Acer CEOs
The headline gift that keeps on giving...
It is a momentus day for ailing PC maker Acer: founder and former CEO Stan Shih has agreed to exit retirement, albeit temporarily, to try to dig the business out of a deepening hole. Just weeks after the resignation of CEO and chairman JT Wang - the man that replaced Shih in 2005 - the board at the Taiwanese firm elected the …
... who after all is taking the "reign" of ACER.... Or did the author maybe mean "take the reins"?
Involuntary puns are often the most amusing - but for heaven's sake isn't there anyone left at the Register with a decent grasp of English? Or are editorial oversight and proofreading also considered to be redundant these days?
This is even more worrying when you consider that foreign students wanting a visa to study in this country must demonstrate that (by taking tests like the IELTS) they have "generally effective command of the language" and that includes being able to differentiate between pairs like: Diffuse and defuse, reign and rein, toe and tow, or principle and principal.... ahem.
I'm not sure how eliminating the CEO role makes leadership decisions any more effective or streamlined. If that is actually the case it isn't the CEO role itself that's the problem. You'd have to have an incredibly overbearing Board ramming things down the CEO's throat or an executive team that had mutinied and were pushing back upstream too hard, or both.
I expect it's a combination of both, but either way the CEO had lost control and had to go. Unfortunately however, upsetting traditional management hierarchies is an extremely desperate move and it rarely, if ever works. It only changes faces but doesn't address core issues that are still burning. It also clouds the authority of the 'man with no title'. Better to fill the traditional role with the right person than try to establish a wonky control structure while a company is in crisis. It's too much.
Out here in the Far East the ACER branches in several countries have no replacement keyboards so Customer Service staff are tearing newer style keyboards apart so they can repair the older (2 years) keyboards.
Battery packs are no problem as there are replacement cells available and Motherboards gather dust on shelves - they are more reliable than keyboards. Plastic cases abound, too, I'm not sure on the spare LCD screen status.