Gateway’s gone, Dell’s next, who’ll be en vogue tomorrow?

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. It wasn’t so long ago that Gateway was considered en vogue among Windows users, praised for their retail stores and their cow-spotted boxes and…I guess that was about it. Never really understood why Gateway was so popular among all those makers of identical Windows PCs, and I predicted that eventually they’d go by the wayside. Although that actually happened awhile ago, today it became official: Gateway has been swallowed by Acer (ouch, the indignity) for $710 million (double ouch, that’s less than a billion dollars!).

Here’s the rub: back when Gateway was all the rage I said that they would eventually fall, and at the time no one believed me. Well, they fell. And before that, way back when Compaq was all the rage I said they’d eventually fall too. And they did. At least Compaq got swallowed out of existence for a less embarrassing dollar amount than Gateway did, but nonetheless they’re both about to exist in name only. Never relevant in the first place, never offering anything that you couldn’t get from any generic whitebox PC, no one really missed them when they went plop.

So why is it that no one wants to hear it when I say that Dell is the next to fall?

Not only is Dell’s fall from grace coming, it’s practically guaranteed. You see, the Windows-using public doesn’t just cycle through PC brand names for the heck of it. No, there’s a method to their madness. A fatally flawed method, but a method nonetheless. You see, most Windows users have yet to figure out that Microsoft, and not whatever brand name happens to be on the side of their Windows PC, is to blame for everything that’s wrong with the Windows platform. And so everyone bought Compaq, and then wrongly blamed Compaq for the crappiness of Windows. So then everyone started buying Gateway as an alternative, and when everyone wrongly blamed Gateway for the crappiness of Windows, Dell became the next in line. Dell has held the title for a bit longer than one might have expected, and to be honest I think some of that has come from the fact that some Windows users are in fact figuring out that blaming the hardware maker does nothing to make Windows less crappy, making them slower to switch away from Dell and on to the next maker of PCs running crappy Windows.

But Dell’s fall is coming. And while the Windows-using public’s slow awakening to the fact that Windows is actually what’s wrong with PCs would seem to benefit Dell for now, it’s bad news for PC makers in general. Because once they figure out that getting rid of Windows is the only way to get rid of the Windows experience, there’s only one thing left for them to do. And much to the chagrin of some of my geek friends, that doesn’t mean they’re moving to Linux.

Could it be that when Dell falls, it’ll give way not to yet another PC boxmaker, but instead pass the torch directly onto Apple? Or do we have to go through one more PC maker going in and out of vogue before the Windows-using public really truly starts to get that Microsoft — not Gateway, not Compaq, not Dell — but Microsoft is what’s wrong with their computing experience?

Gateway’s demise gets the headlines today. But if you want to follow the real story, take a look at this this chart for an idea of which computer maker just might be next to top the charts. Just a thought.