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

Settlement or no settlement, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Dirk Meyer still doesn’t trust Intel. That much was clear when I sat across the table from him last week at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale. More

Ben Foss, director of access technology in Intel's Digital Health Group, uses the Intel Reader to scan a book. Photo: Jon Fortt.

When Ben Foss's father in law was dying of liver cancer months ago, friends suggested Foss read "How We Die" to help the family with the grieving process. Foss has dyslexia, and finding an audio version of the book or scanning it into a computer typically would be an ordeal. But in this case he was able to plow through it at 250 words per minute.

Foss did it with an early version of the Intel (INTC) Reader, a $1,500 device he dreamed up along with colleagues in Intel's Digital Health Group. The device launches today as the first consumer product from the five-year-old group. And though its name seems to place it in the same category as trendy ebook readers from Amazon (AMZN), Sony (SNE) and Barnes & Noble (BKS), this reader is profoundly different.

This is not another thin tablet that displays text; instead it's more like a chunky digital camera that instantly captures the words on a printed page and pronounces them aloud. That makes it little more than a curio for mainstream gadget lovers, but a potential godsend for those who struggle to read standard text because of learning disabilities or vision problems. More

The state of the state? "A train wreck," says one official.

If the world’s eighth-largest economy were a member of the proper religious order, it’d be time to call in a priest to administer last rites.

Name almost any serious malady and the state of California has it: the nation’s highest marginal tax rate coupled with an abysmal public education system; the most home foreclosures; a free-falling commercial real estate sector; lame-duck governor with no legislative support and a disdain for an annual budget process that he refers to as kabuki theater; unemployment somewhere between the official number of 12% and the whisper number of 18%; a 20% drop in year-over-year revenue; municipalities that have either declared bankruptcy (Vallejo) or are on the verge (Los Angeles); and a black-box permitting process that scares away business investment even while every week, 3,000 more taxpayers migrate to greener pastures.

Californians may be a can-do lot, but faced with all that evidence and much more, the political and economic leaders who spoke at the Milken Institute’s annual “State of the State” conference held yesterday at the Beverly Hilton could hardly have been more dour. “It’s a train wreck, and it’s getting worse,” said Bill Lockyer, California State Treasurer. Added former Assembly speaker Bob Hertzberg, now co-chair of governance reform group California Forward, “A high-speed train wreck.” More

Vista was too bloated for many corporate PCs to handle when it arrived three years ago. Its successor, Windows 7, is a better fit. Photo: Microsoft.

Rewind three years. One of the harbingers of doom for Windows Vista, Microsoft’s much-maligned operating system, was a survey that showed half of corporate PCs were too old or anemic to upgrade from XP to Vista. In other words, to get the new software, companies would have to spend a fortune on new computers.

Most never made the upgrade: 92% of PCs in the United States and Canada are still running XP, according to Softchoice, an IT consulting firm.

So it’s a good omen that Softchoice, the same firm that issued that fateful Vista study, is singing a very different tune about Windows 7. This time, its survey of 450,000 corporate PCs in the U.S. and Canada shows that 88% can handle the upgrade. More

Shaw is the latest non-technologist to ascend at Intel. Photo: Intel.

Who rules techland? Increasingly, it isn't the inmates.

In May, when Craig Barrett retired as chairman of Intel (INTC), the choice of his replacement marked a momentous occasion for the granddaddy of the semiconductor industry.

That Jane Shaw became nonexecutive chairman of Intel is a big deal, but not because she is Intel's first outsider to chair the board or because she is the first woman.

What makes her role noteworthy is that she is the first non-technologist in that seat. Yes, she has a science background, with a doctorate in physiology and a career in the pharmaceutical industry. But she's not a technologist in the Silicon Valley sense. More

Changes in computing mean software companies need hardware-savvy employees

By Sam Blackman, CEO and co-founder, Elemental Technologies

Blackman: Your next hire might need hardware chops. Photo: Elemental Technologies

Whether we knew it or not, we’ve all been relying on something called “Moore’s Law.”  Back in the 1960s, Intel (INTC)  co-founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors that could cheaply be placed on an integrated circuit had been doubling every two years.

That meant that central processing units, or CPUs — the chips that drive computer performance — were getting twice as fast in that same time period. That amazing rate of technological change has held up for more than 40 years.

Moore’s Law is why we take it for granted that the cell phone we carry around today is more powerful (and cost us less) than the top-of-the-line desktop computer we bought ten years ago. It is also why we’re not surprised that in less than a decade the Web has changed from a place to look at ugly text pages to a place to watch high-definition TV shows.

But after 40 years, Moore’s Law is slowing down. More

Interview by Scott Cendrowski

Mike Splinter, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Applied Materials, recalls the best advice he ever got.

Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials

Before I joined Applied Materials (AMAT), I worked at Intel (INTC) for two decades. I recall a session with Andy Grove. It was 1984, and Grove was talking about Intel culture to a group of new employees who were coming in at a senior level. I was running Fab 1, a Santa Clara factory that made chips.

In his talk Grove advised us to always assume it's your responsibility. By that he meant to take on a job, even if it wasn't yours. That's a general thought, but it creates specific action and works across almost any situation, from picking up garbage on the floor to a new product idea.

If you automatically assume it's your responsibility and do something about it, that makes the company better. Those who can recognize that are the ones who end up being more successful.

Mike's greatest tips

Engage your audience. When talking to a group, give the audience a challenge or an objective. It makes the presentation much more memorable.

More

Computer makers hope that stylish new laptops like Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion dm3 will lure shoppers away from low-cost netbooks. Photo: HP.

There’s going to be a PC retail showdown this holiday season. Let’s call it the netbook vs. the nymph.

In the netbook corner: the cheap, small, underpowered laptops that are all the rage lately. Asian manufacturers like Asus first introduced them, and consumers love them because they handle documents, e-mail, and web surfing for as little as $300. The big PC makers offer their own models, but also secretly hate that netbook fever is sucking the profits out of the industry.

In the nymph corner: a newer class of svelte yet powerful laptops that could steal some attention from netbooks. (The industry calls them “thin and light,” but hey — nymph is more fun.) Like their competition, nymphs are slim — some of them less than an inch thick — and they often eschew extras like DVD drives for the sake of portability. Perhaps best of all, they do a solid job running Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, which arrives next month. More