“Although Acer ex-CEO and president Gianfranco Lanci and the company’s board members’ inability to reach a consensus was the main reason for the CEO’s resignation, the strong impact from Apple’s products is the other key reason for Lanci leaving the company, according to sources from notebook makers, who added that in addition to Acer, Nokia’s ex-CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and LG Electronics’ ex-CEO Nam Yong both stepped down because of their inability to defend their companies from Apple’s fierce competition,” Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai report for DigiTimes.
“The sources pointed out that the appearance of Apple’s iPad significantly impacted the netbook market in 2010 and messed up Acer’s lineup for the entry-level notebook market, causing the company to see almost no growth in shipments,” Chen and Tsai report. “As for Acer’s smartphone business, since the business is currently still facing losses, Acer is still incapable of competing against other first-tier smartphone brands, especially Apple, the sources noted.”
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a big club: The Federation of the Flummoxed.
Chen and Tsai reports, “Since first-tier smartphone and PC brands are still unable to find an effective strategy to counter Apple’s advance with Lanci the most recent victim of Apple’s assault, the sources believe executives of brand vendors such as Motorola, Sony, Toshiba, Asustek Computer and Lenovo are all in danger of being dragged off by the wave.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t even need to type it.
so I’ll say it for you. Bloodbath!
Bloodbath it is!
But I feel some empathy for the ex-CEO’s. It must suck to be doing well, “innovating” and getting rewarded for it, everything is great, oh look a nice looking apple, that is what I need right now, I think I will have a, er … wholly shit! The apple has a ninja sword! Omg, ….. ahhhh!!!! GGgggrlrlgllllrlgl.
Silence.
Oh, says the CEO. Its sad but I must leave in a Golden Parachute. Sort folks you must pay me $gazzillion to leave.
It’s tsunami.
The confederation of the confused, the league of lemmings, gaggle of goofuses, collective of the clueless, hoard of the hopeless, house of hacks,
I’ll say it – bloodbath!
Bloodbath.
if they don’t start thinking out of the box , and obviously they can’t. They are all toast
Of course they’re toast. You need imagination and intellect to think outside the box. Most of these guys don’t have the common sense possessed by a crowbar.
It starts with BODs that will only select CEOs that do not think outside the box.
Exactly, it was a BOD that originally ousted Steve Jobs if I remember. What a stupid mistake that was. Cost them 400+ million and almost losing the company to get him back too.
Are you kidding? These guys can’t even think ABOUT the box!
I think that most CEOs got their positions through sheer luck, deviousness and brown nosing. There are very few truly smart people in the world and we have so many “F student” CEOs.
And by being tall.
The Harvard Biz Review found that the single most common trait among CEOs around the world was above average height. More common than gender, experience, education, beliefs, race, anything. Height.
It’s amazing that the human race hasn’t yet obliterated itself.
Truly amazing! It’s a pity that such an obviously inferior species has the ability to breed.
Yes, that’s it! Classify most CEOs as part of a vestigial lizard brain subset (and I do mean SUB) of the Homo Sapien species – with S. Jobs being an extreme anomaly. Of course.
Well…we weren’t inferior for millions of years of evolution. Looking for strong traits like height or attractiveness worked until now. If you’re facing a deadly predator or a horde of enemies you need a leader who is strong physically so the tallness thing makes sense. It might take quite some time before we evolve again to see the sense in a CEO being smarter then he is physically fit.
I think we’re already seeing this to some extent. A lot of people find geeks sexy now, I think that must be evolution in action. Some how we as a species are starting to see smart as more preferable to physical ability.
Like I said, Lizard Brains. It would seem that BODs share that with CEOs. I guess it’s true that stupidity has a nasty habit of getting its way.
Yes, they are ALL “being dragged off by the wave.” The Apple tsunami wave is overwhelming market after market. I see several years of this with more markets to come with few survivors that were once giants fighting for the scraps Apple does not want (at this time).
