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ASUS CEO Resigns as Company Shifts Mobile Focus To Power Users (engadget.com)
Earlier today, ASUS announced that long-time CEO Jerry Shen is stepping down ahead of "a comprehensive corporate transformation" -- part of which involving a new co-CEO structure, as well as a major shift in mobile strategy to focus on gamers and power users. From a report: In other words, we'll be seeing more ROG Phones and maybe fewer ZenFones, which is a way to admit defeat in what ASUS chairman Jonney Shih described as a "bloody battlefield" in his interview with Business Next. During his 11 years serving as CEO, Shen oversaw the launch of the PadFone series, Transformer series, ZenBook series and ZenFone series. Prior to that, Shen was also credited as the main creator of the Eee PC, the small machine that kickstarted the netbook race in 2006.
Co-CEO? That seems a little strange, I wonder how that will work out.
Apple realized long ago a battle at the low end is one that leaves no victors.
It's a good idea to focus on finding and winning over people who are willing to pay for extra power and features. The other benefit of that approach is you are likely to find more loyal users, if you go chasing after people who ignore specs and value and just chase the cheapest model, they will have zero brand loyalty and may well not purchase your phones again when upgrading.
To win over repeat customers means putting money into design and build that knock you right out of contention at the low end of the market.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the EeePC. While it flopped at countering Microsoft, it helped pave the way to slimmer systems and solid state drives, lowering system costs, and helped bring ARM notebooks to the market trying to mimic its design. An 11 year run isn't bad, and stepping out of the way so fresh blood can try and counter market shifts you might not suspect or infer is the smart move for your own retirement fund :)
Kendall you could take the hint you punkass bitch.
Is the name of the play.
Is that the name of creimer's biopic?
His netbook move was not vain.
I still have one. 32 bits celeron working OK with a small Linux distro. I use it as a calculator for lab related stuff. Back in the day, a Linux compatible portable computer sold for cheap without the Microsoft tax was big news.
The dude was basically the polar opposite of Steve Jobs. Cringeworthy mobile projects, cringeworthy presentation of said products. I hope they appoint someone better than that. Their laptop lineup is second to none right now. I'm posting this from an X1 running Linux.
Everyone's making the same phone - ever increasing screen size, gimmicks like fingerprint reader front or back or under screen, everyone's removing microSD slots, headphone jacks, using the same set of LCD/OLED panels and other components. If they don't want to make something that caters to smaller but real markets (outdoor activities, smaller phones, and in this case, gamers), then they're competing with bigger companies that can throw $$$ into buying customers. So I guess this is good for them... except they aren't ever going to make a phone that's as good as even a gaming laptop... so it is really just for mobile power gamers. I'd have gone for a bigger or multiple niches.
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I don't see how they are catering to these users when their products come with Win 10 installed.
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With Chen, ASUS, or anything here? You're just a blathering Apple fangirl of no value to any real discussion.
Asus is going after higher end mobile users, I am expelling why so people like you might understand why.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From a computer technician point of view (and my personal opinion) they are SO FUCKING BADLY designed. All the asus laptops that I worked with just took more time for nothing and it felt like all of them could break easily. they material was made cheap.
I mean, just to replace a hard drive was a nightmare imo. I had to remove the entire bottom plate and sometimes the keyboard as well and this is just to replace to access it. Jesus Christ, take a look at the lenovo laptops and at least copy their design to access parts that should take 20 seconds to replace ffs. ()
They're giving up on old failures. You could take a hint, you're not convincing anyone to buy more Apple products with your breathless bitch fangirl-ism. Clue in. No one is paying you to lie. Jerry doesn't need you.
You're a nothing.
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The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
Asus also started off as an ODM too. They made the old Powerbooks and the plastic Macbooks, as well as a few other Apple devices. They spun off their ODM division as Pegatron (the company founder likes Pegasus - both company names are derived from it) a decade ago due to complaints from their customers about conflict of interest (they also sold laptops under the Asus brand). Likewise, the iPhones are made by Foxconn, which is probably more widely known due to PR managers at Apple dumping blame for all the bad things that happen to iPhones onto Foxconn in order to preserve the Apple brand name.
The only hardware Apple makes is their processor. Everything else is made by other companies. Memory by Samsung and SK Hynix. Flash storage by Samsung and Toshiba. Screen by Samsung and LG, camera by Sony, etc. Apple just hires an ODM and gives them the general design specs they want it to meet. The ODM makes the product, buying parts that are available to all other brand names, and packages them together into a whole. Just like every other brand name. There is no magic unicorn dust inside. Sorry to burst your bubble.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
"Ignoring the vapid, meaningless SuperKendall rhetoric for a moment" - There ought to be a plugin for that, but ironically it's too easy to detect his lies manually.
The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple.
This is patently false. Quanta does not design or innovate in any way for Apple. They only manufacturer based on specs. It's the exact same relationship Apple has with Foxcon. And Quanta only making the current lowest end Macbook.
I just bought a ROG laptop earlier this year that I sent back (ended up going Prostar which has been very good). Died after 2 weeks. Horrible support. Nothing but problems. Hopefully if they're going to take this road they'll do it all the way and become as good as they used to be.
Mobile these days is a saturated market and I think most companies see a end to real expansion for now. Apple also realized this although won't admit it. But their actions also convey a market that simply doesn't see advancement worthy of frequent upgrades anymore.
The client computer market (think desktop, Laptop, workstation, gamers, ultrabook, etc) is ripe for consolidation. Only Dell, HP Ink and apple, have decent margings there (tow of them because economies of scale, the other because is able to charge a premium for the product, this written on a Macbook Air).
A consolidatation of players is long overdue. In japan, is already happened. NEC sold its client computer arm to Lenovo. Fujitsu separated their PC arm (which itself was the merger of fujitsus and Siemes client computing arm), So did toshiba. Sony divested the Vaio Group (low sales and earnings) and that was acquired by a private equity group which in turn tried to merge the three of them to no avail. Fujistu tired of waiting and flogged the whole thing to Lenovo...
Asus shoud follow suit and merge, perhaps with arch-nemesis Acer. God knows both companies need the economies of scale to make this work.
Failing that, any other of the top 7 companies will do. in the Client PC game, economies of scale are one of the most important factors, and short of Dell, HP and Lenovo, no one has enough economies of scale to do good in that game. Either merge on your own volition, or be absorved after a Chapter 7 , chapter 11 or administration proceedings
Just my two cents.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Manufacturing requires design elements, you know nothing about this.
they spun-off their oem pc component and non-pc businesses. asus has never really been that good at actual full consumer products (comparatively speaking, and even worse at service. the 'power user' pc market is not a large one, and it's fading. i wish 'em luck, but they probably won't be around in five years.
I DON'T THINK APPLE WANTS OR NEEDS A LYING NAZI INCEL FOR A SPOKESPERSON BUT THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES KEN DOLL EITHER WAY
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
It sounds hilarious.
It actually worked well for the Roman *Republic* for nearly five centuries.
"A consul held the highest elected political office of the Roman Republic (509 to 27 BC), and ancient Romans considered the consulship the highest level of the cursus honorum (an ascending sequence of public offices to which politicians aspired).
Each year, the citizens of Rome elected two consuls to serve jointly for a one-year term. The consuls alternated in holding imperium each month,[citation needed] and a consul's imperium extended over Rome, Italy, and the provinces. However, after the establishment of the Empire (27 BC), the consuls became mere symbolic representatives of Rome's republican heritage and held very little power and authority, with the Emperor acting as the supreme authority."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Apple realized long ago a battle at the low end is one that leaves no victors."
Except for the victors it leaves, of course. If there were no victors there would be no low end.
When the most successful party has 87% of the industry profits and the distant second place has 10% then you have one victor and one intact survivor. What could we call the remaining market participants? "Beleaguered?" :-)
... Samsung came in second in smartphone operating profits with 10% of total industry profits"
https://www.investors.com/news...
"Apple (AAPL) captured 87% of smartphone industry profits in the fourth quarter, despite accounting for only about 18% of total units sold in the period.
