OBIT: Cow-Spotted Boxes
Today we mourn the passing of Cow-Spotted Boxes, the signature of Gateway computers. Gateway was recently purchased by Acer, a company with solid engineering but absolutely no trace of whimsy. Cow-Spotted Boxes turned cold hardware into warm smiles. It may be unusual for OOBE to stand for Outside-of-the-Box Experience, but for fanciful Gateway, the outside was often more fun than the inside.
Whimsy started early at Gateway, as the ponytailed founder set up shop in Sioux City, S.D., rather than in Silicon Valley. Obviously, the force of whimsy was strong in that one.
The now-famous Cow-Spotted Boxes may have been born of an accidental run of bad printing that ruined an early batch of shipping boxes, or they could have been created in a purposeful union. If a mistake, whimsy turned potential disaster into a billion-dollar branding bonanza. If on purpose, the entire notion may be even stranger.
Cow-Spotted Boxes may live on, but they’ll never be the same. The lifeblood of whimsy comes from upstarts in South Dakota, not deliberate executives in Taiwan. Serious people who are paying serious money for a company are usually too short on whimsy to take a chance on Cow-Spotted Boxes.
Send donations to the Northern South Dakota School of Whimsy.
-James Gaskin
