There is a conspiracy theory that MS kept supporting Apple even in its darkest days just to prevent a possible monopoly lawsuit.
It wasn't a rumour - it was a fact. Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple shares to help prop up Apple back in 1997, when Apple looked like it was circling the drain.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
I suspect a lot of us can't even remember our yahoo account details... we just used them as a source of throw-away emails before discovering mailinator, etc.
The same could probably be said for gmail and hotmail... some site wants you to register, you don't want lots of spam, you quickly register an account, then ignore it.
In the end, it still means the death of yahoo. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Welcome to the search/advertising duopoly; duopolies, because of their lessened competition, end up costing end-users more, and it's not like google doesn't already set an artificial floor price for all their adwords.
Guess you missed the illegal and anti-competitive actions that got Microsoft the anti-trust fines in the first place. They *did* force people to carry only their products, going back to MS-DOS vs DR-DOS.
Hey, it's all good. Toyota will probably make a profit in the last half of their financial year, so their annual loss won't be so bad, and return to profitability by 2012. GM, on the other hand, certainly won't be paying back those bail-out "loans", and may still end up in a second bk. I know people who will never again buy a GM or Chrysler, even at half-off. Screw me once, shame on you - screw me twice... and we've all been screwed by bailing out GM management. And the banks management.
GM's 2008 4th-quarter loss was 9.6 Billion. GM's 2009 1st-quarter loss was 6 Billion Your $2 billion was for one MONTH.
DETROIT - General Motors Corp. lost $6 billion in the first quarter and its revenue was cut nearly in half as car buyers feared the wounded auto giant would enter bankruptcy and no longer honor its warranties.
The Detroit-based company also said it spent $10.2 billion more cash than it took in from January through March, mainly because revenue dropped by a staggering $20 billion, or 47 percent.
When I bought mine, I was told the cancellation fee would be pro-rated depending on how long I had the phone. $20/month to a maximum of 20 months (I didn't buy low-end).
They didn't actually make a profit in 93. What they did is known as "channel stuffing."
Last fall, to reach its goal of posting a profit for 1993, Saturn slashed its advertising after it added a new, third crew of workers to raise production at its assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. Partly as a result, dealer inventories soared in January above a 100-day supply.
In other words, GM decided to try to cook the books (and inflate its' stock value) by forcing dealers to carry MUCH more inventory than was financially sound. The SEC doesn't like this; you may recall that Corel did the same thing, lost investor confidence, and then ended up circling the drain. Chrysler is another company that did this as it lurched towards bankruptcy.
Channel stuffing in order to show a profit when GAAP would show a loss (ie: you don't make reserves for the discounts and incentives you'll have to pay out to move the goods you artificially stuffed into the channel) tends to piss off the SEC. More importantly, it weakens your dealer network (siphoning off cash from your dealers to pay the carrying costs of the bloated inventory), weakens your business in the next year (too much inventory means more incentives for "inventory clearances"), and is a sign that you aren't able to properly forecast demand so your figures shouldn't be trusted in the future.
if you buy a cheap second hand car and then put a $50,000 sound system in it, you still have a cheap second hand car. It just has a ludicrous sound system
There, fixed that for you.
I think that, in your example, they've passed ludicrous - they've gone plaid!
I had an IBM Thinkpad that lasted eight years, and wasn't especially careful with it, tossing it around and throwing it in my backpack with my textbooks without a second thought.
The old Stinkpads are TANKS. I've got an old 320D that's now taking up space as "shelfware", but it still works more than a decade later.
As for other sorts of durability, I once dropped my Dell laptop while it was running. The hard drive securing screw broke, and the hard drive flew out of its slot a good five feet across the room. I was in the middle of something, so I just popped it back in and went on my way. Everything worked fine. Maybe I just got lucky - but my experience has given me no reason to think I should be paying for accelerometers to shut off my hard drives "just in case".
