"A year ago Jonney Shih was searching for a breakthrough. The Taiwan company he has run since 1994, Asustek, had become the world's largest maker of computer motherboards and one of the ten biggest laptop manufacturers. Once known for churning out cheap clones of name-brand laptops, Asustek began designing its own ten years ago and produced more than 4 million last year. 'But we were still a second-class company,' he says. 'We were fighting fires, not thinking ahead.'
"The problem was that the personal computer market was maturing. The company had just established its laptop brand, and Shih was worried that Asus laptops would now be left with only a small slice of a slowly growing pie..."
