At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon. Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the Statement Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day? There are other considerations: every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car; occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on; occasionally, executing a common maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too; you could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought Car95 or CarNT. But, then you would have to buy more seats; Macintosh would make a car that came fully loaded with optional equipment, was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would have do no advertising and have no dealerships; the Macintosh car owners would be required by their employers to get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower; the oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single general car default warning light which would come on only when it was too late to fix the problem; buying a new set of tires would also require one to buy multiple other accessories or the car wouldn’t run properly; the airbag system would say are you sure? before going off; the re-sale value would drop 75% as soon as you drove out of the showroom and would be $0.00 within two years – trade ins. Forget about it!; for service you would have to call a toll free number and select the proper number for the repair you wish to have done. An automated voice would walk you through the step to repair the car yourself and when that didn’t work refer you to the company that sold the gas for the car.
