Tuesday, August 7, 2007

What if Microsoft built cars?

At a computer expo (COMDEX) a few years ago, 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 1000mi/gal."

General Motors addressed this comment by releasing their own statement "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?", and offered the following comparisons:

  1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

  2. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart the car and drive on.

  3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to reinstall the whole engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too.

  4. 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 and install more seats.

  5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was perfectly reliable, ran five times faster, and was twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5% of the roads.

  6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars run much slower, and begin to crash.

  7. The red "oil", "gas" and "alternator" warning lights would be replaced by a single blue "general protection fault" warning light.

  8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butts.

  9. The airbag system would ask "are you sure?" before going off.

  10. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what caused it, or what you can do to prevent subsequent crashes from occurring in the future.

    And more

  11. When you applied the brakes, a panel on the dashboard would light up saying "Are you sure you want to stop?"

  12. Sometimes a message would appear on the dash saying " The gearbox cannot access the differential - do you wish to - CONTINUE - RETRY - ABORT ?

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