A gutsy move to salvage Gateway?
Take a good play from the Dell playbook – negotiate an exclusivity deal, not with Intel, but with AMD.
The deal is contingent on Gateway’s due diligence demonstrating AMD will be able to maintain performance superiority or parity with Intel over the next 2 or 3 years.
Terms of the deal:
Gateway converts entire line to AMD processors: desktops, servers, notebooks.
Gateway pays usual best price volume discounts in near-term to not further erode AMD’s ASP’s.
Gateway gets more favorable discounts long-term should AMD achieve the future goal of raising ASP’s.
Gateway gets right of first shipment for new processors in reasonable volume, including Hammer.
AMD supports Gateway sales team training to ensure a good understanding of AMD processors and associated chipsets.
AMD financially supports (we’re talking major contribution here) Gateway advertising resulting in an instantaneous, well-seasoned pro-AMD marketing department. The primary goal of the ad campaign will be to educate consumers that the highest performing processors are not necessarily the fastest clock-wise. (Some thoughts: Stress examples in industry: Alpha, Sun, Itanium <bg>. Print literature with benchmarks in bar graphs – e.g. 1.2 Athlon dual system smokes 1.7 GHz Xeon. Generate a new lay term to readily describe a processor’s performance other than Hz – e.g. Estimated iterations per second or IPS – and brand each system with it. Promote a performance satisfaction money-back guarantee. In the major public announcement introducing this new move, state one of the reasons for it is a major dissatisfaction with P4’s performance, despite its faster clock rate.)
If Gateway needs to cut costs, let those employees go who don’t feel committed to the AMD line of products.
Gateway benefits: 1) first to market with new processors, 2) instant, highly-recognizable, differentiation from competitors, 3) stable processor shipments, 4) AMD supported costs near-term.
AMD benefits: Over 30% market share.
If nothing else, would be interesting, no?
eCo |
