firewind@xroads.UUCP (Tom Parker) (03/11/90)
Howdy! I was wondering if I should post this message, but I think people might be helped by this. I work for a competitor of Gateway, and according to our sales department, we've been getting spillover business from Gateway. People would order from them and find out they can't deliver within a couple of weeks. This is on 386SX and 386 machines. Our company tries to ship withiin 48 hours of recieving an order in comparison but sometimes we have problems getting certain parts. Tape drives we normally special order for e xample. When I mean having trouble getting parts, there are two troubles. The first is distributor trouble. Since we special order tape drives that delays an order. Currently there is a shortage of 80386-25 chips, so that can cause delays in getting 80386-25 motherboards. We have gotten a few of them with 33mhz chips! There is currently a shortage of Conner 104MB hard drives. Our sales manager called Conner and found out they were on "emergency allocation" for their hard drives and that they were backordered 3000 units! We had temporarily switched to another brand of IDE drive until they start shipping again. These are examples of distributor trouble. Sometimes you can have trouble just buying the parts -- vendor trouble. [this is speculation] Gateway pretty much has the lowest prices out there, so it goes to figure that they're running on a real low margin. They may not have enough money to tie up in stock for an order. This'll cause problems getting parts -- the tape drives example from above except with motherboards. Anyway I hope this is informative. I don't intend to reveal who I'm working for because I think its wrong to say something negative about a competitor while mentioning who they can get the goods from. If a company can't ship within two weeks, or strings you along beyond that I feel that something might be wrong... Disclaimer: I'm speaking for myself and all of the above should be taken as my opinion only! -Tom -- \ / C r o s s r o a d s C o m m u n i c a t i o n s /\ (602) 941-2005 300|1200 Baud 24 hrs/day / \ hplabs!hp-sdd!crash!xroads!firewind
jackb@hpfinote.HP.COM (Jack Benzel) (03/14/90)
Gateway is indeed shipping! I ordered a 386/20 for my church in a tower case with 8MB RAM, a 160 MB ESDI disk, etc., on 2/14/90 and received the computer on 3/8/90. Everything worked right out of the box. I am very pleased with the computer and have sucessfully installed a CMS tape drive, a COMTROL Ultra/16 multiuser board, and SCO Xenix/386 over the past few days. I did have to make my own floppy interface cable as the one supllied was not long enough to accomidate the tape drive in the top bay with the 5.25 floppy immediately below it. I also called into technical support on Saturday, March 10, and spent 30 minutes on hold waiting for a technician and then finally hung up as I had better things to do. Jack Benzel jack_benzel@hpfcla.HP.COM