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

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

I was fascinated to see that if you knew what you were doing, you could sell a $3,000 computer system over the phone.

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

There are hundreds of competitors in the direct marketing of computers. We have been very successful because of quality, price, service and the way we treat the customer.

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.

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

It's not a matter of being first, it's being there at the right time, being first in volume to market, and knowing what trends to stay away from.

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

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