If Microsoft made cars

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Any other suggestions?

Regards.

Please stop.

Is it 1997 again?

In a choice between Vistamax, Unixmax, or MacMax I choose Vistamax.

Your Vistamax GT Radio has been automatically tuned into Microsoft Live.

In order to start your Vistamax GT you will need to first activate your vehicle online.

Vistamax GT has detected you have a dirty windscreen. Windows Wiper 2.10.1988.22.108997-B3 will now start. You will be unable to use your vehicle until it has completed.

An old one:-

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 (by Mr. Welch himself):

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 repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
4. 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 reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the highways.
7. The oil, water temperature 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 butt.
9. The airbag system would say: "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. Occasionally, and 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 grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. 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% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. 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.
13. You'd press the "Start" button to shut off the engine.

microsoft are a lot like Toyota who make pretty bland generic no thrills functional appliance cars. Don't appeal much to enthusiasts who actually enjoy driving itself and want to do more than just go from A-B.

You're kidding right? Every single MS product is bloated and jammed full of unnecessary extras designed to make nice eye-candy at the expense of usability or system specs.

Windows is like a Hummer - hugely expensive, requires an engine the size of a planet, and delivers very very average performance.

Who REALLY needs transparent 3d windows? I'd rather save a few GB on the install and most of my CPU's power and just have a blank page with some icons on it that sodding well work when you run them, and don't require a PC with more power than god just to run a very average game because most of the power is being sapped by the OS.

as mr. Vorderman said..

well the windows i look out of in the real 3d world are usually transparent. I can see my garden,cool! ;-]

I see you have just crashed into a tree.
Would you like me to deploy the Air bag?

Your car is running on Win95 RON fuel
For optimal performance MS recommend you use PREMIUM

This is the first time you are driving the car.
Let MS take you for a guided tour


You do not have sufficient priviledges to change the spark plugs


Attempted to stop off at MacDonalds. Access Denied!
Contact your employer


We hope you enjoyed your trip to Scunthorpe
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if MS made cars, you'd get the message
Your doomed passengers may get enough time to scream "try ctrl-alt-delete!!!" in unison as you plunge off the cliff.

or how about:


:)

hey, I think your onto something there:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6405701.stm

lol

LOL!!

either way you're not going anywhere :)

Toyota make large, boring, overweight cars that completely disengage drivers from the road. They scrapped all their sports cars and now only really make generic commuter cars.

Just because they are successful doesn't make them all that good. Once upon a time they were pretty interesting and noted for their reliability and decent construction. Most of that reputation is built on past success.

BTW, for the most reliable cars, toyota came a distant 3rd place.

An independant study by a automotive warranty specialist that covered 450,000 cars from 33 manufacturers, across the UK and USA, aged 3 - 9 years old the percentages of cars with faults over that period were as follows.

Results are pretty interesting. Was surprised about the jump from 2nd to 3rd place.

Manufacturer Incidence Rate %

1 Mazda 8.04%

2 Honda 8.90%

3 Toyota 15.78%

4 Mitsubishi 17.04%

5 Kia 17.39%

6 Subaru 18.46%

7 Nissan 18.86%

8 Lexus 20.05%

9 Mini 21.90%

10 Citroen 25.98%

11 Daewoo 26.30%

12 Hyundai 26.36%

13 Peugeot 26.59%

14 Ford 26.76%

15 Suzuki 27.20%

16 Porsche 27.48%

17 Fiat 28.49%

18 BMW 28.64%

19 Vauxhall 28.77%

20 Mercedes 29.90%

21 Rover 30.12%

22 Volvo 31.28%

23 Volkswagen 31.44%

24 Jaguar 32.05%

25 Skoda 32.12%

26 Chrysler 34.90%

27 Audi 36.74%

28 Seat 36.87%

29 Renault 36.87%

30 Alfa Romeo 39.13%

31 Saab 41.59%

32 LandRover 44.21%

33 Jeep 46.36%

So you agree that the analogy is appropriate?

yeah, MS make a boring OS that works for the masses, but doesn't offer anything particularly interesting that would get an enthusiast excited.

So the OS market is quite similar to auto manufacturers in that regard.

Wonder how much longer it will be before they put the brakes on 'tweaking' the O/S or allowing un-assigned software to run on it?

Just like the modern cars with their engine management systems. Gone are the days when you could tinker under bonnet. Trying to do that now will invalidate your warranty or disable the car completely.

MS already have UAC in place, ELUA clauses which state "you are prohibited from modifying the O/S to overcome technical limitations", as well as the "We don't know what this program is. It must be really bad!" warning messages.

They still make the MR2, a small sports car.


And the Yaris - boring yes, but hardly large or overweight.


That list suggests they are still reliable, just that Honda and Mazda are better. Hardly a bad place to be. With the likes of BMW, VW, Porsche, Audi and Mercedes having over twice as many warrantly claims I would suggest that Toyota are still doing it right.

MR2 was discontinued in 2005
Celica discontinued
Supra discontinued.

and all the other cars like the camry have had the sportiness taken out of them. Yaris is lightweight, but its just a generic potter around town car.

0-60 in about seconds is too slow for safe freeway driving in the states where freeway ramps are too short and your often merging into 70 - 80mph traffic..

You think that's bad, here's one from iTunes:

Hands up anyone who's using iTunes to run any nuclear facilities.

I can't find the "Run nuclear station" option in the menus. Did that feature get dropped?

I can see the "Produce Weapons of mass destruction" option but its disabled. Spoil sports!! ..

well there we go, now i know what was written in the dossier bush and blair had before they invaded Iraq?

something like:

"MI5/CIA has evidence,that Saddam Hussein,uses iTunes version 6,though,intelligence suggests he will have version 7 capabilities within 6 months,which cannot be tolerated"

The fact is that no one would buy a car with the sort of restrictions built into it that we put up with in software. When you think how much it costs in plant and machinery to produce a car compared with a piece of software and then look at how much money MS has made from windows why aren't there more choices? Is it that an OS is so incredibly complicated that only a tiny handful of extremely gifted programmers are able to make one? Linux shows that it is possible to produce an alternative OS for the PC so why aren't there more of them? My Atari ST from c.1989 had a GEM desktop - everything appeared in windows - when the PC was still using a CLI - so presumeably Microsoft didn't invent the idea of using windows even if they were the first to trademark the name. Anyone know why we don't have more choices?
Regards.

Microsoft was locked in as the leader because they are cheaper than mac, known to exist (unlike linux to the masses) and because they were at the top when everyone bought their first computer to look at internet porn about 5-10 years ago.

They will continue to be at the top, until the average computer user knows the difference. Which they don't.

Lately I realized, if you buy one of the not so cheap vista distros, you gonna pay more for the OS than for the machine.

Probably it's really time to support alternative OSes. I stopped smoking, so why shouldn't I stop using MS?

I won't use anything else till the software I invested in works on the other platforms. The cost of windows is inexpensive compared to many of the other things that run on my puter.

Don't see why I should have to invest time and money into learning new software and OS when I don't need to. At the end of the day Windows and OSX are expensive, and open source OS's have no support and require too much effort.

As a Microsoft-hating but Microsoft-using individual, here's one from my friend Clippy:

http://www.vaxer.net/~jeeves/AssistedSuicide.html

If Microsoft made a car it would be a buggy