It's better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a cow.
Before you can create a strategy, you need a vision of the company. Before you set that vision for the future, you have to understand your current position in the market as well as your limitations.
You have to always look ahead, always be positive. It's your choice, your destiny. You have to enjoy life.
It's important to at least break through many of the conventional approaches. I'm not sure my way is better. I will say it's a new alternative, at least. I think my personal contribution over the last 25 years has really been to give a lot of young entrepreneurs a lot of hope: Acer can, they can. Stan can, they can.
To me, strategy means trying to overcome your limitations and your weak points. To do that, I try to enhance and leverage my strong points.
Because I had visited Silicon Valley, I recognized the microprocessor was going to lead the second industrial revolution. We Chinese could not miss that opportunity again - we missed the first industrial revolution already. We put our effort into trying to bring this new technology from the United States to Taiwan. That was the begining of Acer.
People always want to have ownership and decision-making and autonomy.
When you do business, you have to depend on other countries. This is the global economy.
I think from the business point of view, Taiwan and China tied together brings mutual benefit. And we don't see any reason for stopping that progress, unless they have a political reason.
In China, if they open the markets, it will force local companies to compete with international players, and the local companies will benefit in the long run.
Taiwan's development in the past 20 years in high tech is almost 100 percent related to Silicon Valley.