It’s telling that in the past week, we have seen outrageous FUD coming from the mouths of executives of companies like Dell, HP and Microsoft against the iPad. I don’t smell hubris so much as I smell fear. I think we will find that Apple is becoming accepted in more large corporations than we might know. The stalwarts who have gotten fat and happy suckling on the corporate IT trough are shocked. This was not part of the script. The old WinTel dualopoly is showing signs of rust. And it’s freaking out the status quo.
In past years, the spoonfed IT and geek media would have taken the PR FUD directive in lock-step. Not any more. While the outrageous comments voiced the other day by a Dell executive got press, before every article ended, the reporter questioned the validity of their claims. In fact, the claims themselves became a story that got in the cross hairs of the media for critical scrutiny.
Things have changed. And the Old Guard haven’t a clue on how best to respond. Can you say, “deer in the headlights” boys and girls?
See the last paragraph of this piece:
“Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell, which have strong bases in the enterprise market, are monitoring the tablet PC market closely and are not in a hurry launch their tablet PCs, noted the sources, adding that due to the limitations of its hardware platform and operating system, iPad is currently still unable to grab any large market share from the enterprise market; therefore allowing notebook vendors a place to earn profits.”
In other words, for HP and Dell, sitting still is a strategy.
What?!?! You didn’t hear that HP is going to aggressively synergize with channel partners!?!?
Not just sitting still, my friend. They are going to redouble what they are currently doing.
Add Schmidt the creepy cheat and backstabber to the list. Don’t let Android market share fool you. Google loses the shirt on each Android copy it gives away. Mobile ads revenue is still peanut compared to the money spent on development and support.
Total System Integration:
Competitors did NOT see this coming from Apple because they were so convinced they would always advance using their existing methods which relied on Microsoft.
So if MS was late or didn’t support hardware advances or did not do it well, the Apple competitors were routinely screwed.
Who will come up with a totally integrated solution to compete with Apple? Well, uh. All the hardware makers are totally held hostage to Microsoft.
Until a company like HP or Dell take Linux and supports it for major corporate use with the level of commitment Apple has done, my minority opinion is the days of “Windows PC dominance” are in decline.
Short….2 the point… And for the record… I agree totally.
However, I do not think that Apple has any chance to gain any significant marketshare in the mobile phone space. Right?
I ponder that statement in the most profound way to this day….
I’m FLUMMOXED….as to the STUPIDITY of this statement.
That’s not really fair. Given Apple’s legendary ability to keep competitive information secret, they were basically fired for lack of clairvoyance.
No, not a lack of clairvoyance—a lack of imaginaton, a lack of creativity, a lack of even the desire to improve anything except the bottom line.
All it took was a serious look at what Steve Jobs did at Next starting with BSD Unix and the programming tools which came to Apple to see what the OS was going to bring, to the already shipped mobile market that started with the Newton (which started with Apple’s work with prior to NeXT with the ARM chips).
That was followed by Quicktime, sound advances & basic applications & utilities starting to set up a total digital ecosystem of software and hardware to run it.
ALL of those advances were in place before the year 2000.
Hence, I stand on the record, stating flatly that the features announced by Apple gave fair warning to anyone who would look with a large picture at what was happening with Apple’s aquisitions and internal development.
Mmmm, yes, …. best served cold. 🙂
It puts a big smile on my face 🙂
Snappier! Oh….that wasn’t the word…
How can they compete? They were making the same old crap year after year until the iPhone and iPad came along, and that’s all they know how to do!
I don’t see how this can be called “fierce competition” from Apple. If Apple were trying to make me-too netbooks at a lower price than Acer, that would be a competition. But, Apple is making an entirely different product that in no way competes with the traditional netbook. It’s the fact that people actually want the new thing that Apple makes instead of getting the same old crap from Acer that’s causing CEO destruction.
some years ago I said Apple was going to hurt Acer. That was when Acer sales were accelerating by tens of percent every quarter due to net book sales. Win fanboys laughed called me idiot etc. and said Apple is DOOMED.
NOW I hear the SAME tired story from Android fanboys about HTC etc: their sales are of android phones are accelerating, gaining market share (go read all the android rants of HTC thunderbolt killing Verizon iPhone), Apple is DOOMED.
dumb droidek dudes: thing is you guys forget is long term strategy and PROFITS.
