The company needs to get beyond where (Inouye) has taken it. Gateway needs a visionary. He's an operations guy.

This is a company with real profits and a real brand recognition. It's also a new thing for Dell since they haven't bought a company and maintained it as a separate subsidiary before that I know of.

Intel is in a position to tip the balance on this one, and in fact seems likely to do so,

If I were inside Dell, I would be using Apple as the benchmark. Apple has totally wowed the computer world. They are the company to beat.

The faster the obsolescence, the better the deals on existing stuff.

These types of enterprise services are typically available only to large organizations. By offering this portfolio to its mid-market customers, Gateway is providing them with a class of services not normally within their reach. Working through partners, Gateway is able to deliver services tailored appropriately for its customer set.

Notebooks are roaring and taking over from desktops at a pretty fair clip.

The bad news is that it's hard to get to them, ... The good news is that they're not overexploited because they're hard to get to.

It's not as neat and clean as it might sound.

They have a huge cash flow that finances a whole city of people, and yet where you can grow from there is actually fairly limited. Microsoft's stock price isn't going anywhere, and in that environment, politics that were background noise rise to the foreground.