A few years ago rivals mocked Jonney Shih, chairman of Asustek, and his purse-size laptop computers. Millions of netbooks later, Shih is having the last laugh.

Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus, in Taipei.

On a hillside above the Hsing Tian Kong temple in the northern reaches of Taipei, Jonney Shih sits on a wobbly stool next to an ornate low wooden table. Dressed in a taupe suit, white shirt, and silver tie emblazoned with jaguars, Shih, 57, cheerfully waves off three umbrella-wielding employees who try in vain to shield their boss from the hot sun and a swirl of menacing bees.

But Shih, who is waiting to be photographed for this magazine, sits serenely, perspiration-free in the sun, intent on a game of Chinese chess. "In Buddhism you learn to accept everything, to let it flow through you," Shih says. "Then you can slow down and think clearly."

It turns out the ferociously driven Shih is a less-than-model Buddhist. (Buddhists aren't supposed to be thinking about technology while they're meditating — something Shih is known to do.) But his ambition, combined with engineering skills and spot-on business instincts, also makes him the most brilliant technology executive you've never heard of.

He is the largest shareholder and chairman of Asustek (pronounced a-soos-tech), the $21-billion-a-year tech conglomerate that introduced the first netbook three years ago, ushering in a revolution in the stagnant PC industry. When it hit stores in the fall of 2007, Shih's $399 EeePC was derided by rivals as a low-power plaything. But Asustek, or Asus for short, went on to sell millions of the mini-notebooks and soon vaulted to No. 5 in worldwide PC market share. More

Microsoft moved a lot of install disks, but hardware makers got a bigger bump two years ago

Photo: Philip Elmer-DeWitt

When Microsoft (MSFT) launches a new operating system, as it did two weeks ago, PC manufacturers like Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer are supposed to reap the benefits. And everything seemed to be in place on Thursday Oct. 22 for that to happen.

"Never before has the industry launched such a variety of new form factors, price points, technology upgrades, and design innovations at one time," wrote NPD's Stephen Baker just before Windows 7's release. "This past weekend I happened by a Best Buy store and there was not one single PC for sale with Vista on it. Lots of Windows 7 machines, however, all of which were marked 'not for sale until October 22.' Someone did a great job in the supply chain making this happen. This will give Win 7 a tremendous boost out of the gate." (link)

Two weeks later, Baker is singing a different tune. Microsoft got a big boost according to NPD's weekly tracking data, racking up sales of Windows 7 that were 234% higher than Vista's during its first few days of sales. (More on that below the fold.)

But PC makers didn't make out quite as well. Although they had a relatively strong week, with unit sales up 49% year over year and 95% from the week before, it was nothing like Vista's launch in Feb. 2007. Then, sales soared 68% year over year and 170% from the week before.

In a press release issued Thursday, Baker explained what happened:

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Those Get-a-Mac spots aren't cheap, but they deliver a lot of bang for the buck

Photo: Apple Inc..

Apple (AAPL) shells out a ton of money for advertising. In fiscal 2009 it spent $501 million, according to the 10-K form filed Tuesday. That's up from $486 million in 2008 and $467 million in 2007.

But half a billion doesn't seem like so much when it's compared with the $1.4 billion Microsoft (MSFT) spent in fiscal 2009, or the $811 million Dell (DELL) spent on ads I can't remember ever seeing.

In fact, as a percentage of revenue, Apple has actually been decreasing its ad spending every year for the past eight, from nearly 5% in 2001 to 1.37%  today (1.17% if you use non-GAAP revenue). That's less than half the 3.6% of revenue Research in Motion (RIMM) spends advertising BlackBerries. (See chart below.)

Most recent fiscal year. Source: Company reports

Yet even if you despise Apple and never use their products, you tend to remember their ads. How does Apple get so much bang from its marketing buck?

I can think of five reasons: More

(AAPL) (HPQ) (MSFT) (DELL)

Remember how cloud computing was supposed to kill client/server? Turns out it’s more of a wedding than a funeral.

First, some background: The hype surrounding cloud computing in recent years has been nothing short of wild. If you believed the popular wisdom, the traditional computing model was toast. Businesses were going to stop loading specialized programs onto workers’ PCs and buying expensive software and servers for data centers.

Instead, we’d have the cloud. Service providers like Salesforce.com (CRM) and Amazon (AMZN) would own the hardware and software, and let companies plug in over the Internet and use it on demand. More

Imagining life at Bizarro Google.

Schmidt says consumers would revolt if Google started acting evil. Photo: Google

On Wednesday morning Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin met with a group of reporters and talked about a number of issues, from the outages its Gmail service has experienced to its efforts to digitize books to the company's culture.

Schmidt repeatedly deflected questions about the competition, saying Google prefers to focus on, well, Google. (In response to a question about Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that adoption of Google's Chrome operating system amounts to little more than a "rounding error," Schmidt quipped: "I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions.")

But Schmidt did offer a long explanation of why Google isn't Microsoft — like when it comes to hemming customers in to its technologies and systems. More

HP Executive Vice President Vyomesh Joshi isn't as close to Hurd as colleagues Livermore and Bradley are. Photo: HP.

If HP CEO Mark Hurd does merge the PC and printing businesses, what will that mean for printing chief Vyomesh Joshi?

A few months back, I spent some time at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) headquarters with Joshi, who’s known around HP simply as “VJ.” We talked about how he led the printing group to become a sales and profit powerhouse, the how the slowdown in printer sales growth is unfolding, and how he’s trying to get things going again. And we talked about how he’s doing under Hurd, an unsentimental numbers guy who hasn’t been shy about saying the printing business needs to shape up. More

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns has made a bold bid for services company ACS. Photo: Xerox.

Xerox's new CEO bets big on services. Can she convince investors she made the right move?

Ursula Burns calls less than 30 minutes after the markets close on the most tumultuous trading day in Xerox (XRX) history, and she sounds, well, energized. Not quite 100 days into the CEO job, on Monday she launched the biggest acquisition bid in the company's history and survived a 15% drop in its stock price on record volume. And she's still standing.

"I was positively surprised that it wasn't as bad as it could be," she says, adding that she's ready to continue explaining the deal to Wall Street. "Exciting times."

Investors are understandably less sanguine than Burns. Her $5.7 billion cash and stock offer for outsourcing giant Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) would put $3 billion in debt onto the books, and more than double Xerox's employee headcount from 54,00 to 128,000. This, when investors had been expecting nice, safe stock buybacks. More