Nah - laptop hard drives today have their own built-in motion sensors - plus, when it popped out, that cut the power, so the heads would retract automatically (if they hadn't already been parked because the hd had spun down to save power between reads/writes).
easy removal of power connector in case of tripping
I have a battery, you ignorant clod!
accelerometers to shut the hard drive off if the laptop falls
doesn't save the screen, which is more likely to be damaged, since, with a laptop, power management will spin down the hd much of the time. Also, you can buy laptop hds that come with a motion sensor and will self-park, so this is no longer a "premium", but a standard feature.
backlit keyboards that have a sensor to automatically come on
Why? Are you typing a murder mystery while under the covers? oh, right - surfing pr0n!
automatic screen dimming at low light levels
... like when surfing pr0n under the covers?
single piece aluminum frame construction for less stress on the motherboard (the most common point of failure of a laptop, in my experience)
Sounds like the most common point of failure is the user. Maybe a "don't drop me" sticker would help?
custom battery arrangement to maximize useful lifetime but leave a smaller dimensional footprint.
For this end-user, premium means gobs of disk space, cpu, screen, ram, and decent battery life. For under a grand, I've got twin 320gig hds, 17" screen, full-sized keyboard, 4 gigs ram, dual core 64-bit cpu and decent (a couple of hours with everything running) battery life. And those self-parking-when-you-drop-me drives.
It's usually thrown in a pull-behind, along with camcorder, charges, extra batteries, tripod, cabling and media, etc (It's my video-production-studio-in-a-box).
Just saying that "premium" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I was willing to pay a premium for a bigger keyboard and space for a second hard drive. I can buy 3 x 17" laptops for less than the cheapest 17" mac laptop. for others, the mac might be a better deal, but not for me, and I suspect not for many in this crowd.
Saturn has NEVER turned a profit (though individual dealerhships have).
It wasn't just the gaps because of polymer expansion - the fit of the glass was always a weak point with Saturns - they'd even pop windshields in transit from the factory. That's in indicator of both bad engineering AND bad quality control.
Also, 200k is now easily attainable by any properly-built car. My last Nissan made it easily over 300k w/o major work. When the distributor went, it was easier and cheaper to just scrap it and get something different. My Mazda needed major work at 220k only because a huge pothole ate the front tire, rim, and suspension. It'll probably make it to 300k as well.
The 12 years that the S series went w/o change was due to GM not putting any money into the brand for a decade.
By the way, since I didn't ask it as a question, I will now. Would you rather drive the Prizm or the Corolla?
... as compared to ??? (the Prizm is a rebadged Toyota Corolla, since GM can't produce quality small cars on its' own, and knows it... which proves my point).
The writing was on the wall for the gas-guzzlers - we've been saying as much for decades (remember the first oil crisis???)
The only reason that GM and Chrysler lasted longer than they would have normally was the "don't care" attitude of back-to-back bubbles - tech and housing/debt. Once we returned to reality, they were both caught with their pants down around their ankles.
Fact of the matter is that Toyota, Honda, and the Germans are the only entries in this year's Kelley's Blue Book Top 10 residual values. Quality. They have it - GM and Chrysler don't, and the market residuals say so.
A lot of us have permanently removed GM and Chrysler from any future consideration - they would have to be half the price of the competition to even get a glance, because neither company has the processes in place to produce what we want - cheap, reliable cars. And the residual values clearly show that, even ignoring price, they can't produce quality products.
GM is the new "Jap Scrap". Chrysler? Not even on the radar for most people any more.
Here's something that's NOT anecdotal - the only way GM and Chrysler can now compete is by undercutting prices... in other words, by using bail-out money to subsidize the sale of their crap cars, because if the price was the same, people would rather buy Asian, or even Ford.
The fit and finish on Saturns is substandard. Remember the problem with the "dent-free polymer side panels" that was so bad that they had to drop what was a major selling feature? The design is blah, the ride is like sitting in a bathtub nailed to a skateboard after just a year or two. Good luck with your resale value. BTW - in its' 20-year history, Saturn has never turned a profit, so consider that what you got was actually subsidized by other brands and the lenders (and now the taxpayers).
Funny how the Windows fan-boys point to statistics to justify their "Windows isn't crap" - sort of like "Eat shit - 10 trillion flies can't be wrong."
Lots of people eat at McDonalds, but I wouldn't consider them to be haute cuisine.
