With a sense of real excitement, Stan Shih, CEO of
Acer, Inc., boarded a plane for San Francisco in
early February 1995. The founder of the Taiwanese
personal computer (PC) company was on his way to
see the Aspire, a new home PC being developed by
Acer America Corporation (AAC) Acer’s North
American subsidiary. Although Shih had heard that
a young American team was working on a truly innovative
product, featuring a unique design, voice
recognition, ease-of-use, and cutting-edge multimedia
capabilities, he knew little of the project until
Ronald Chwang, President of AAC, had invited
him to the upcoming product presentation. From
Chwang’s description, Shih thought that Aspire
could have the potential to become a blockbuster
product worldwide. But he was equally excited that
this was the first Acer product conceived, designed,
and championed by a sales-and-marketing-oriented
regional business unit (RBU) rather than one of
Acer’s production-and-engineering-focused strategic
business units (SBUs) in Taiwan.
Somewhere in mid-flight, however, Shih’s characteristic
enthusiasm was tempered by his equally
well-known pragmatism. Recently, AAC had been
one of the company’s more problematic overseas
units, and had been losing money for five years.Was
this the group on whom he should pin his hopes for
Acer’s next important growth initiative? Could such
a radical new product succeed in the highly competitive
American PC market?And if so, did this unit—
one of the company’s sales-and-marketing-oriented
RBUs—have the resources and capabilities to lead
the development of this important new product, and,
perhaps, even its global rollout?
Birth of the Comp ...