Amelio consolidated Lenovo’s suppliers and factories and narrowed the product line. He signed up resellers to hawk Lenovo desktops and laptops in Europe, and for the first time, the company made money in every geographic region in which it does business. Lenovo’s net profit for the fiscal year ending March 31 shot up to $161 million, from $22 million the year before.

But PC manufacturing remains a tough business, thanks to constant price cutting. One sign of how intense the competition is: In April, with yearly profits up 625 percent, Amelio laid off 1,400 workers to further streamline operations.

China is betting on Lenovo, but not all Chinese think it’s a lock. Tech entrepreneur Jack Zhang, who runs the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, has his doubts. We meet in a restaurant in a tiny courtyard deep in an old Beijing alleyway, a place chosen, apparently, for its atmosphere. The customers dine at folding card tables, seated on plastic stools in primary colors. Zhang uses his chopsticks to pull a chunk of flaky white fish out of the metal chafing dish on the table. The spicy vegetables and peppers smothering the fish could make one’s tonsils combust. After noticing the sweat beading on my forehead, Zhang points at pieces of something red and says, “Yeah, don’t eat those.”

Zhang’s site, Zhanzuo.com, has 3 million members, he tells me. It is funded, in part, by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. In a loose white shirt and jeans, with tousled hair and a Clark Gable-esque glint in his eye, Zhang has the air of a business swashbuckler.

His generation, he explains, thinks of Lenovo the way Steve Jobs thought of I.B.M. a couple of decades ago. Lenovo is big and slow and makes commodity hardware that, these days, is about as thrilling as plumbing fixtures. “The real excitement in China is not Lenovo,” Zhang says. “It’s companies like us, or Baidu”—a Chinese internet search firm. He could have added Chinese internet game company NetEase or local instant-messaging giant Tencent Holdings. These ventures attracted outside investors, took wing with the hypergrowth of China’s internet industry, and went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.

Zhang doesn’t sound all that interested in whether Lenovo will have an Olympic breakout. And that raises a legitimate question: Can any firm ignite consumer lust—or can that only happen when a company strikes a new market at the right moment? Sony nailed miniaturization; Nokia, mobility; Toyota, small cars in the wake of an oil crisis; and Google, instant information. Lenovo addresses only existing, mature markets. Even Amelio admits that PCs, desktop computers, and corporate servers are treated mostly as tools—necessary gear for life in the 21st century.

Although there have been exceptions: Starbucks didn’t invent coffee.

Amelio used to wrestle for Lehigh University, and at 49 he still has the bearing of a guy who might enjoy pile-driving an opponent into the mat. He has a short, neat beard and eyes that lock onto whomever he’s talking to like a sniper’s laser sight. On this day, he’s wearing a light-blue dress shirt—no jacket—with a wild red tie that could’ve been designed by Pablo Picasso and Jerry Garcia. He always seems to speak in an even, friendly tone, yet it’s one that conveys absolute certainty.

He has that same burnished-steel confidence in his voice as he talks about Lenovo’s current challenge: pushing consumer PCs and laptops into the U.S. market starting in early 2008.

Lenovo does well in the United States selling ThinkPad laptops directly to businesses, but the company sells no consumer-oriented computers in the U.S., and there’s no indication that retailers are dying to clear shelf space for them. The big gorilla of computer retailing, Best Buy, has “no immediate plans” to carry Lenovo consumer PCs, though “the door is always open,” says spokesman Jeff Dudash. Forrester Research analyst Simon Yates, who follows Lenovo and the rest of the PC industry, says, “You’ve got to have a stomach of steel to go into the U.S. consumer retail market.” Lenovo is still negotiating with sellers and will have to offer them unique products, deep discounts, consumer rebates, and some reason to believe its PCs will move off shelves faster than those of established brands. Forrester’s research indicates that Lenovo probably has the money and savvy to gain a retail foothold in America, but probably not in 2008.

Lenovo also runs no consumer ad campaigns in the United States and has little brand recognition. Consider the potential for confusion: In Western markets, some versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad X60 still have an I.B.M. logo in the bottom-right corner. As part of the merger, Lenovo acquired the right to take up to five years to complete the transition from the I.B.M. brand to Lenovo—which means that many ThinkPad owners have no idea who really made their laptops.

In China, the situation is flipped. Lenovo owns more than 30 percent of the market and sells a broad line of consumer desktop and laptop computers under the Lenovo label. ThinkPad is the stepchild brand.