We were unknown before, and that was an advantage. Nobody knew who we were, so we snuck up on the competition.
There are hundreds of competitors in the direct marketing of computers. We have been very successful because of quality, price, service and the way we treat the customer.
You have to have great products out at the right time. It's difficult to go with one foot on the gas and the other a little bit on the brake.
From our perspective, there's been a price war in the PC industry since we opened for business in 1985.
For a while there, companies were pushing technology on people and people were buying it. Now the consumer is really in the driver's seat. Now it's more of an overall solution: How can technology make your life better? How can it save you time?
Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.
We have to have a successful box business if we are going to go beyond the box.
The PC is an important part of our business and will continue to be for a long, long time.
You can get business with price, but you have to have service to keep it.
I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father and five generations of people in my family do not make good employees.
When Mike Hammond and I started Gateway 12 years ago on my father's cattle farm, we knew it could be big. We talked big. But there's no way we could have been prepared to go from less than $300 million in revenues to $5 billion in six years. You can't so much prepare for that kind of growth as sort of ride it and try to manage it.
Technology for technology's sake is not innovation. What we in the industry have to be concerned about is what products do, as opposed to what the processing power is.
I kind of became apolitical.
Let's face it, politics in this country is coin-operated. Does that really equate to a real democracy? It's very difficult to say.
But - there's no point in aiming to be Number Two. You've got to have a plan-to-win attitude.
Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.
Companies that are closest to the customers are the ones who are going to lead the industry.
You don't know the impact of Windows XP. You don't know what the economic impact is going to be.
If Dell's going to be a fast follower, then we'll continue to innovate.
Intel's a great company, and Microsoft is a great company. Everybody seems to do a lot better when there is competition.
