Bill Gates: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry ....

[Scuba]

Bill Gates: "If GM had dept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

But Bill, if the automotive industry had developed technology like Microsoft ....

1. A couple of times a week, for no apparent reason, your car would crash.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.

3. At random, doing things like making 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. The oil, coolant temperature, alternator and low tire pressure warning lights would be replaced with by a single "general default" light.

5. You car doors would occasionally refuse to open until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

6. The airbags would say "Are you sure" before firing.

7. Every time a new model year came out, buyers would have to learn to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate like the old models.

8. All GM buyers would also be required to buy a complete set of Rand McNally road maps (GM subsidiary) whether they wanted them or not. If you didn't keep the maps in the car, your vehicle's performance would diminish by half.

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

10. If you wanted to take passengers with you in the car, they would each need to buy their own seats, with would be non-transferrable.

11. When you wanted to shut off the engine, you'd press the "start" button.

[Renew Deal]

1. Gates is correct

[hollysmom]

6. and all our cars would be made out of this country by non-union workers in buildings

with nets out side as people try to commit suicide - not union workers.

Right now I am a bit concerned about cars being hacked.

[we can do it]

8. I haven't seen a computer for $25, so why would a car be that cheap?

He's an ass.

[Renew Deal]

10. You can get computers for a $1

http://www.verizonwireless.com/smartphones/iphone-5-certified-pre-owned

And yes, iPhones are computers. But that's not the point. The point is that computer technology has advanced faster and become cheaper faster than cars. Cars are more or less the same for the last 70 years. There have been improvements to performance, safety, etc, but no fundamental changes. We can't even get off of gas.

[raccoon]

2. Recd. thanks for posting this. nt

[BlueJazz]

3. I like and enjoy most operating systems but with the kind of work I do, I need,,,

...a "Standard" like Windows. Photoshop and Pixinsight work wonderful with Windows plus I get to buy expensive Video cards.

[NNadir]

4. Hilarious. Thanks.

[CBGLuthier]

5. Cute old joke about windows but not really as true as it used to be.

I have not had my computer crash in ages. BTW, since most cars have "computers" in them now they are quite capable of running like shit themselves.

[Initech]

7. I'm a system builder. You know what the single biggest cause of PC failure is?

It's power supplies. Get a good one and you'll never have to worry about hardware failure. Get a cheap, junk power supply and that can lead to all kinds of problems down the road.

[csziggy]

9. Years ago a science fiction story took it even farther

Back in the days before Windows when Apple was just another small computer manufacturer, no bigger than Atari, Sinclair, Radio Shack, Texas Instrument or Commodore. Every brand of computer and usually different models even of the same brand used a different operating system. Atari computers were tops for graphics, Commodores for business, Apple was best for education, etc.

The main idea of the story was that if cars were made like computers, they would run on different fuels, would have to use roads with ruts of different widths (sort of like proprietary railroad tracks), and would have completely different ways to steer them and to read the instruments on the dashboard.

It was a cute story and I wish I remembered who wrote it - but it's been forty years since I read it and I disposed of my science fiction magazine collection twenty years ago. Since that story came out long before this list came out on the internet, I wonder if the list were generated by someone who vaguely remembered the story but wanted to update it for Windows.

On the other hand, my sister recently discovered that my parents stored Dad's Commodore 64 computer every since the disk drives stopped working sometime in the mid-1980s. And Mom still had the TI-99 Dad gave her for Christmas the first year they came out in 1979 - even though she never took it out of the box. I wonder if the TI-99 would work if we plugged it in?

[Taitertots]

11. He is totally right in the stupidest way possible

Because there is no good reason to assume that cars could/should "keep up with technology like the computer industry".