Micron Electronics

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

~ the obituary ~

Micron Electronics came into being in April 1995, when Micron Technology in Boise bought Zeos International out of Minneapolis and merged it with its own PC and custom manufacturing arms. The Zeos name came off the machines on 22 February 1996 and everything shipped as Micron after that. The head office was in Nampa, Idaho, which is not where American computer companies were supposed to be.

The model was direct order. You called a number or filled in a form, you specified the machine, and it was built and shipped to you with no retailer in between. Dell had proved this worked and Gateway had proved you could do it from somewhere nobody had heard of. Micron did well enough at it to double the capacity of the Idaho operation inside two years and add plants in North Carolina and Malaysia. Its business customers liked it and its magazine reviews were good.

It also quietly built a second company inside the first one. SpecTek recovered and resold memory components. HostPro was assembled out of four web hosting businesses bought during 1999 and 2000, which in that period was a normal thing for a company with cash to do. By 2001 the chairman and chief executive was Joel Kocher, who had come from Dell, and the PC business he had been hired into was the part that was bleeding.

By the time I had money of my own for a computer, this company had already stopped making them. That is not the interesting distance though. The interesting part is what it turned into, because hosting is the layer that crosses a border without shipping anything. A desktop built in Nampa had to go on a boat and clear customs before it could mean anything to me. An account on a server in Atlanta only had to answer a request. Micron spent six years on the side of that line that could not reach me, then moved to the side that could, and by the time it got there it was not called Micron.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The PC price war of 2000 and 2001 is the event, and it did not kill the weak so much as the mid sized. Component costs fell and everybody passed the fall straight to the customer, so margin on a desktop went to almost nothing. Companies that shipped tens of millions of units could live on almost nothing. Companies that shipped a few hundred thousand could not.

In the quarter that ended on 1 March 2001, Micron Electronics lost 168.9 million dollars. Kocher described the PC unit publicly as a drain on the company's cash. That is an unusual sentence for a chief executive to say about his own main product line, and it only gets said when the decision has already been taken.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 1 May 2001 Micron announced it was giving the PC business to Gores Technology Group, a turnaround firm. Gores took the assets and the liabilities, Micron put in 70 million dollars of working capital to keep the thing running, and the deal closed on 31 May. The unit stayed in its Idaho buildings with its management in place and kept the MicronPC name for a while before Gores rebranded the products as MPC.

That August, Micron Electronics bought Interland of Atlanta, merged HostPro into it, took the Interland name and moved to Georgia. The company that had been a computer manufacturer four months earlier was now a web host, and it promptly reported a 355 million dollar loss for the year. The pivot everyone was making in 2001 turned out to be into a market that was also collapsing.

~ the next chapter ~

Interland bought the Web.com assets at the end of 2005 and renamed itself Web.com on 20 March 2006, trading as WWWW. So the corporate line that started as a Minneapolis mail order PC company is technically still alive, four names later, selling websites to small businesses. Nothing about it is recognizable.

The hardware side ran longer than it deserved to. MPC did 365 million dollars of revenue with 680 employees in 2007 and then bought Gateway's professional division, which is what a small company does right before it stops existing. Its stock was delisted, and three days later, on 7 November 2008, MPC filed for Chapter 11. Nampa had been building computers since the Zeos merger and stopped there.

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