Gateway's reorg killed off all their differentiating factors- which seem to have been mostly Amiga, AOLTV, and the whole offagainonagain relationship with the entertainment PC concept- at a moment when those identities suddenly became important.
Think about it; when you write about 'Wintel' suppliers, a list like "Dell/Gateway/Compaq" three years ago, and "Gateway/Dell/Zeos" or whatever a few years before that, has since been abbreviated to "Dell." Ignoring the realities of business that made the changes seem a good idea to management, consider what made *anyone* choose a Gateway in the past 5 years.
The associations left rattling in my head from that era are "Lower cost (than Dell)," "Association with gaming (Price/Performance)," and "Biggest name to sell Athlons." Over that time period, commoditization has steamrolled over the price and processor aspects, while DIY has become ridiculously easy (and 'serious' gamers no longer give any of the big movers cred, preferring boutique shops like Alienware).
As such, for the average peon, there's just no real reason left to consider Gateway. Their LCD all-in-one was a decent effort, but an eMachine from Best Buy has almost the same appeal. Not many people have reason to walk into a Gateway Store (there's no draw, and the Radio-Shack-like salespitching keeps them from becoming impromptu landmarks*), and no one ever got fired for ordering a Dell.
Just about all the major box-pushers have ignored the chance to leverage home networking; were the MCC to have included HomePNA, as was specced at one point, it could've seen a few sales as an Audiotron-like peripheral; similar thought put into the AOL appliance might've made its own small splash. ("So I can put the intarweb on my TV while the kids surf? Wow!")
For those few left buying Gateways, there's no sense of having bought into anything. Apple has their ideology thing going; Dell has their... Dellness, with the ever-growing web of products and services around them; HP has sort of sidled into a Smith-Corona position (remember all the word processing 'appliances' of a decade or two ago?) with their emphasis on Things that Sell Printer Ink; IBM at least makes you look really l33t.** It's just a box you could've had from Circuit City, but for $200 more.***
Gateway could've leveraged it all into something- peripherals and services for the consumer that would've meant more revenue (and provided reason for anyone to waste 10 minutes in a Gateway store- hey, they got 5 minutes out of me at The Wiz, back in the day of the original Dimension) ... meanwhile, as the MCC really *was* little more than a Transmeta + All-In-Wonder layout, they could've knocked a few unnecessary components off and cut a deal with Citrix to stay relevent in the corporate space.
The "Amiga Curse" bit them only in so far as it's always implied ditching R&D and general acts of brand destruction- and really, you don't bother picking up Amiga in the first place unless something's a bit off-kilter to begin with. (In Gateway's case, the failure to spin the Dimension concept into marketability any other way... and HP seems to have run with the ball as of Media Center Edition.)
*I'm in no way representative, but Apple Stores seem to have become the landmark of choice on recent mall expeditions. Everyone can recognize the logo and the THX-1138 lighting, and the coffee-bar layout *does* mean you can kill 20 minutes in one if you need to, slowly being won over by all the shiny plastic trinkets (and locking up the demo units trying to run System Profiler, presumably fixed as of Jaguar
), as opposed to hard-sell establishments like Radio Shack, Gateway, and half of anything else you might find in a US shopping center.
**Somehow, I've ended up not only with an old dual-P2 Intellistation- the best price/performance I could eke out of the surplus market- but a black IBM keyboard to match. It's a pretty boring black minitower, but for some reason, visitors find it more gawkworthy than even my old (also black) fulltower and its
Dvortyboard and Trackman FX. Go figure- Maybe it's the LED in the $10 Intellimouse what does it.
***Computers *are* becoming more like cars, Apple having managed to spin up the whole representation-of-personality thing among the consumer masses, and awareness of upgrade cycles having broke through to even the least technical of minds. Gateway's been stuck with the GM-of-a-few-years-ago card- too diversified, with no clear vision and an overly staid marketing model.
