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

Photo books are replacing 4x6 prints as the most important products in the printing business. Photo: Shutterfly.

Photo site offers lens into the post-print world.

At lunch on a recent afternoon in Silicon Valley, Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold is remarkably upbeat, considering the miserable year the overall photo business is having.

Almost any way you slice it, people are making fewer glossy prints in a rough economy. The numbers are off for at-home printing (down 2%), photo-counter printing (down 6%) and kiosk printing (down 12%), according to the Photo Marketing Association. The only big growth category? The under-the-table printing that people do for free at work. (That’s up 42%.)

Fortunately for Housenbold the photo recession hasn’t hit online photo finishers like Shutterfly (SFLY) as hard as some other parts of the industry. In fact, Shutterfly and rivals like Eastman Kodak’s (EK) Kodak Gallery and Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) Snapfish are still growing – partly because they’ve embraced ideas like photo books, social networks and smartphones to push their business beyond the old-fashioned glossy print. More

Even with Yahoo deal Microsoft will continue to struggle — and lose money — online.

The anti-climactic deal of the year is now out.  Long after the sizzle faded from Microsoft's (MSFT) failed $40-billion-plus bid for  Yahoo (YHOO), the two companies announced Wednesday they'll do what sympathetic observers urged them to do two years ago. They'll stop competing on search and search-advertising technology, enabling them to combine forces against Google. (GOOG)

Critics frowned on Yahoo (where's the "boatloads" of upfront cash Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz promised she'd extract from Steve Ballmer?) and praised Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal going so far as suggesting the tide may turning in the tired monopolist's favor. Perhaps. Beyond the something-must-be-said-because-they-called-a-press-conference chatter, however, a few points to consider: More