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Poway, CA - Embattled PC maker Gateway will soon phase out its existing
family of products to make way for a so-called “Retr0” line
of computers and peripherals, the company announced today.
 The
new line will be the centerpiece of an aggressive marketing campaign
with the themes, “Yesterday’s Technology Today” and “Good
Old-Fashioned Computers.” Print and TV ads will eschew the familiar
cows in favor of “Sol,” a software engineer who left the
industry in the late 80s to live in a remote mountain cabin and develop “the
ultimate app.” In the ads, Sol rejoins modern society with the
program saved on a stack of 5 ¼” floppies, only to discover
that his program missed the boat by nearly twenty years. Enter Gateway,
with its Retr0 line, to save not only Sol’s day, but others
of his ilk. The fame and recognition he dreamt of is ultimately realized,
as he becomes the world’s leading authority on Gateway Retr0.
“Our research showed us that there was a small but fast-growing
customer base who wasn’t interested in marketing fluff like
performance, reliability and innovation,” said CEO Ted Waitt. “We
saw an opportunity to take advantage of this market by offering products
that, while new in a sense, represent a huge step backward into the
heyday of PCs. We want our customers to feel the same excitement
buying a product in the Retr0 line as they did when buying their
first-ever PC.”
The flagship entry in the Retr0 sub-brand will be the “Ol’ 82,” a
PC with a Motorola 6510 processor at 1 MHz, 64 KB of RAM, a removable
160K floppy disk drive, and dazzling 16-color graphics. Retail pricing
has been “rolled back to 1982,” and will start at $1,299.
It will effectively end at $1,299, as well, since there are no upgrade
options, but available accessories include the Gateway- branded “Whine
Country” 970XJS dot-matrix printer ($299), the “Lead Zep” 40-column
color monitor ($399) and the “S’ Wayback” game bundle
featuring the popular titles Seven Cities of Gold, Beamrider and
Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One.
Shocked by the announcement, industry pundits warn of serious supply
issues with the Retr0 line. Processors such as the 6510, for example,
would force the re-opening of fabs that have been unoccupied since
the Reagan administration. “I can’t begin to imagine what
they’re thinking,” said TBR analyst Brooks Gray. “With
those specs, I’m not sure it could handle a grocery list, let
alone anything with a modern GUI like users are accustomed to.”
Others, however, were heartened by the announcement. Bruce Symmons,
a 43-year-old banker, has often been frustrated by the complexity
of modern PCs and operating systems. “You can keep your Excel-this
and your Word-that,” he says. “Give me VisiCalc and WordStar
any day. It was friggin’ magic what I could do with those.”
Despite Gateway’s dwindling market share and still-fresh changes
to its existing product line and strategy, Waitt defends the Retr0
strategy with characteristic vigor. “Back in the day, technology
moved at lightning speed. As soon as you bought something, man, it
was obsolete. All that’s changed now, but it’s boring,” he
says. “Our new strategy is simple: change strategies as fast
as technology used to change when the strategy was to change as fast
as technology changed, and support that by offering products that
have endured those changes but without changing the technology for
technology’s sake.”
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