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Leaping from a chair in his sparsely decorated office, Safi U. Qureshey grabs a felt-tipped pen and maps out his vision for the future of AST Research Inc., the deeply troubled computer manufacturer he helped found 15 years ago.
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Scrawling diagrams on a white drawing board, he describes a world in which computer manufacturers such as AST will increasingly link arms with software publishers, on-line services and entertainment companies. PC makers with sterling reputations, he says, could make millions by exploiting their products' brand names.
"There were 1.5 million PC users last year who saw AST on their machines every day," Qureshey said in an interview late last week. "Whether you believe it or not, that is a franchise."
He may be right. After all, Qureshey is widely regarded as a visionary, an industrial philosopher capable of recognizing the shape of markets in years to come.
But for now, AST's well-being is far more dependent on what happens next week or next month, points in time that Qureshey seems less able to anticipate.
Once known as a company that made bold moves and forced others to play catch-up, AST has in recent years become slow-footed and clumsy.
When Compaq and other computer manufacturers dropped their prices last month, for example, AST stood by and watched.
At the company's Irvine headquarters, top executives mulled over how to respond to the price cuts for weeks. Torn between doing nothing and losing market share, or cutting prices and taking another earnings hit after a year of whopping losses, the company was paralyzed. As one AST executive said, "Nobody wanted to pull the trigger."
How could a once-aggressive company become so gun-shy?
The answer, according to company insiders and industry analysts, has a lot to do with the man wearing the holster.
Qureshey, one of three immigrants who founded the company in 1980, probably deserves more credit than anyone for building AST from a tiny start-up into the seventh-largest PC manufacturer in the United States, with $2.5 billion in worldwide revenue. But with the departure of the other co-founders in recent years, AST has increasingly reflected the strengths and weaknesses of its chief executive.
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Current and former executives at the company portray Qureshey as keenly intelligent,...
