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I kind of became apolitical.
People confuse me with Gateway.
I'm not in favor of stealing music.
I don't want a mercenary management team.
We don't consider ourselves a PC company.
PCs will go the cell-phone subsidy route.
I definitely don't welcome takeover interests.
Both Gateway and I are products of Sioux City.
Who is my biggest competitor? AOL, Microsoft, and AT&TAtHome.
I'd be lying to you if I said I had not done some soul searching.
Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.
I've used soap dishes as ashtrays in the best hotels in the world.
We want a Gateway to be the last computer our clients will ever buy.
You know, growing up in the cattle business, I know a lot about cattle.
If Dell's going to be a fast follower, then we'll continue to innovate.
I don't see anybody pointing to desktop PCs as being a hot Christmas item.
The PC is going to become one key product in an ever-expanding array of products.
We never put any limitations on what Gateway could be. We had big dreams, big goals.
We hope to be a leader in the convergence of consumer electronics and communications.
We like being an independent company. We do not need to merge or do anything different.
Being a smaller, nimbler company is better for our customers, employees and shareholders.
The first thing I got was a jet. And it's the last thing I'd get rid of if I go bankrupt.
The PC is an important part of our business and will continue to be for a long, long time.
Companies that are closest to the customers are the ones who are going to lead the industry.
Technology people have as much interest in protecting patents as the entertainment industry.
If you buy a CD and want to put your favorite songs on one CD, you should be able to do that.
But - there's no point in aiming to be Number Two. You've got to have a plan-to-win attitude.
If all we wanted to do was to make money on PC hardware, that wouldn't be a good business model.
You don't know the impact of Windows XP. You don't know what the economic impact is going to be.
We started putting '2000' at the end of our name. That was in 1985, and 2000 seemed very futuristic.
From our perspective, there's been a price war in the PC industry since we opened for business in 1985.
I mean, you don't get a chance to buy a company like Gateway, you know, at or near book value very often.
We spend as much time looking at companies that are smaller than we are as we do at those that are bigger.
Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.
In 1992, we did $1.1 billion in revenues. In the first nine months of 1993, we did just under $1.2 billion.
The PC business is not about price, it's about value, or what you can give the customer for his or her money.
If any PC manufacturer has made money selling PCs retail in the last 10 years, I'd like to know who they are.
We were unknown before, and that was an advantage. Nobody knew who we were, so we snuck up on the competition.
Customers don't care about rivalries between corporations, they care about getting the best value for their money.
For any business that has an indirect model to move into the direct business is very difficult and very challenging.
I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father and five generations of people in my family do not make good employees.
Intel's a great company, and Microsoft is a great company. Everybody seems to do a lot better when there is competition.
To me, the consumer-electronics business feels a lot like the PC business in the late 1980s. It's an inefficient market.
When you fall short of your internal forecast, two things happen: Costs go up as a percentage of sales, and margins go down.
So many people got caught up in the excitement and the promise of the Internet that they kind of lost sight of their senses.
The Internet is the number one reason people buy PCs, and the number one use of PCs is on the Internet from our customer base.
The biggest challenge is adding the bureaucracy it takes to run the company without becoming fat, lazy, inflexible - bureaucratic.
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.
The complexity increases exponentially when you try and combine two companies that both need to be restructured in their own right.
I love Gateway, and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure the company can grow and prosper in this challenging environment.