Meanwhile, evidently it's still a lousy time to be any computer manufacturer whose name doesn't rhyme with "Snapple™." Okay, sure, Hewlett-Packard just posted better-than-expected results (and who are we to complain, since Apple's stock got a nice little boost from that bit of news?), but we'll call that the exception that proves the rule. After all, remember when Dell announced disappointing quarterly earnings last week, prompting an amusing little stock price plunge? Well, next in line to sashay down the Catwalk of Shame is Gateway, which did, in fact, post a profit-- its first in over three solid years, incidentally-- but painted a dire portrait of future earnings and consequently saw its stock plummet by 78 cents. That may not sound like much, but GTW was already so firmly in the toilet that a loss of 78 cents per share represents a whopping 20 percent drop. Oooooh, hurty.

Not that the news was all bad from Cow Country; according to the Wall Street Journal, Gateway actually reported "booming sales of personal computers." Unfortunately, the company also reported a terrifying increase in inventory levels, massive share dilution, and skyrocketing accounts receivable-- and indicated far less rosiness moving forward due to those pesky "pricing and component-cost pressures" that are the personal bugbears of all computer manufacturers whose strategy hinges largely on buying the cheapest parts available, bolting them together, and selling them with razor-thin margins in hopes of beating competitors on price and making up the difference in volume. Add in the fact that most of Gateway's $17 million quarterly profit came in the form of a $15 million settlement from Microsoft (most of which it can only spend on marketing, apparently), and Gateway's long-awaited return to profitability seems like little more than a freak accident of circumstance. And Wall Street knows it.

If you're somehow surprised by this turn of events, you clearly haven't been paying much attention to Gateway in recent years. Then again, who has? This is a company that did so poorly, it was forced to amputate all foreign offices, had to shut down its entire chain of retail stores, tried to keep afloat by selling cheap TV sets, thought it would be good for its image and brand to launch an extensive marketing campaign dedicated to informing the buying public that it was a company run by a talking cow, and finally only survived by more or less getting bought out by, of all entities, eMachines. You know you're in trouble when your savior is a company made famous by shipping crappy little sub-$400 Wintels slapped together from potato scrapings and peat moss. Indeed, forget the days of yore when only Apple was fit to wear the "beleaguered" mantle; if anything these days, Gateway is the Uberbeleaguered.

Do we seem a little too happy about all that? Guilty as charged. Honestly, we don't actually have anything personal against Gateway itself, but we can't help rejoicing in its misery. See, back in the late '90s, there was a sad little man who, despite being a rabid Wintel fan, actually read AtAT on a regular basis. Why? Apparently just so he could send us hate mail practically every single day, gloating over every misstep Apple made (real or imagined) and insisting over and over again that Apple would soon go out of business and Gateway would rule the roost. So are we pleased that Apple is currently worth over 32 times Gateway's market cap?

Yes. Yes we are. Ahhhh, it's good to be petty...