Backlogs eh?
My trusty aspire one is being held together with gaffa tape, might have to keep an eye out...
Acer has announced its first-ever quarterly loss as a veritable vortex of inventory backlogs, internal reshuffling, sluggish PC demand and runaway iPad popularity chewed through its profits. The Taiwanese firm's Q2 loss after tax was NT$6.8bn ($236m), according to its preliminary results, which came from "$150m in sales …
Perhaps if they stopped whipping windows boxen littered with insanely exploitable backdoors people could buy thier stuff without having to worry how many hidden security holes it has?
My last Acer was a well made laptop and it put others at work to shame but I had to remove two acer specifc DLLs and some COM objects that provides system level command shell access
instigated by a very simple bit of code in any web page.
Even worse these blatant backdoors were ingnored by all but Clamwin - evidently Acer register thier backdoors with the AV vendors who ensure thier security holes do not get highlighted to the end users.
IMHO Acer and security are mutually exclusive.
Posted using my 2 year old acer netbook that could just use a new battery (did well to last this long with my usage pattern). £20 on ebay for a new battery (with higher capacity than the factory one), or £200 for a brand new netbook that... has the same specs as my current one? hmm, tough choice
Just spent the whole day being palmed from one Acer department to the other. Nobody can tell me how I can return a faulty battery I purchased for a client. Acer are top of my shitlist of toxic brands I would never purchase, if they go under never to resurface again I wouldn't be too distressed.
They missed the boat on the netbooks. They all thought about the form factor but not the software, or how the software would would work on such a small form factor. Then they put back harddrives, Windows XP, increase the form factor a little more and increased the weight, all with an underpowered CPU, it just didn't work anymore. What these companies should take away from this is that it isn't just about the hardware. Some software/OS support would go a long way
Posted from an eeepc 701 running puppy 5, with a modded touchscreen.
Stop paying for Windows licenses in your consumer devices. Right now, you try and make that back up by installing trial crapware that no one wants onto the machines.
Stick Ubuntu on there, stick libreOffice on there, and get some Google cash for installing Chrome as the default browser.
I don't actually use Linux, and previously, I would have dicked over this notion too.
But we're at a point now, where the browser has superceded native applications. My most used applications all live on the web.
System builders used to make money selling crapware for Windows, there was no way to do that on Linux platforms - but now there is - Google are willing to pay for installations.
When the world's biggest PC manufacturer want to exit the space due to the tiny margins on offer, something drastic needs to change. At this year's LinuxCon, the phrase "year of the linux desktop" became a bit of an in-joke - http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/08/no-year-of-the-linux-desktop-after-2-decades-linuxcon-keynote-so-what.ars - but this is theirs for the taking.
Acer struck me as vulnerable. They were yet another player in the thin-margin PC field, with MS' OS "quality" being a big factor in their market's health and their product. Then they accelerated to the bottom with the netbook, which while it had even thinner margins, allowed them to get the cream off the first skim.
Once the iPad came along and people preferred iPads over netbooks, the writing was on the wall.