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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."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: if GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they painted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to re-install the engine.
4. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
5. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
6. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
7. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car''s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Dept.
8. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
9. You''d press the "start" button to shut off the engine.
To add...
10. Every time you wanted to add or remove a part to your car or play a CD, a message would come up on the car window-screen prompting you if you really want to do the action and thus obstruct your view causing you to crash!
cmatcme
Blue Screen errors which u get every time?
13. GM would no longer be subject to government recalls for automobiles that work unreliably or intermittently. GM would be released of all liability for poor workmanship and GM would not be subject to lawsuits on behalf of private litigants that were injured by the cars' failure.
14. GM would be allowed to copy the designs of Ferrari, Porsche, BMW, Mazeratti and Lamborghini for their own models.
15. All GM cars would still have a manual transmission, manual brakes and manual steering.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
Nah! Let me reprase that.
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Apple would brand a reliable car as Macintosh, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive on 95 % of the roads, but still market it at twice the cost of competitors. So they wont have to 'service' 95 % of the driving lemmings, zombies, drones, clones ...
Information Week should get 10 years of back royalties for this joke.
I think Mr Bill will pay it :) happily
17. GM sports models would offer optional legal one-handed steering.
19. You would not own the car, but would only have the right to use it, as long as you are the only person using it. A long and wordy EULA would reveal this fact, but would only be available once you had paid for the car, and started the car for the first time. If you weren't happy with this, you could not return the car under any circumstance. If you bought the car from a major dealer, you would never even see this EULA.
20. Since you don't own the car, you can never resell it.
21. Violation of terms 18 and 20 could lead to prosecution.
22. GM would fund, along with Ford and Daimler/Chrysler a group called the Car Users Aliance, whose primary purpose would be to prosecute violations of 18 and 20.
22. GM would encourage your disgruntled aquaintances/coworkers to turn you in for these violations by running commercials suggesting in no uncertain terms that if you knew someone who had lent their car to someone, or who had resold it, or who was using one of their cars without a license in the first place, you should call this toll free number and turn them in.
23. If fleet owners accidentally forgot to purchase a license to run a few cars, they would be subject to enormous, and for all practical purposes, impossible to appeal, fines.
24. Fleet owners would also be allowed to lease trucks, but each truck would be limited by how many warehouse workers were allowed to load and unload material from the trucks. Violations of this license would be quite severe. These trucks had a long history of mechanical problems, but looked very much like the fleet cars, so middle level fleet purchasing decision makers felt comfortable using them. And if you didn't also lease such trucks, it was a bit harder to run your fleet of cars.
25. Unsatisfied with the above restrictions, GM would start marketing to fleet leasers a new plan, which would allow the fleet leasers to get a new, upgraded car when one was released, but if they stopped paying the lease fees, the cars would stop working, although you could still get in them.
26. As these rules grew increasingly more onerous, fleet owners would begin to take increasingly serious looks at companies that offered cars which they would not only get to own outright, but could duplicate at will. These companies made their money by offering service contracts for varying periods of time. Such cars were based on open, free standards, and could be made by anybody, and were by and large interoperable. The cars are slightly less flexible, and a little harder to use of course. But the trucks are very solid, and have used tried and true engineering principles for many years, they are mechanically superior, and are very easy to work on for skilled mechanics. Oddly, in the shops where the mechanics got a voice in deciding which trucks to buy, they almost always chose the non gm trucks, especially for certain uses, such as supplying company stores, where for some reason GM trucks had a notorious history of unreliability, and could be stolen by any kid with a paperclip to hotwire it. Once stolen, the kids would also have access to most of the store's financial and customer records. Non gm trucks are much harder to steal, since all their locks are built into the truck by design. The GM locks were added more as an afterthought, and there were many more different ways you could steal this truck, so GM had to keep adding new locks whenever kids found new ways to steal their trucks. GM cars didn't even come with locks at all until 2000, and the first practical GM trucks only came with locks as of about 1997.
28. Every time you'd want to turn it off you'd have site in their for 10 minutes waiting for the "goodbye" tune to pointlessly play and finish.
29. People would have fun hacking into your cars without even knowing who you are.
Make it 30
