“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…”