We are all aware of the awesome rate of change in the computer world and have seen comparisons of the type "what if the xyz industry had progressed as rapidly as computers recent decades?"

The following is a lightly edited letter to the editor from the April 6, 1998, issue of Journal of Alaska Business and Commerce, which itself was cribbed from some unnamed source, which ...  Well, you get the idea.  Enjoy!

At a recent COMDEX computer exposition, Bill Gates 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 $25 cars that got 1,000 mpg."

General Motors responded to this comment by releasing the statement: "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"  GM elaborated further:

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, and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a 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.
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 more seats.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5% of the roads.
6. Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower.
7. The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size rear end.
9. The airbag system would say "are you sure?" before going off.
10. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.