A cool $710 million later and you too can own the 3rd largest PC maker in the US. Acer is simply looking to increase it’s footprint here in the US and also prevent Lenovo from making yet another acquisition. What’s shocking is that they purchased the struggling PC maker. Gateway’s hay day has come and gone. I purchased a Gateway P60 (the Pentium 1 with 60MHz) when they were at the top of their game. It was a solid machine, but I only ran DOS, downloaded porn pics (no movies back then) over my 28.8kbps modem and played video games. I think Acer has made a mistake but then again if they can reorg things and institute some of their Korean business practices (aka fire some folks and cut costs) then they might find themselves in a position for success with the Gateway brand. Who knows if they’ll kill the ‘cow’ branding but the deal does include Gateway’s Emachine line of computers as well. Part of Acer’s move was to get right of first refusal on the Lenovo Packard Bell deal. I don’t know too much about that, but you can read more about it at Business Week.

The Acer brand is number 6 in the US. With the purchase of Gateway they now have combined machine sales of 18.6 million beating out Lenovo which boasts 16.6 million.