How truly sad. Gateway's fall from the top 5 had absolutely nothing to do with Amiga, not even the "curse". Their whole fall started when Ted fired Tom as his right hand man (the guy who was gung ho on the Amiga in the first place) and hired that rattly little bean counter of a wanna-b CEO (Jeff Weitzen). There were so many huge budget cuts and reorganizations while trying to improve ideas and technology that ended up to be things noone wanted... "services".
Did you know that for $250 bucks a Gateway tech will come out to your house and move all of your data from your old computer to your new computer? Yeah, sounds good for the non techies don't it? Here's the limitations: No applications, only on usb networks, all files that will be transferred must reside in 1 folder, the size can not excede 2GB. Hell, for 25 bucks I would do this for anyone and they want ten times the amount? Something is wrong with that. Who's idea was that you say, well none other than Jeff Weitzen... the bean counter.
When Gateway decided to rebrand from Gateway2000 to just plain Gateway, they decided to retrain every single employee on a completely new extremely buggy customer database system. The training cost 17.5 million dollars which they could have just renewed their contract with the maintainers of the old customer database system for 10,000 a year. Same person made that decision.
Jim Collas was considered a mover and a shaker only because he was pissed off at how they (the executive board of directors) were treating Jeff Schindler. He wasn't going to take the offer unless the bean counter's board of directors were going to back off and let him do his thing. Jeff actually had some damn good plans but since most of them didn't take Gateway into direct consideration they were all shot down but one, which sucked. Don't knock Jeff, he did more for the Amiga than Collas did, only it was inside work rather than visible by the masses.
Why did Collas leave, sorry, that one remains a closed topic due to a personal request from JC. Jeff Weitzen had nothing to do with JC's decision though.
What ever happened to the "PEA" (portable email assistant) that used the new ubber lightweight OS they had recently acquired? Why was Jeff so hung up on BlueTooth technology in his ideas for the future Amiga? Why did Jeff Weitzen agree to allow Amiga Inc to contract Pentagram to design concept cases, and why did they look into designing matching PDAs?
You know, a ton of questions remain unanswered and forever lost from that era in Amigadom, but it was probably one of the best times to see the inside happenings of Gateway. After Jeff Weitzen's idea of "noone wants standard hardware" and "let them eat services" stance on business practices for 3 years with Gateway, Teddy boy came back and booted Jeff Weitzen to the curb where he belongs. Interesting note: where is Jeff Weitzen today?
Anyway, I'll leave it open from there.
:pint:
