Why Taiwan Matters?

The International Cover Story of the latest Business Week is "Why Taiwan Matters?". It strikes me immediately as this is the question I am thinking all the time. Basically, this article is discussing about Taiwan's important role in the global economy and the obstacles it's facing, mainly the cross-strait issues. However, the part that strikes me the most is "China may threaten Taiwan as No. 1 IT supplier. But for now it's Taiwanese engineers who provide ever-more-ingenious solutions to manufacturing and design conundrums. "In Taiwan, people say the U.S. understanding of outsourcing is backward," says Victor Zue, co-director of the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. "It feels more like the Taiwanese are outsourcing marketing and branding to the rest of the world.". It brought me to my questions I got after back from CeBIT.

What's Taiwan's role in this global marketplace? How to maintain its leading position and even create more competencies to sustain this leadership? How can I contribute to my country, Taiwan, on this? Seems it all points to the answers, marketing and branding, which we are lacking of. According to the article, there are only 2 major brands from Taiwan, BenQ and Acer, concentrating its efforts on building up the brands. All of us know this route is very tough as it costs a lot of money and efforts but we all agree that this is the way out for Taiwan. It makes me start wondering if I should go back to join my follow people in this war and bring Taiwan to the next level.

However, I haven't accomplish my mission here. I have spend the past three years working on my babe, RANGER. This is even a tougher fight as its objectives is the same as BenQ and Acer that we want to build up the brand name but we are at a much smaller scale and with very little resources. However, I just can't let go and leave all my previous efforts into waste. I give myself maximum another one and half a year on RANGER and I would need to make it self-sustainable before I need to go back home. It's like mothers who would not just give up their babes easily and want to raise them until they can live by themselves. What a big dream to me at this moment!!