The ASUS sub on Reddit is filled with stories detailing horrible customer support. If the new CEO doesnâ(TM)t put some effort into improvements in that area their time selling expensive components to gamers will not last very long.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I see one fail and I call yours also! Google is not your friend, pal. It ain't your pal, chum. It ain't even your chum, buddy. Calm down. No you calm down. I am calm. Then everybody's calm. REAL calm. The calmest.
Now I sell all your private information, and you watch an ad. Pow, right in the kisser, friend.
So Quanta has the parts and manpower needed to do things like prototype milling? While Apple do not?
Not that scale is mentioned, which is imported if you need to do 1000 different prototypes in a reasonable time scale.
Thats the gist of it, at the least as Solandri presents it.
I'm considering the Asus ROG phone, Razer Phone 2, and Black Shark Helo for my next phone. Make a landscape slider keyboard addon for the ROG phone and you'll get an instant niche of power user customers - all the people still using Droid 4s, Photon Qs and even Maemo phones like the N900.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Apple is a big winner on the software side too. 2/3rds the number of iOS app downloads generates five times the amount of revenue as Android apps.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...
that's mega, not giga. I can't bear to part with it even though I have no use for it now. It's a wonder of technology and mankind's genius rendered completely obsolete.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So, hey Asus!
I've got two thousand US dollars with your name on it, if you can build a genuine flagship Android phone with a removable/replaceable battery, an IP68, resilient plastic body, headphone jack, all sensors, 6+gb ram, the fastest processor money can buy, IR blaster, etc. Big, thick, heavy, with absurd battery life (say .. 8,000mAh).
There hasn't been an legitimate flagship phone since the Note 3/4 and I've been saving a long time.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Many years ago I was looking to buy my first laptop.
Did a lot of research.
Was seriously thinking to buy ASUS.
Didn't happen - the web-site was caatstrophically bad. The only way to figure out which product to buy was to visit *every product page*. The main listing was just the product code, which carried no meaning.
Also found on the net reviews of, and units on sale, which were not on the web-site, so it was clear I wasn't looking at the canonical list either.
I gave up.
Some years later, when I was looking for my second laptop, exactly the same. Hadn't changed a bit.
I'm down with all that from a hardware point of view, but what about the software?
iOS is a huge differentiator. I could be wrong, but I think that's fully Apple?
There is no money to be made in commodity laptops and phones. Low-end mobile devices are loss-leaders for name recognition only. Plus, the user experience on these devices just gets worse and worse as Android gets more and more bloated.
I think this is a good move on their part.
The Macbooks are (currently) made by Quanta. They're an ODM - original design manufacturer. That's like an OEM, except they also design the product. They're the ones who came up with such innovations like hogging a unibody laptop chassis out of a single solid piece of aluminum, not Apple. Slashdot had an article describing how they bought the CNC milling machinery, were playing around with hogging out aluminum billets, and pitched the idea to Apple. Quanta also makes laptops for pretty much every other laptop brand out there, so no, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality.
I always tell buyers that about the only thing the brand name tells you is what sort of aftermarket support you'll get.
This is exactly why I tell people not to buy Apple. My work Dell has a melt down, they send me a replacement, I swap the disk and send back the dead one. A Mac has a meltdown and I have to go to an apple store and wait for them to deign to see me.
What Apple figured out is the Gucci effect. If you develop a strong brand name, people will pay extra to buy it regardless of features or quality.
Exactly, Apple is a brand. Nothing more, nothing less. If Apple's were priced the same as Dells, and Dell is not a cheap computer brand here in the UK, the Apple would be considered a vastly inferior product.
Now I do own an Asus as a personal laptop. Its got the same spec as the same year MBP except it only cost £750 instead of £:2,600. If anyone is looking for a personal laptop, I couldn't recommend Asus highly enough. My last Asus is still going, the only reason I replaced it was the fact it couldn't run modern games any more (and really, no brand can future proof when it comes to gaming). Maybe not as a work machine as they lack the conveniences of a Dell or Lenovo, like a docking port.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Amazing that itâ(TM)s 2018 and there are still posts like this. They are the first and last PC company standing.
If anyone knows about building the best PC product, itâ(TM)s the 40 year old company