Now that several reports show the iPad eating into sales of traditional low-cost PCs, the blame game has begun – starting with Acer. You may recall Apple sales in the U.S. recently surpassed Acer, which fell 42 percent. The computer maker’s former CEO now blames the company’s slowness in responding to the iPad threat.
“I already saw if we want to become a major player in this new world, we needed to do certain investments, mainly on software and on smartphones and tablets, on touch,” ex-CEO Gianfranco Lanci told a blog earlier this week. Lanci resigned in late March amid reports he was blamed for the iPad cannibalizing Acer’s market.
Lanci said he wanted to more than double Acer’s engineering staff, hiring outside of Taiwan. However, the PC maker resisted what he called a “de-Taiwanization” of the company. Acer fired back Wednesday, telling industry publication DigiTimes Lanci failed to “sustain healthily and long-term development for the company.”
The firm did not blame its sales slowdown on Acer chairman JT Wang, who in 2010 predicted the iPad share of the tablet market would plummet from 100 percent to 30 percent as soon as alternative devices appeared. So far, with Motorola, RIM, HP and others introducing rival tablets, the iPad market share still hovers around 80 percent.
Acer also did not blame its sales slowdown on its own strategy reversal, first embracing the idea of volume, then rejecting it when the company’s founder, Stan Shih, announced a more Apple-like future. PC makers “should not single-mindedly pursue volume growth, and should extend its operation to the field of service, just like Apple has done.”
Who’s to blame for the PC sales slow-down? If anyone, the PC industry held on to the belief consumers wanted cheap computers with pedestrian features. Like a great ocean-liner, the PC industry had become too large and too enamored by its own message that it couldn’t see the future – one without the PC.
