Ponytail Sweepstakes: Ted Waitt, Gateway

I've gotten a few emails based on yesterday's post about Jonathan Schwartz. It has been brought to my attention that Gateway founder and ex-CEO Ted Waitt was ponytailed for much (or all) of his tenure at Gateway:



There's a great quote on Waitt in a recent Fortune article, that foreshadows Sun's challenge:

"But while Waitt, the ponytailed visionary, was looking toward the future, boring old Michael Dell was obsessing over efficiency, thinking about how quickly a PC could be assembled rather than how fast it ran. As it turned out, execution was everything."

The ability of the Internet to quickly and easily answer idle historical questions such as "what was the market cap of Gateway during Waitt's tenure" is still limited, but a quick scan of the stock price suggests that it may have been as high as $28 billion circa 2000. This would significantly eclipse Sun's current $17B number under Schwartz.

The race is on, Jonathan!