, I’ve never understood why anyone would want to buy Gateway. I have relatives who run dairy farms in Pennsylvania similar to the one pictured in the ad. They’re good people, but they know almost nothing about any technology. So why on earth would I consider buying a PC from a farmer?
OTOH, I have always had a fairly high opinion of Acer even though I’ve never owned one (I’ve rarely seen the opportunity).
So I hope Acer drops the Gateway theme like so much cow dung.
The idea of using the farmer, cows and the CEO of Gateway was to give people a homey, friendly feeling about Gateway machines and the company as opposed to the corporate feel of Dell/Compaq/HP, etc.
As other posters have said, Gateway uses quality components in their machines (using Intel CPU/motherboard combos on the ones I used several years ago) and AMD Athlon 64 CPU’s when nobody else would sell them (I bought 3 desktops and a laptop from them for that feature alone). The laptop is a three years old and my daughter still uses it.
And as other posters have pointed out this is a smart move by Acer, because the only thing that generates any discussion I have seen of Acer machines is the Ferarri laptops used by several Sun employees. Other than that you don’t hear squat about Acer.
Yeah, and some of my friends purchased a laptop from some fruit/orchad growers in Cupertino. What does a fruit grower know about computers?
Jobs never portrayed himself as an apple grower. The selection of that name even mystified Wozniak. But the Gateway engineers actually claimed to be farmers.
I see your point, but it doesn’t really work here. Apple doesn’t portray itself that way. Haven’t you seen the ads?
In fact, the name Apple is a reference to Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge. The Macintosh is a reference to a type of apple. It’s now simply Mac due to copyright issues.
I believe Gateway and eMachines have been locked together for a while now and with Acer, there is more buying power and better distribution.
Gateway/eMachines already has good placement in U.S. retail stores so the combined strength of all three should give them better success, if they do things correctly.
Acer has a poor reputation since they started selling computers so this should help them, especially in Asia, where they’re quite big.
Interestingly, Gateway is trying to obtain Packard Bell.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/27/gateway-plans-to-acquire-packard…
Why, I don’t know; Packard Bell was the king of low-cost computers in the early 90’s, but poor build quality and poor service cost them credibility and customers, so that their brand name is a joke now. I didn’t even know they were still around.
But maybe Acer wants both Gateway and Packard Bell. Maybe Gateway’s purchase of Packard Bell was a required precondition for the Acer deal?
Up through the late 1990’s Gateway was a great brand, and had a lot of solid products. I’ve got two of them at home (a P-75, and a G-233). But then tried to expand into the Consumer Electronics market and killed themselves, especially when they decided to target the sub-$1000 PC. (It really hurt them.)
I think what really did Gateway in at that time was that up to about then they were fully run by the founder (Ted Wait [sp?]), and then transferred to a group running out of San Francisco, CA. A few years ago, they transferred back to their founder, and I was hoping that it would help them enough that they could once again rival Dell, but now this.
Packard Bell is a terrible brand, and Acer is not much above them. Though, I guess Gateway has been playing at that level for long enough now that it doesn’t surprise me.
But there goes all hope of Gateway ever recovering. I know if it goes through that I’ll certainly not be buying a Gateway anytime soon, if ever again.
Oh well…guess it’ll be a Dell or HP, or building it myself. (HP has really made a comeback at PCs in recent years.)
Their other mistaken foray was to make better servers than what they offered by buying Advanced Logic Research (ALR). Gateway could not capitalize on the bleeding edge technology that made ALR the darling of tech geeks until they needed support. Several publications gave failing grades to ALR for their poor support of their products.
Gateway had a good run at it’s start but once they sold there own store and bought eMachine they seem to have had a sour note in the investment market.
Gateway as some interesting patent so did eMachine , they have some patented technology on distribution system that are quite impressive.
I always thought that once they where passed the below 1 billion mark they where marked for an acquisition , I was hoping that one of the big GNU/Linux player would have bought them for the access to hardware and create a direct hardware distribution channel like Apple as.
They where the first to ship computer’s with an PCI-E expansion slot on there motherboard even do they had good onboard AGP graphic on the motherboard. Witch was a rarity about two , three years ago on lower end system.
I just hope that the end result will be that they keep Acer cool design but integrate Gateway hardware stability on the low end Acer.
Why the hell is this modded down? I’m pretty sure that “I don’t like person X and his other posts” is not one of the valid reasons for modding down.
Edited 2007-08-28 05:02
Then mod it back up — I did.
http://www.crn.com/hardware/25600121
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1548151,00.asp
http://www.geek.com/gateway-acquires-emachines/
One other thing that Gatweway was a first at was to offer refurbished computer’s to general user’s , they started it in partnership with some vendor.
The first, a machine with a PII 266MHz and 32MB RAM, running Win95; got it around 1997. The second was an 800-850MHz PIII, which I don’t remember much else about since I didn’t have it for long before I traded it in for my current machine. I don’t really remember much about these two older systems, other than that they worked and Gateway’s support was good. Oh, and I upgraded the oldest one out the ass.
The current system has had a couple problems; right after receiving it, I noticed it had some ATi graphics chip. This was quickly fixed, as Gateway sent an nVidia GeForce256 and I sent the ATi back. But the biggest problem is the lack of memory, and the type of memory. It came with only 128MB (2 64-bit chips) of RAM, which I quickly upgraded to still “only” 256MB (two more 64MB chips). To this day, the system runs as good as ever… although some programs are showing its age (especially lack of memory).
Not sure that it’s worth bringing this machine up to 1 gig or not… it would likely last at least five to ten years longer… and it’s still ticking (though somewhat disappointing) with only 256. Runs just about any Linux distro I throw at it quite well, in fact better than XP in most cases (XP now takes third place in my multi-boot system, Zenwalk being my primary OS).
I’m not sure how Gateway is these days, since I haven’t bought anything from them in a while, but hopefully the buyout works out good. Don’t have any experience with Acer computers, and the buyout seems quite unsettling, so I may not even get another Gateway. Plus, with my recent interest in alternate OSes, and Dell starting to sell Ubuntu computers (without Windows), I may get a Dell next time. Or, a Mac.
Edited 2007-08-28 00:15