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Claim: General Motors issues caustic press release in response to Bill Gates' comparison of advances in computing to the automotive industry.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
Origins: Jokes sometimes take the long way around on their journeys from mere humor to "this really happened" tales. The basic premise of this gag — the computer industry's touting advances in computing technology by comparing them to the automotive industry is met by a stinging rejoinder from car manufacturers — began life as a mere three-line joke at least as far back as early 1997:
There's word in business circles that the computer industry likes to measure itself against the Big Three auto-makers. The comparison goes this way: If automotive technology had kept pace with Silicon Valley, motorists could buy a
As typically happens in the urban legend cycle, within months a generic tale that invoked types of businesses had been transformed into a version that attributed it to the biggest and most well-known corporate representatives of those businesses: "the computer industry" became Bill Gates of Microsoft, and "Detroit" was replaced with "General Motors":
At a 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/gallon." Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement : "Yeah, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"
By 1998, someone had taken the evolving joke and tacked on a list of humorous comparisons between Microsoft software and the auto industry, one which played on consumer perceptions of Microsoft as a greedy, rapacious producer of flawed software incompatible with other vendors' products:
At a recent 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 1,000 miles per gallon."
These "even scarier" thoughts were formalized into a numbered list of points General Motors should have made in their imaginary press release issued in response to an apocryphal Bill Gates comment:
Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement: "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?" What's scarier is that if Microsoft had gone into automobile manufacturing and dominated the industry as they normally do, then we'd have to deal with the following: Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to 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. 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 The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower. The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors should have issued a press release stating: "If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
And from there it was a short step to: "Here's what the CEO of General Motors himself actually said in press release":
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release (by
(Actually, Jack Welch was the chairman of General Electric, not General Motors. The chairman of General Motors was Jack Smith.)
Although this piece now circulates as a "true" story complete with specific details of person and place, it's still nothing more than an evolving joke that someone decided would be funnier if it were put in the mouth of a real, well-known person. Last updated: 12 August 2005 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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