Top 45 Ted Waitt Quotes

If Dell’s going to be a fast follower, then we’ll continue to innovate.

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.

So many people got caught up in the excitement and the promise of the Internet that they kind of lost sight of their senses.

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

Being a smaller, nimbler company is better for our customers, employees and shareholders.

The PC is an important part of our business and will continue to be for a long, long time.

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

The Internet is the number one reason people buy PCs, and the number one use of PCs is on the Internet from our customer base.

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 know, growing up in the cattle business, I know a lot about cattle.

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.

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

If any PC manufacturer has made money selling PCs retail in the last 10 years, I’d like to know who they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

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

The entertainment industry always chooses to fight things out through the courts and legislation. Technology people always think there’s a business solution.

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?

If you buy a CD and want to put your favorite songs on one CD, you should be able to do that.

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

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.

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

The PC business is not about price, it’s about value, or what you can give the customer for his or her money.

I’ve used soap dishes as ashtrays in the best hotels in the world.

We don’t consider ourselves a PC company.

We hope to be a leader in the convergence of consumer electronics and communications.

Customers don’t care about rivalries between corporations, they care about getting the best value for their money.

People confuse me with Gateway.

But – there’s no point in aiming to be Number Two. You’ve got to have a plan-to-win attitude.

I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father and five generations of people in my family do not make good employees.

Both Gateway and I are products of Sioux City.

For any business that has an indirect model to move into the direct business is very difficult and very challenging.

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

If all we wanted to do was to make money on PC hardware, that wouldn’t be a good business model.

The PC is going to become one key product in an ever-expanding array of products.

Intel’s a great company, and Microsoft is a great company. Everybody seems to do a lot better when there is competition.

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?

In 1992, we did $1.1 billion in revenues. In the first nine months of 1993, we did just under $1.2 billion.

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