Been there, done that, remember trying to install a math co-pro on a 286, bent a few of the leg pins on it, trying to shove it in the slot, straightened them out with pliers and wow, my machine still worked and did calc’s much faster. Those were the days when the machine could grind all night and spit out an answer in the morning, today I can do the same job in less than 10 minutes of computing time.

GM might go the way of the Hudson Hornet, Desoto or the Henry J.

Then again, remember Chrysler took out and paid back the largest loan ever paid back in corporate history and they did it ahead of schedule.

Never say die till they shovel dirt on your face and even then you can always come back and haunt them.

Which is likely to happen if America loses it’s domestic car manufacturing base.

The GM Mark of Excellent on the chopping block? Really? Kick it when it’s down? How short can our memories be?

GM was there in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and in the Gulf War. Was Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Suburu, BMW, Lamborgini, Chery etc. there? I don’t think so!

All the products mentioned here are the legitiment children of GM.

The industries I worked in over the years had Asian, European, South American, and Middle East contacts that came to America to become famialized with American technology to take back to their respective countries so that they could copy American industry with cutting edge technology to compete with their American benefactors.

Gm stood up to foriegn threats and competition, internal strife between platforms and unions, big government and suppliers whose products many times did not measure up to the specifications contracted for.

While GM carried on business as usual on many fronts, it’s employees paid w/h, fica, and medi tax while GM paid its trust taxes.

Where are the many industries that benefitted from GM’s apron strings? I’ll tell you!

Shuttered because American industry was no less pirated by offshore vendors that ignored the human aspect of mfg. and saturated our economy with sweat shop labor products.

The government opened the corral gates to the financial industry and foreign competition while putting a straight jacket on its cash cow– GM and its peers.

The government insists that GM and its peers compete with foreign competition on its terms; no mention of standards placed on the foreign competition.

Government has helped itself to all the goodies that hard working people provided for them over the years. Government doesn’t work for its keep; its given to it by hard working citizens.

Taxes are free for the government to do with as they please; they just give it all away and bragg about how great their deeds are!

History won’t let us forget the Titanic; history won’t let us forget GM either.

When we needed GM, GM answered the call; now when we apparently don’t need GM and its peers, we label it a “DINASOUR”, place it on an ice float and push it out to sea to go down into the deep six!!! BULLSHIT!!!!

Bob of Michigan, organisms, and organizations, adapt or die. There is nothing sacred about GM, or any other industry.

Detroit became so unresponsive to customer needs, and exquisitely attuned to labor demands, that it continued to create the only products that could (for a long while…now at an end)generate enough margin to cover truly extravagent employment (and especially post employment retiree medical and pension benefit) packages.

When most other employers began (long ago) scrapping the idea that we all deserve nice early retirements (with fat benefit defined pensions and fully covered medical, Detroit (and it’s complicit partners in greed) didn’t understand that the world was changing.

Why would Americans continue to buy poorly constructed gas guzzling Detroit behemoths when they could purchase an array of other automotive products that were the exact opposite? So Detroit and the UAW could continue to live in a fantasy world? I’m afraid for you, my friend, that the party is over. Like the rest of us, deal with it. Calling up alleged past glories won’t do a thing to get us out of this mess.

Why would taxpayers support a hand-out that appears to perpetuate, for a relative small segment of America, a dream that they will never realize? Most of us are stuck with plummeting contribution defined retirement futures, and staggering medical premium costs.

Now, the industry could try to encourage protectionist legislation, as industry has successfully done before (which by the way is considered one of the major blunders enacted during the 1929-1935 depression era), or it could adapt. I’m personally not very optimistic that it will manage to do so….its world view is too entrenched.

Bing,

I think you need to see this move by the magazine as a good thing. The message and the ideas you brought to the masses about the digital world (in analog form) have been heard and put into practice. You may see it as a cannibalistic move, but it had to be the ultimate goal and plan.

I’m not going to comment on the GM rants below but I think GM has separate issues. GM got complacent, bloated and out of touch. This is forced change not because they did their job but because they refused to. Capitalism rewards those who produce products the market wants/needs…let’s not forget that. The big 3 have an opportunity to re-invent the auto industry and they are to afraid to do so.

