TED WAITT

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.

You can get business with price, but you have to have service to keep it.

We like being an independent company. We do not need to merge or do anything different.

We want a Gateway to be the last computer our clients will ever buy.

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?

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.

You don't know the impact of Windows XP. You don't know what the economic impact is going to be.

We never put any limitations on what Gateway could be. We had big dreams, big goals.

Our biggest risk is ourselves.

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.

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.

I mean, you don't get a chance to buy a company like Gateway, you know, at or near book value very often.

To me, the consumer-electronics business feels a lot like the PC business in the late 1980s. It's an inefficient market.

Anything that helps consumers get more for their money is fine by us.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.

Both Gateway and I are products of Sioux City.

I'll end up living where I feel is the best place to raise my kids.

The first thing I got was a jet. And it's the last thing I'd get rid of if I go bankrupt.

We spend as much time looking at companies that are smaller than we are as we do at those that are bigger.

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.

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.

We were unknown before, and that was an advantage. Nobody knew who we were, so we snuck up on the competition.

Who is my biggest competitor? AOL, Microsoft, and AT&TAtHome.

I didn't have the patience to wait to take a degree before starting work, because I wanted to run my own business.

The complexity increases exponentially when you try and combine two companies that both need to be restructured in their own right.