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When I look back through the 1980s and 1990s, those were some of the funniest experiences I had and, sometimes, some of the most difficult.
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.
It's not a matter of being first, it's being there at the right time, being first in volume to market, and knowing what trends to stay away from.
We think the right categorization for digital devices is something you hold in your hand, a mobile-type product, and something you sit two feet away from.
The entertainment industry always chooses to fight things out through the courts and legislation. Technology people always think there's a business solution.
Don't get me wrong; we have a great relationship with Intel going back over many, many years. But we're not a wholly-owned subsidiary. We can do our own thing.
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.
We've got tremendous equity in cow spots and in the name Gateway, so this isn't anything radical, but you'll see us getting more sophisticated in our marketing efforts.
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.
We compete with Dell and HP. Now, we are going to compete with Sony and Best Buy. Are we going to be like Best Buy? No. Are we going to be a small Dell? No. We are going to be uniquely Gateway.
There's a large risk to our society if a group of people doesn't have access to technology or even the desire to get on the Net and see what opportunities are out there. Technology can be a great equalizer.
I don't subscribe to the idea that everything moves to the network. Theoretically it's possible that everybody will use little hand-held devices to access the Internet, but I expect more of a hybrid environment.
People are looking for more than a faster and faster PC. It has to do what they want. Will it fill some void, add some value, deliver something that they can't do previously at a price that people are willing to pay for?
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?
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.