If you've got a pre-built PC today, it's probably sporting a brand name
like Acer, Dell, HP, or Lenovo.
But there used to be plenty of other challengers that just kind of disappeared.
So we're back with the second installment in our something part series, where are they now?
Looking at the desktop computer companies of yesteryear,
starting with one of the industry's oldest heavy hitters,
Tandy. Originally a leather company that got its start all the way back in 1919,
Tandy became successful enough over the next few decades to eventually buy Radio Shack in 1963,
paving the way for them to come out with the TRS-AD Model 1 in 1977.
The Model 1 was one of the very first home computers that was widely available on the market,
with Tandy ultimately selling over 100,000 of them,
catapulting the company to a whopping 60% share
of the microcomputer market. The TRS-AD wasn't IBM compatible though,
after all, the IBM PC hadn't been invented yet,
so the popularity of Tandy computers declined
after the IBM PC hit the scene. But the company did find a niche for itself,
making PC-compatibles, which proved quite popular for some time.
As the years went on though, cost-cutting by its competitors forced Tandy
to sell its computer business to AST,
which itself adopted a losing strategy of selling high-cost PCs when other companies
were trying to do it as cheaply as possible. AST was eventually bought by Samsung,
and then closed down, relegating Tandy to the dustbin of history.
Let's change gears then to one of the cost-cutting competitors, Compac,
which focused on making IBM-compatibles from early on in its history.
Their business model was to take IBM's systems
and then make them better in some way, like they did with the Compac portable in 1982,
and the Desk Pro in 1984, which wasn't as visually striking as the portable,
but was quite a bit faster than IBM's offerings at the time.
This kind of innovation made Compac a dominant force by the late 80s,
but it was forced to change its strategy to focus more on cost
as the PC industry was rapidly becoming based around building commodity machines
using inexpensive components produced elsewhere.
This led to Compac releasing the Presario line in 1993,
which quickly became a fixture at Big Box electronic stores.
Although this made Compac quite successful again through the late 1990s,
the company started to gain a reputation for unacceptably poor quality,
and they were shipping way too many of these hyper-commoditized PCs.
Combined with the fact that Compac was now being undercut by companies like Dell
that sold directly to customers instead of relying on retail middlemen
that sold at their own markup, the company was suddenly in deep trouble
and was eventually sold to HP in 2002.
The Compac brand lived on for a while though, as one of HP's budget brands
with the name getting sold again to an Argentinian company in 2015,
and then quietly disappearing altogether a few years later.
Next up is Gateway, another company that helped contribute to Compac's demise
through selling its PCs directly to consumers online,
over the phone, or even in its own retail stores.
Gateway's low cost and distinctive cow pattern boxes
made their computers very recognizable, and they even came out with the first all-in-one PC
from a major brand name that cost less than $1,000.
By 2004, Gateway had captured about one fourth
of the PC market in the US, but they missed a huge opportunity
because they were very late getting into the laptop market
at a time when a major shift towards portable computing was occurring.
Instead, Gateway tried to get into the business of consumer electronics like TVs,
but they didn't end up making much money off that venture, and combined with the fact that they weren't as aggressive
trying to sell their PCs to large businesses compared to Dell,
they were really struggling by the year 2007 when they were bought by Acer.
Today, Gateway is still around as a low-cost Acer brand
that can be found in some brick-and-mortar electronics stores.
A company that had a similar fate to Gateway was Packard Bell,
another mainstay on store shelves during the 1990s.
The company actually dates all the way back to 1933
and originally manufactured radios, getting into the computer business in 1957
when they began manufacturing specialized computers for science and industry,
and then into the home PC business in 1986
after a change in ownership. Packard Bell quickly made deals
with large department and big box stores, and thanks to a manufacturing process that emphasized speed,
they quickly flooded the market with product. By 1995, over half the PCs on sale at Sears,
yes, Sears sold PCs, were Packard Bells,
and their popularity was bolstered further by a shell program
similar to Microsoft Bob called Packard Bell Navigator, which dumbed down the interface for novice PC users,
of which there were, of course, many at the time. Remember, PCs were pretty new.
However, the company quickly gained a reputation for poor quality and corner cutting,
and also turned off consumers when they found out that they were using used parts in their machines
without properly disclosing the practice. The company was in enough trouble
that it merged with NEC the very next year,
but the brand never recovered from its poor reputation in the US,
and Packard Bell disappeared from the US market in 2000.
With that said, they didn't have the same public image problems in Europe
and other parts of the world where their PCs can still be found as an ace or sub-brand,
although they are becoming increasingly hard to find,
like a Tinder account that isn't trying to catfish you. So thanks for watching, guys.
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