In the half decade just prior to the PC halcyon days you are reminiscing about, I worked for a CAD/CAM system developer. There offerings ran on IBM mainframes and were written in Fortran and Assembler. I was a technical guy assigned to marketing in a position informally referred to as a demo jock. Multi-million dollar system sales often hinged on the performance of the demo jock in hotly contested system benchmarks. We were the magicians that made the software do things even the developers hadn’t thought about.

We were treated like rock stars. We were paid more than the programmers who wrote the software and we travelled the world. Over a five year span, I filled all the pages of a ten-year passport and had to have an accordion insert added to it. Those pages rapidly filled as well. I learned a lot by that world travel and have always been grateful for being in the right place at the right time so that I could seize that particular opportunity.

Once I had to go to Brazil on business. My flights took me from Seattle to New York, where I would then connect to a non-stop to Rio de Janeiro. When I got to New York, I was advised that business class was full and I was being upgraded to first. I had a seat on the upper deck of a Boeing 747. There were no other seats within a radius of eight feet of mine. Each seat was an island of its own. They were the most luxurious accommodations I ever had, before or since, on a flight.

That flight was on Pan Am. It’s long gone now. So is the company I worked for. So are all the old rock star demo jocks. I still make decent money in the computer business and I still travel, though mostly domestic nowadays—compacted into aging aircraft with ragged seats and burned-out flight attendants.

And that, my friend Bing, is the way life goes. Time passes, the world gets more crowded and the bloom goes off the rose.

Should people be able to buy what they believe is a better product?
And not buy what they believe is not?
Should certain businesses survive for reasons other than business reasons?
If government gives a huge amount of money to big business should government oversee how that money is managed? (Mr. Gorbachev, put your hand down.)
Will not the world continue to beat a path to the door of whatever company currently makes the better mousetrap?

I agree, much is hard to fathom and tends to make the head hurt.

Let me clarify my intention of speaking up for the “DINASOUR” (GM).

In my mind, I am concerned that the U.S.A. is the target and the supposed “DINASOUR”.

My concern extends to the possibility that “AMERICA” is looked at as a “DINASOUR”, out of touch, out if sight, and out of mind; ready to be placed on an ice float, pushed out to sea, and join the “TITANIC” at the bottom of the sea. America’s problems transcend the issues of the “BIG THREE”; but we must find a place to begin the process of reconstruction.

Darwin’s picture is not pretty; some will call Dr. Kevorkian: some will call Dr. Phil!

Does my unbridled enthusiasm for argument (often mistaken for hostility) and total lack of civility drive people away from the blog? If so, I’m sorry. I thought its purpose was to stimulate discussion, not necessarily agreement. I will refrain from ‘ranting’ like a demented pitbull if only you’ll all come back.

Bing, perhaps the only decent thing to do is to start deleting my posts…but then, I’m probably just flattering myself.

i remember my talking whiz kid and my speak and spell. I don’t know what i am going to do without Lehman brothers lol.

Mike, I don’t think the rant comment was meant for you. For arguments sake I don’t think the big 3 were nimble enough to react in time to the rising oil prices and the fickle market switch to efficient vehicles. They got caught with no answer to hybrids and everyone blamed their faults and entrenched world views. Although I can say with confidence, many of the people at GM believe Detroit to be a very “cosmopolitan city”…that does reinforce your argument and goes against the majority world, national or state views.

Times have changed. At least PC Magazine didn’t go away. They just changed. If you can’t change you go away. GM are you listening this time?

How sad. I used to get about 4 computer mags each time I went to the store. Dvorak was my favorite and I read his articles first. I learned BASIC on a VIC20 using COMPUTE, COMPUTE GAZETTE and AHOY. When I heard about a new supercomputer that will cost about $10,000 it reminded me of the drooling I used to do over 486DXs in those magazines and how they were much more than $10,000.

I now use Linux (Ubuntu) to enjoy the thrills of having something besides the usual MS.

The thrill of those large magazines are gone.