Acer founder Stan Shih has opened his mouth and said something extraordinarily stupid: the ultrabook and tablet form factors are nothing but a stupid fad with no future. Someone should tell Apple that, so they can stop selling iPads and MacBook Airs to a throng of millions of excited customers.
Sayeth Digitimes:
Acer founder Stan Shih has commented that the fads for ultrabooks and tablet PCs are both short-term phenomena and urged companies in the notebook supply chain to come out with more value-added products through innovation.
Shih added that Apple achieved success with iPad through its outside-the-box thinking, which is an attitude that all notebook players should learn.
Commenting on Apple bringing tablet PC and smartphone products into the PC market to compete with PC players and creating a great impact on PC demand, Shih pointed out that PCs are the base of the IT industry and tablet PCs are also developed from the base; therefore, in the future, products will still need to go through the PC platform to create even more add-on value
Absurd and myopic. How can the founder of one of Apple’s main competitors not be paying attention to what Apple is doing? With iCloud and iOS 5, Apple is already cutting the cord between the PC and mobile platforms, and iCloud’s only going to get better at what it does. Tablets only need to go through a PC as long as tablet-makers don’t have an analogue to iCloud.
As for the prediction about ultrabooks, he may very well be right: ultrabooks might be a non-started for Windows PCs. I don’t think that’s going to stop Apple though.