Everex

» see everex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Everex was founded in Fremont in 1983 by Steve Hui and two colleagues, and it grew the way hardware companies grew in that decade, which is to say by selling whatever the industry was short of that year. First a hard drive in 1984. Then tape backup, graphics boards, memory, modems and network cards. By 1988 it had half the world market in tape backup, which is a share almost no component company ever holds.

The computers came alongside. Everex was building IBM AT compatibles under other people's labels by 1985, and in 1986 it launched the STEP line under its own, first with 286 chips and then 386s. It went public on NASDAQ in 1987 as EVRX. It shipped a UNIX called ESIX and it shipped file servers. In 1990 revenue passed 436 million dollars and the headcount passed 2,200. That is the top of the curve and nothing after it goes up.

The clone market turned on itself in the early nineties and Everex was on the wrong side of it. A merger with Northgate was discussed in 1992 and fell apart. On 5 January 1993 the company filed for bankruptcy protection, then sold ESIX to the James River Group for 210,000 dollars and its storage division to Exabyte for 5.5 million. What was left got bought by the Formosa Plastics Group, which also owned First International Computer, the largest motherboard manufacturer in the world at the time.

By the time I was buying machines with my own money, Turkey did not really have a brand PC market for anyone like me. You bought parts and put them together yourself, then you wrote the list into your forum signature so it would sit under every post you made. That was the culture on the Turkish hardware boards and it was not unusual, it was the default. Everex's whole business was the exact opposite of it: the finished box at the lowest achievable price, sitting on a shelf in a store. That model needs a Walmart, and there was no Walmart.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The second Everex, the one owned from Taiwan, was a different company wearing the same word. It stopped inventing and started assembling, and it competed on one number. Its most interesting failure of that period was the FreeStyle in 1998, the first PDA to run Windows CE, which the company abandoned inside the same year.

This is the shape of most survivors of the clone wars. The brand keeps going because a brand is cheap to keep and expensive to build, and the thing behind it is now a purchase order sent to a factory that also builds for four other names. Everex kept a Fremont address and a logo. What it had stopped having was a reason for you to pick it.

~ the green years ~

Then in 2007 it found an angle. Everex started selling low power machines that used VIA processors and shipped with Linux instead of Windows, and it marketed them as green rather than as cheap, which was clever because they were also cheap. The Impact GC3502 came out in July 2007 at 298 dollars. In November the gPC went into Walmart at 199, running gOS, a Google flavored Ubuntu remix that put Gmail and YouTube in the dock.

The first run of ten thousand sold out in about a week and the tech press decided something had changed. It had not. In March 2008 Walmart pulled the gPC out of its physical stores and kept it online only, and a spokesman explained that this really was not what their customers were looking for. Everex followed with the CloudBook in February 2008, the second netbook on the market after the Eee PC, and it took minutes to load a program off its 4,200 rpm drive. Reviewers also found dialog boxes that rendered below the bottom edge of the screen.

~ what got buried with it ~

NewMarket Technology announced it was acquiring Everex in June 2008, citing about 60 million dollars of 2007 revenue. Within a year that was academic. First International Computer closed the US subsidiary in July 2009 and everex.com put up a notice saying the company was no longer in business and that operations had closed. It added that anything already sent in for repair would be finished and returned. That last clause is the most dignified sentence any dead PC company has written.

The design outlived the brand by a few months. The CloudBook chassis kept shipping under other names as a Nanobook, and Sylvania sold a version of it too. That is what a hardware company leaves when it dies with no patents worth fighting over and no software anyone loved: a plastic shell that other people keep putting their sticker on.

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