Stan Shih started off selling duck eggs in his widowed mother's shop. Last year, Microsoft boss Bill Gates went to Taiwan to speak at his company's 20th birthday celebrations. Meanwhile, Shih has built one of the world's biggest PC manufacturers, with an annual turnover of more than £7 billion, making more than five million PCs a year. Though Shih is a superstar in Asia, he is little known in Europe, where many people buy his PCs without knowing it: half of Acer's computers are manufactured for sale under other brand names, including Texas Instruments and IBM. And the company's greatest successes have come in less well developed countries such as Mexico, Malaysia and Thailand, where it outsells Compaq and IBM.
Shih may look like a standardissue suit-wearing Chinese businessman, but he has a novel approach to business, insisting on "strong local management", which involves local shareholdings and a lot of independence. Acer typically owns less than half of each overseas subsidiary, and Acer's manufacturing units compete against outsiders to supply them with components such as monitors and motherboards.
Shih compares this "disintegrated" approach to a fast-food franchise such as McDonalds, which offers consistency and a global brand image - unlike the multitude of family-owned Chinese restaurants, which are all different.
Right from its beginnings in 1976, Acer has been a co-operative venture, with Shih and his wife Carolyn Yeh owning half the company, and five partners owning the rest. This was a conscious attempt to get away from the Chinese tradition of family ownership, and Shih's three children have been deliberately excluded. Later, Acer raised capital by selling shares to its staff to encourage commitment, and many have become millionaires. In so far as Shih rules, it's through delegation and exhortation, and the company's "most important core value", according to its literature, is: "human nature is basically good".
Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Acer is building its own little Utopia, Aspire Park, on 425 acres in Taiwan. This "model village" brings together houses and factories with research and education facilities (the Acer Institute of Experience Sharing) and a large nature conservation area.
Acer started with more modest aims under the name Hong Chi at home and Multitech abroad, selling computer learning kits. Its first microcomputer, the Microprofessor II, was launched in 1982, and might have become popular in the West - it was featured on the cover of British computer magazine Your Com- puter - if Apple hadn't sued.
At the time, many small Taiwanese manufacturers were producing counterfeit copies of the Apple II, and selling them for a fifth of the price. Shih had thought the Microprofessor II would be safe, but it turned out that parts of the instruction manual had been copied from Apple's. Although this could be changed, the young company couldn't afford the legal fees to fight the US giant.
Nonetheless it was a useful lesson, and one that Shih applied when he saw Compaq's first IBM clone at the 1982 Comdex trade show. Here was a machine that wouldn't attract the attentions of the lawyers. Multitech rushed out an early "clone" of IBM's PC XT at the end of 1983, although dozens of other Taiwanese manufacturers were not far behind.
"When I saw the Compaq, that's the first time I understood compatibility," Shih says. "Unfortunately, when we introduced our PC XT, we made a mistake: we tried to improve the input/output system, and became not so compatible. I have many experiences of trying to do better and not being accepted by the market, so compatibility is the Bible for us now." At this point, he decided the name Multitech wasn't catchy enough.
"We searched for a new name for six months, and finally we found Acer in a Latin dictionary," he says. "It means spirited, energetic. It's short, easy to pronounce, and the biggest benefit of all is that it comes near the top when companies are listed in a brochure."