Zeos International

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

~ the last words ~

Zeos International was incorporated in Minnesota in 1981 by Gregory E. Herrick, and for its first six years it was not a computer company at all. It was NPC Electronics, a contract assembly shop whose best remembered product was a small transmitter sold to real estate agents, so that a car parked outside a house could tune in a broadcast about the house. The company underwrote its own stock offering in mid-1985, took the Zeos name, and sold its first PC in November 1987.

What it sold after that was a machine and a phone number, and the phone number was the part it advertised. Zeos took full pages in the American computer magazines with a specification, a price and a toll-free line at the bottom, and claimed to be the first PC company in the country to keep that line staffed twenty four hours a day. It put Lotus 1-2-3 and Ami Pro in the box at a time when software was a separate purchase, which dragged Dell and Gateway into doing the same. In 1991 Fortune named it the fastest growing public company in America.

Micron Technology put a letter of intent on the table in October 1994. The structure was inverted: Micron Computer and Micron Custom Manufacturing Services were merged into Zeos rather than the other way around, so the small Minneapolis company was technically the buyer. When it closed in April 1995 Micron Technology held roughly 79 percent of the result, the combined company was called Micron Electronics, and the head office was in Nampa, Idaho.

The phone number is the part that could not cross an ocean. In 1996 I was twelve and two years away from my first modem, and the American magazines those advertisements ran in were something you might see a copy of, late, if somebody carried one back. A 1-800 prefix is a string of digits that means nothing at all when you are dialing from Ankara. Mail order was not a channel that had thinned out here. It had never opened.

~ the record ~

~ how you bought one ~

The magazine page was the storefront. You read the specification, you called the number, you gave a card, and a box turned up. Zeos pushed this further than most with a line called Computers Now, pre-configured machines that shipped in under a day instead of being built to your order over a fortnight. PC Magazine put it on the cover as an Editor's Choice at the end of January 1990.

The economics were the point. No dealer took a margin, no shop held stock, and the money that would have paid for both went into the price on the page. This is the model Dell rode to the top of the industry, and Zeos was doing it in 1987. Being early to a model is worth nothing if somebody else can run it at ten times the volume.

~ the survey ~

PC World's March 1996 reader survey put Zeos near the bottom of the market. Barely more than half of its customers said they would buy the brand again, around half reported hardware problems, and the average wait to reach technical support came out above forty hours. On 22 February 1996 Micron Electronics said the Zeos line was going away. Steve Laney, speaking for the company, said it had not seen the survey and had had no sign from Zeos customers that anything was wrong, and that the decision was about ending the competition between two brands inside one building.

Roughly 500 people worked in the former Zeos plant in Minneapolis and no date was set for the last machine. A company whose entire pitch had been the line that answered at three in the morning was killed by a survey measuring how long the line took to answer.

~ the long tail ~

Micron Electronics split itself in 2001. The hosting side merged into Interland and eventually became web.com. The PC side went to Gores Technology Group, which renamed it MPC Computers and kept it in Nampa. MPC filed Chapter 11 on 6 November 2008 and stopped. The brand Micron chose to keep in 1996 outlasted the one it dropped by twelve years and then died of the same thing.

Nothing survives of Zeos except the advertisements, which turn up scanned in the back halves of 1990 magazines: a beige tower, a list of what was inside it, a number in large type. It was a good business built on the assumption that a person who buys a computer will eventually need to speak to somebody about it. That assumption was right. Zeos just could not afford to keep being right about it.

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