dreams of market dominance. His company, Proview, may now be in ruins and his most valuable asset a disputed
trademark, but those dreams remain intact.
"My biggest wish is to resolve all these frustrating problems and put them behind me," Yang said in a recent
telephone interview. "If we can resolve all the problems we have now and I have a chance to make a comeback, I'd
still want to overtake my old competitors."
Much of that will depend on whether he wins a long-running dispute over ownership of the trademark in China -
Apple's second-biggest market by revenue. Although a recent decision by the Shanghai district court to reject
Proview's demands that Apple stop selling the iPad was a setback for Proview, the case is still to be heard in the
higher court in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong Wednesday.
A decision against Apple there would set a precedent that would create an uphill battle in other cases in lower
courts around China. Local media have said Proview is seeking up to 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in compensation.
Proview's fortunes may currently be the polar opposite of Apple - one has creditors at the door and the other is
the world's most valuable listed company - but both illustrate how the fickle world of technology can make or break
a company.
Yang and Proview rode the first wave, when every home and office desk had to have a computer, and a screen. For
Apple, the last decade has seen it ride the crest of a new wave where the computer moved from a commoditized,
clunky desktop to a fashionable mobile consumer device.
Proview may now be a shadow of a company, trying to convert its last major asset into cash, but it was not always
so. "They definitely existed," says IDC analyst Rhoda Alexander, who covered them for a while. "They were a
significant manufacturer and a major player."
Strong brand
Yang and the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs were born just a year apart - Jobs in 1955, Yang a year later. An engineer
by training, Yang worked in the electronics industry before founding Proview in 1989 in Taipei. At that time, a
Jobs-less Apple was struggling for direction: that year it released the bulky, overpriced Macintosh Portable to
underwhelming reviews.
Yang, meanwhile, was building a strong brand in the cut-throat computer display business: within a decade of its
founding, Proview had nearly 4 percent of the older style CRT monitor market and 12 percent of the newer, flat
screen LCD market. This was the era of the desktop computer: in 1990, according to eTForecasts data, fewer than 22
million desktops were sold. By 2000, there were 98 million.
But Yang's plans were bigger.
While Proview had become a respected, albeit second- or third-tier brand for computer monitors, he wanted more.
Said one analyst who met him at a computer conference in the mid 1990s: "He was very suave, very bright, very
international. He had an angle ... he knew everything about the world."
In 1997, Proview International Holdings Ltd, the parent of units including Proview in Shenzhen and Taipei, became
the first Taiwanese technology firm to list in Hong Kong; in 1999, it announced a deal with National Semiconductor
to build an Internet-access device it called the iPAD (Internet Personal Access Device).
It was really a stripped-down PC, with a bulky CRT ( cathode ray tube) monitor, a slow-ish chip and running a very
basic version of Microsoft Windows. Yang told Reuters in a recent interview that Proview had dedicated significant
resources to develop its iPAD, whose design could later be found in now-defunct Compaq's iPAQ Internet Device.
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