Patrick, THG ain't a low-level blog and you know that. This should belong to TGDaily.
This is only a minute proportion of Taiwan's economy. The title of the article is offensive to my country and misleading.
Taiwan’s new economy isn’t new anymore and it is maturing. 10 years ago when Win95 first came out, how many major graphic chip makers were out there? Maxtor, Tseng lab, Cirrus Logic, 3dfx, just to name a few I could recall, have all been burried since. 10 years ago, a decent computer would have cost about NT$50K. The same computer will cost half as much today and that’s not counting inflation in this past decade.
I’m afraid Taiwan had missed the boat in this run. As good a company as Asus, Gigabyte is, not too many people outside of the enthusiasts would know about their existence after all these years. If you don’t think Intel cutting 10,000 jobs is a sign of things to come, you are in denial.
I’m an enthusiast myself but I find the computer gaming scene to be pretty dull after Win2K launched because you can get so much out of you money now that I don’t need to upgrade anymore. Unless you want 200 fps on insane resolution, your new rig should last 18-24 months while I used to upgrade every 6 months during the Win95/98 era.
And what kind of computer you’ll need if you just do some emailing and web browsing? A three year old rig you can get for $200 can do all that plus playing DVDs.
Out of all the companies, maybe only Acer has tried to build brand awareness but not to too much success. The rest are just happy to be the foundries of IT world producing the same products competing with their own countryman. How many different Nvidia 5900 cards, nforce4 mobos, etc. do we need out there?
Taiwan’s closest competitor, South Korea, on the other hand, has used this opportunity to propel themselves to a higher plateau. Samsung was barely a recognizable name but is now a leader in many areas, DRAM, LCD, DLP just to name a few.
Of the four DRAGONS, Hong Kong and Singapore will always have their finance and transportation sectors to count on, Korea has made great strides in building brand awareness, and Taiwan only has a maturing and dwindling IT business to fall back to. It’s hard not to worry about Taiwan’s future at this juncture because China is poised to overtake Taiwan’s position in this regard even if the market is healthy.
To use terms like a “minute propotion” or “offensive” just shows that you are very insecure to hear about the truth.