But if they didn't want to play, then fine, they could hit the road. More than that, the company's resellers had forfeited their birthright by doing a consistently half-baked job selling NEC computers into the corporate world. Sony is also in the process of broadening its distribution, which until now has relied on mass merchandisers to sell its PCs. The company, which entered the U.S. computer market about a year ago, is shipping about 60,000 units each month, according to sources. By next year, Sony expects mail-order to comprise about 25 percent of its business.
Copycats are likely to follow.
The buzz on the show floor at the recently concluded PC Expo had both Hitachi and Toshiba following in Sony's footsteps. It's still unclear how ALR's resellers are going to react to the news, though I'm not sure whether that's going to make much difference to Gateway. ALR's resellers haven't exactly set the world on fire. Despite a reputation for building fast machines, ALR remains one of the computer industry's minor players. Gateway has a genius for marketing, and the ALR resellers may actually get a lift by being linked with the industry's second largest mail-order manufacturer.