All these android guys fighting each to the bottom selling cheap (like acer netbooks), androids, giving BOGO deals and building expensive multiple models with funky hardware (each selling a handful relative to the iPhone) is going to kill their profits.
A few years from now the HTCs will join acer… just watch.
iHaters keep joking at Apple as a ‘toy company’, not realizing it’s the most ferocious competitor around and the only one that controls award winning hardware, software , content (iTunes) and application stores together with a top ranked retail chain.
Critics say Apple is ‘secretive’ ‘uncommunicative’ does not attend CES, CTIA , Mobile World etc. Well, PREDATORS usually don’t make a lot of noise until they strike…
“…PREDATORS usually don’t make a lot of noise until they strike…”
– Oooo! Good point, Davewrite! I like that one!
Pumas, tigers, jaguars and leopards have silently been sneaking around killing secondary CEOs.
Is it time for the king of the animals, the Lion, to take on the big prize CEOs?
Bullseye!
When all you know what to do is extrapolate your sales graph based on what you know using outdated technologies that haven’t moved forward from a Nineties paradigm you’re basically flummoxed when a game changing disruptive influence makes an entrance.
All you have to fall back on is tried and tested strategies hoping that that is the best way forward, just like IBM was left stranded by the PC revolution wrought by Microsoft and to a smaller extent, Apple in the Eighties. But that was then and strategies that worked then don’t necessarily work now.
Now that Apple has moved the game forward these dinosaurs are still using the Wintel approach of churning out ever cheaper PCs when the game itself has moved on to touch based tablets.
The advantage with Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs is being unafraid to venture into new territory possibly cannibalizing sales of an existing product line in which no amount of predictive analysis will give the right answers.
There is a difference in being a visionary like Jobs and being a competent manager who happens to have risen in the ranks through sheer hard work but not necessarily having the imagination, the guts and gumption to overturn comfortable notions of what works.
Only SJ dares to walk where angels fear to tread reaping the rewards of far sighted vision.
Ballmer’s Left Nut has more brains than its Monkey-boy “host”.
Seriously, you are spot ON. Very inspired post :o)
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” A. Einstein. He would have written “silly pundits” or “iHaters” today.
Can’t wait for ZuneTang™ to entertain us some today. Come on Zunny, it’s YOUR day today.
The problem is most corporation do not promote the visionary talent from the lower ranks to CEO, they tend to favor star Salesmen, Marketers of CFO and bean counters. Very few of this lot can offer out of the box long term thinking and visionary direction to a company’s product line. You might as well have a historian or psychologist at the helm. Creating a series of future products and supporting echosphere that truly provides value to customers is not a task that can be handeled by a star salseman because he can sell ice to an eskimo. Why does the product have to satisfy a customer need if the market is moving along and no major paradigm shift has caused anyone to have to really innovate? The trap that the Dells, HPs, and Microsofts fell into was they were in suc a hurry to commoditize PCs that they could not see past what would happen when a paradigm shift occurred and the PC companies relied too heavily on MIcrosoft for software . Most of them supported Linux too late and did so half heartedly so as not to pissoff Microsoft. CFO are primarily concerned with the bottom line and most don”t understand product development anyway. Salesmen and marketers use psychology to convince you to buy something you don’t need or want becaust it’s what ws the cheapest thing for their company to produce. I used to work for a small electronics firm in the barcoding industry. It grew to be the largest in the sector until the star salesman from Europe was pronmoted to CEo and ruined the company, which got bought out by Motorola.
That’s the effect of the ‘Applesunami’, TM!
Windows system depended on the genius of Microsoft — protection stand-over- tactics theft and monopoly!
Once it was breached all the punks have no defenses against others in their turf, and are waiting for Microsoft to restore their protection with its goods that were stolen from the other!
“Nokia’s ex-CEO Oili-Pekka Kallasvuo…”
Oili-Pekka?! You simply can’t make this stuff up…