Posted on 08/27/2007 10:07:25 PM PDT by paudio
Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all of Gateway's outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government approval, Acer said in a statement. Gateway's shares ended at $1.21 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.
"This is the biggest acquisition in Acer's 30 year history," said J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman, speaking at a news conference in Taipei.
"After this acquisition, we are solidly number three in the global PC market," Wang said.
Acer's acquisition deal with Gateway also derails rival Lenovo Group's plans to acquire Packard Bell.
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
‘... personal cash machine...’
well, DUH. That is why someone decides to start a business. Start it, build it up, and then around retirement time, sell it and hope to end up with a few mil (after taxes) in your retirement account. Then go sailing.
Too bad they don’t teach that in college.
This “free trade” thing sure is working well for America.
When Lee was recruiting Nathaniel Borenstein, he offered to meet him for dinner. When Nathaniel arrived, he was escorted to the table. Lee asked if it was OK if Peter Frampton joined them for dinner. Lee was Peter's agent at the time. He was also Matthew Broderick's agent. It was common to have some of Lee's clients wander through. The producer for Dale Plant was a regular employee. He used his Hollywood music award trophy as a tie rack on his desk. The guy collapsed in the parking lot one morning. Too much alcohol and who knows what. We even had Crosby Loggins (Kenny Loggins's son) working on our phone bank. It was an odd place to work.
The place certainly had a typical 90s "party" atmosphere. It was a well financed startup. Working daily with Marshall Rose and Nathaniel Borenstein was really the highlight for me. The rest of it was window dressing and wretchedly long hours. I left the company and walked away from 38,000 options because the thousands of lines of code that I had to produce daily caused repetitive stress injuries to my hands, wrists and arms. The money would have been cold comfort next to the stinging tendons running through my hands and wrists. It was so bad that I was dropping glasses of water, unable to rotate a door knob and having serious problems shifting my car. The injuries didn't go away when I left, but my daily work responsibilities have been reduced enough to keep the RSI pain at bay. In the final analysis, the salary bump from working at FVHI is paying long term dividends that far exceed what I lost by walking away from the stock options.
A few of my fellow employees decided to "tough it out". One succumbed to MS as the stress triggered an "attack" that took her life. The lady who did our database work took over the tasks from the one with MS. She developed RSI problems so bad that she lost feeling in both hands. Many of us ended up at a doctor's office to treat the RSI problems. The company covered those costs (financial), but for many of us the treatment came too late. C'est la vie.
Yep, that was a bad move. A former giant goes out with a whimper.
Packard Bell is still around?
Tandon builds tape drives. Tandem builds "fault tolerant" systems. When I was still at PacBell, we considered acquiring Tandem. It would have been a valuable addition to keep the IT shops up with fault tolerant systems. Tandem was excited about the new "non-stop UNIX". A demo was arranged at the San Ramon office. I couldn't attend due to deadlines, but my cohort in crime David St Pierre did attend. Tandem set up the machine and shortly thereafter the "non stop UNIX" stopped. It was down all day. It never ran while anyone of importance was present to see it. Suffice to say that we didn't proceed with the acquisition plans.
>>Not IBM. IBM’s laptop business.
Desktops, too.
I bought an Acer a little over a year ago.
The worst combined machine / customer service I've ever experienced in the electronic marketplace.
Over a period of several months the machine was packed and shipped to Texas from PA four different times without resolve.
. Acer refused to replace the machine but I don't think it would have mattered. I think they're just junk. Never did work right.
Almost funny thing is they have a website they direct you to that's named: fixmyacer.com
They'll fix your acer alright if you're silly enough to buy one.
It feels so good to finally get a good rant in on Acer.
They didn’t make any desktops at that time did they?
DEC deserved it.
Thanks for the correction. You're right. Actually, a company that I was doing contract work for had a pair of the Tandems installed at their "hot site" for the very reason you mentioned... "Non-stop" computing. A terrific idea. However, not even the Compaq guys (former Tandem guys) could get the things to run reliably. One thing I remember was that the cache battery backups used D-cell alkaline batteries...
It was a really expensive disaster for a very large financial institution.
Mark
Gateway had the right idea (as Apple later proved). A retail store where customers can talk to a person who was an expert on PC’s rather than what you find at best buy, a floater from the digital camera or appliance section, was badly needed. BUt their execution on that idea was awful!
Does anybody here actually own an Acer computer? If so is it any good?
IBM? Sure they did.
I wonder how much that decision played into the decline and sell off of the company.
Not much at all. What ruined Gateway was when Ted Waite stepped aside and brought in outside executives to run his company. He left to spend more time with his family. The company went south almost immediately.
Ted jumped back in to try to save his company, but it was too late.
‘... personal cash machine...’well, DUH. That is why someone decides to start a business. Start it, build it up, and then around retirement time, sell it and hope to end up with a few mil (after taxes) in your retirement account. Then go sailing.
Too bad they don’t teach that in college.
If you think that the principal reason somebody builds a business and goes public with it is simply so that he can sell billions of dollars worth of his stock to investors/suckers while the company's stock price (and hence public value) steadily declines over a period of years, your concept of capitalism is askew.
See rant / post 28 above.
My mistake.
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