Edible Apple

There’s a fine line between being a dreamer and utterly delusional, and Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci probably falls somewhere in no-mans land.

In an interview with Digitimes at a recent New York press conference, Lanci expressed confidence that Acer tablet PCs will supplant the iPad as the dominant tablet in the market within 2-3 years.

While iPad has gained successful sales performance and good market response, Apple is centered around the US market with a significant leading status, but its competitive strength may not play out in emerging and other markets, this is the opportunity for Acer. Sales of iPad pushed forward very fast initially, but have slowed down in the past few weeks.

Hmm, this is all sounding eerily familiar. Didn’t a slew of companies try and topple the iPod back in the day, reasoning that more affordable MP3 players would eventually garner enough marketshare to finally dethrone Apple’s iconic music player? Yeah, that didn’t quite work out as planned.

Moreover, how is Lanci privy to iPad sales figures. Have iPad sales slowed down in the past few weeks? Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea, and neither does Lanci. What we do know, however, is that consumer interest in the iPad as at an all-time high and Apple, by all accounts, is poised to sell a boatload of them this holiday shopping season. Remember, the iPad was released this past April and this is the first holiday season of its young existence.

Commenting on the difference between PC’s and tablet devices, Lanci opines:

The differences are, firstly there is no standard platform for tablet PCs; secondly the integration of platforms with content is essential, and this is the reason Acer will keep expanding our software R&D staff, and why we have announced our “alive” online content platform which will improve the user experience and increase loyalty to Acer. Because content should be localized, we will have teams responsible for providing localized content services in each country. Compared with competitors, Acer has the advantage that our annual shipments of 40-50 million PCs are large enough to attract content providers into negotiations. We hope our tablet PCs can reach a global market share of 10-20% initially, and become the market leader in 2-3 years.

You can’t deny his enthusiasm or confidence, but we won’t be buying Acer stock anytime soon.