Acer has announced that President and CEO Gianfranco Lanci was leaving the company and would be replaced by Chair JT Wang as interim CEO. Unresolvable differences in corporate direction and strategy were cited.

Under Lanci, Acer invested heavily in netbooks in 2009–selling enough to overtake all but HP for the number two spot in US computer sales. Fast forward to 2011. Apple's iPad chomps down on netbook market share, and Dell sends Acer to third spot just ahead of a surging Lenovo.

There had to be some kind of fallout over this and it came in the form of Lanci's, resignation. Lanci wanted to make a push into the mobile computing market. Just like HP's acquisition of Palm, and Dell's recently noisy pronouncements over support for the enterprise with mobile devices still to come.

An Acer press release said that Lanci held different views from a majority of the board members, and could not reach a consensus following several months of dialog. They placed different levels of importance on scale, growth, customer value creation, brand position enhancement, and on resource allocation and methods of implementation. Probably more of the last two.

Interim CEO and current Acer Chair JT Wang has announced that the company will be putting emphasis on its core personal computer product line. Remember that this was the company that bought up three PC makers in the past half decade: Gateway, e-Machines, and Packard Bell.

Wang's announcement reads like the antithesis of Acer's near-past product emphasis. Those familiar with how asian business can shift from aggressive to conservative in the face of unchartered waters will find this no surprise. This is very eastern conservatism at its best. Just stop everything on its tracks before things get any worst. From a western viewpoint, Acer might be seen to be in full back-pedal mode but that would be too foolhardy. Remember that this is a company whose DNA dates back to the mid-1980s when its founder Stanley Shih started Mutlitech Computers producing clones of the Apple II and then IBM's new PC. Eventually,they were able to go legit by using BIOS and boot ROMs that allowed its products into the US market. Even in its present form though, enough of the original genes remain in Acer to want it to be the biggest in the US PC market. Shih had publicly set 2012 as his target for overtaking HP in the US and even predicted the demise of US computer companies in 20 years.

But in typically Chinese fashion, Acer is not going to dive into any enterprise without an ace up its sleeve. It in the past, it has always been trying to provide more perceived quality than the price points it offers. In 2008-2009, it was the first and at least for a while, the only source of netbooks in a category that it practically defined. Acer is somewhat like Apple in that it tends to be partial to products with a disruptive nature to them but theirs is more economic than technical.

Perhaps the failures of its Windows-based tablets inured it to being wary about rumors of the iPad, but Acer seemed confident that its little laptops would hold their own against a form factor that has never succeeded in the consumer market. The rest of course, is history and now they are left to fight the good fight with renewed emphasis in PCs in an era that Apple's Steve Jobs has called the post-PC era.