May 2004 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 15, 2004

One of the joys of being interested in business news is seeing companies succeed, grow and prosper.

Conversely, watching a company die is the saddest of events, especially since it happens in "journalism time," which means over the course of months or years.

I've been feeling the pain of watching a computer company die of late, and all I can feel is sadness for the company, its workers — present, former and soon-to-be-former — and those who invested in the company's stock.

Gateway seemed to be the kind of company that would live forever. It was more than a computer company, in my view, but an attitude. Sure, it sold computers and sought to make a profit, like all good companies must do, but it was something else that attracted me to it as a customer.

Back in the early 1990s, it was called Gateway 2000, a forward-looking name when the millennium was years away. Its ads featured something you'd hardly associate with fast computing machines: cows. Its founder and CEO, Ted Waitt, appeared in the magazine advertisements looking less like a businessman and more like someone who founded his company in a barn, which is where Gateway 2000 was born.

The ads were clever and creative, such as the one showing Waitt riding a cow at a race track. "You have a friend in the business," the ads said, and even someone as cynical as me believed it.

I finally broke down and bought a Gateway PC in late 1992. Back then, there was no Web ordering. I picked up the phone, dialed the 800 number and talked to a fellow who typed my order into a computer. Soon I had a number and an estimated delivery date, which was sometime after the beginning of 1993.

Gateway was booming then, and was having a hard time keeping up with the orders flowing in. I was willing to wait.

Weeks passed. Then, on Christmas Eve 1992, the UPS person rang the bell. There were three big cow-spotted boxes for me. What a Christmas gift! I set up and started the computer before leaving for work at the post office that day.

More computers followed, all Gateways, and all very satisfying.

But the company was changing, and not for the better. At its peak, Gateway had 25,000 employees. After the most recently announced round of layoffs, it will have 2,000. Beyond that, who knows?

I'm writing this at home on a Gateway computer (the 2000 was dropped after the millennium). It came in a cow-spotted box, but the cows in the print ads were put out to pasture a few years ago.

Still, it's a great computer that performs well, and I like it, as I like the other three Gateway computers two desktops and a laptop — in my little home office, and the one in the garage.

But I will miss Gateway's passing, if that ever happens. I hope that it'll be around when it's time to buy my next computer. If not, though, I can always turn on one of the old machines and remember Gateway's glory days.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 8, 2004

Shortly after I moved to the West Palm Beach area in 1986, I was walking through a bookstore and drifted to the travel book section.

Just out of curiosity, I opened a travel guide to Florida and turned to the page that described the Palm Beach area. It gushed about all the wonders of Palm Beach, the ritzy stores, the exclusivity of the island and the beaches.

But about West Palm Beach, the guide was terse and to the point.

I'm paraphrasing here, but the book described West Palm Beach as an industrial city with nothing to interest the discriminating traveler.

I was crushed. To me, it was my new home, and there were plenty of interesting things to do. But I guess it was true that at that time, if you were one of "the beautiful people," West Palm Beach had very little to offer except a few airport runways and some roads the limo would take you over on the way to "the island."

West Palm Beach was someplace you drove through with the doors locked and the windows rolled up — at high speed — to cross "the moat" and return to civilization on Palm Beach.

I'm happy to say that things have changed, at least, according to The New York Times, which recently reported that West Palm Beach has suddenly become "cool." It was once the home of the servants and builders of Palm Beach, but now the wealthy and well-connected are discovering that there is life — and fun — to be found on what the story described as "the wrong side of the Intracoastal."

Suddenly, the ugly duckling of a city that no one wanted to admit being a part of is a pretty flamingo, with exciting things happening. Before I moved to Vero Beach in the summer of 2001, I saw the changes finally taking place.

CityPlace, which had opened in 2000 after almost 15 years of yakking about downtown redevelopment, was actually fun, even if parking was and still is an ordeal. SunFest, which started while the CityPlace area was still reminiscent of Berlin in 1945, was a festival that brought people together to celebrate music and art.

There were even dreams, before the dot-com meltdown, of becoming a sort of southeastern Silicon Valley. The arrival of Scripps Research Institute still could make the city — or its county, at least — a center of research.

The memories have faded of Palm Beach's notorious "Au Bar" and the William Kennedy Smith trial, which seemed to be the first and only time most people heard of West Palm Beach. Now, new roads and bridges are everywhere. Who needs the stuffy "island" when there is so much to do on the mainland?

Of course, all that growth and "cool" has come with a price. Traffic and congestion are beyond comprehension. Small wonder that people are looking to the north — to our area, even — for a place that's comparatively bucolic.

Maybe West Palm Beach is Vero Beach's worst nightmare, but we can hope to avoid the worst of West Palm, appropriate the best for our city and someday maybe we'll be cool, though without the crowds.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( vincent.safuto@scripps.com).


--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 1, 2004

News item from Reuters: A Romanian soccer coach, frustrated at his team's losses, recently threatened the squad with an awful fate: a classical music concert.

Apparently, for young athletes raised on the pile-driving beat of hip-hop, attending the philharmonic is the newest disciplinary method.

As someone who enjoys classical music, I find it frustrating that anyone would consider using it in such an undignified way. I discovered such music when I was in the Marines, and rediscovered it when I began attending college. I find the works of the great masters inspiring, instructive and entertaining.

Anyone who can play one of those instruments in the orchestra is a true artist, in my view, and my music collection includes the works of Bach and Handel (who actually are from the baroque era), Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

True, my collection also includes The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and other rock groups, but that's for when I'm in the mood to rock out.

Using classical music as a punishment is counterproductive and may leave those being "punished" with a lifelong resentment toward the music, the folks who make it and the people who listen to it.

I remember once reading years ago about a convenience store owner who wanted to get rid of the people who were hanging around in the parking lot of his store and causing trouble. So he put up speakers and started having classical music blare out of them.

Well, it worked, and the people left. The store owner's next problem was finding a way to get the classical music fans to stop hanging out at the store's parking lot.

Great music can sprout in the most unlikely places. One of my good friends from my former life in the Postal Service turned out to be a piano teacher. How we became aware of each other was amazing.

I would listen to classical music while I did my job, which was removing rubber bands from letter bundles. He walked by and saw the tapes one day, but thought I was just trying to make fun of him. So in the locker room, he asked me to whistle Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

When I passed the test, he realized that I was interested in the music and revealed that he was also a big fan.

I visited his house one day when he was holding a garage sale, and was stunned. He had four pianos and a record collection that could have filled a classical music radio station. I bought a number of the records he was selling, and have them to this day.

Music from the baroque or classical era may not have the pounding beat that rattles nearby windows or the poetic meaning of whatever they're shouting about on those rap records, but beneath the surface is the full and awesome sweep of human hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Used as a punishment, though, such music is cheapened. If your team isn't winning, then practice playing soccer, coach.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


--------