A billion people don't have clean water - doesn't mean I should consider making dysentery a high point of MY day.
Don't confabulate marketing and lock-in with quality. Windows is still shit. People cursing their computers all the time because they don't know there are alternatives says so.
Really, have you driven a GM car in the past 15 - 20 years?
Yes - read my other posts in this thread. GM makes craptastic cars. They might look good to someone not used to driving something from Asia, but in side-by-side comparisons, the "Jap Scrap" comes out on top.
I ask people which they'd trust more on a drive to Thunder Bay in the middle of winter - a brand-new GM or a 10-year-old Toyota. They say that's unfair - the new car needs tome to find the bugs. So I reverse it - would you trust a 10-year-old GM car more than a brand-new Toyota? In both cases, the Toyota wins.
What's wrong with your alternators going so quickly - they still using those crappy diodes from the '80s?
Since the early 90s or so, GM and Chrysler weren't selling crap (no seriously, they might not have been as low maintenance as Toyota, but they weren't crap).
They're still crap. When you have a 1-year-old Malibu that has half a tank of gas and fails to start without being left overnight, there's a quality control problem. When the people next door, who were crowing about how great the build quality on their 2008 Malibu was, sell it at a loss in less than a year, and all you can get out of them is "don't get me started on that piece of shit!" there's a problem.
The underfunding of the employee pension and health care funds was done by management, over the protest of the employees - because GM and Chrysler took a "payment holiday" for 2 decades, because of the high returns on the stock market and the at-the-time lower employee claims. This helped the bottom line, which helped management claim higher profitability, higher rewards for stock options, bigger bonuses, etc., but doomed the plans.
Labour costs aren't the problem at GM and Chrysler - shitty products are. Even if you were to remove every single penny of wages, they would be losing money. Why? Crap design, crap customer service, crap quality control, crap engineering, crap management, and a "blame-it-on-the-workers" attitude. If it's the workers' fault, then who the fuck hired them and created that disastrous work environment in the first place, if it wasn't management?
Management HAS to accept responsibility, and not just at GM and Chrysler, but in ALL businesses, all the time (if you want credit for the profits, you should take the blame for the loses), or they won't be able to take it to the next step - which is change. The Toyota Way works - in any business. But if you don't understand the underlying mindset, the Toyota Way won't work for you - you're just going through the motions.
No question about it - inertia is the main reason that things don't change. People don't act in their own self-interest because it's "too hard" to change. Then they complain that "the gubb'mint" isn't protecting them, rather than accepting some of the blame for refusing to vote with their dollars or, $DIETY forbid, do without by not buying the product or service.
I refused to buy a cell phone until I saw the deal that was rignt for ME. It meant some inconvenience, but when the right dela came along, I acted, and I've been satisfied since.
People complain about the early cancellation fees, but "forget" that their "free" cell phone was actually several hundred bucks, and that there's no reason for $EVIL_PHONE_CO to eat that.
Same as people complain all the time about their computers, but won't take a day to actually learn how to use an alternate OS - even though they'll not only save time, but also money. Laziness, inertia, and a lack of curiosity.
It's like someone who spends $3k on an accounting package (true example from last week) and then complains that it's too complicated - well, you DID buy a package more suited to an accountant than someone running an SMB. Next time, instead of asking an accountant, do your own research, or ask someone who is running a small business and ISN'T an accountant what THEY use.
Next up - people who buy exercise machines and treadmills and complain that they don't lose weight while the hardware sits unused in a corner gathering dust, followed by a special feature on people who complain that they quickly grew bored with the Wii, even though they haven't tried more than the freebie demo disks that come with the hardware, didn't know they could surf the web with it by spending $5 for Opera, or play against others all over the world for free (and email them, etc).
Ya know I've never once purchased Windows off the shelf.
I don't understand people who do; it comes free with the PC.
If you felt ripped-off buying Vista, it was by your own choice.
No it doesn't.
Unless your copy was an unlicensed one from some white-box builder who also "gives" you a "free" (pirated/cracked) copy. Maybe along with a bunch of "free" games, and a "free" copy of Office.
If the cost of the OS were a separate line item on the invoice at Worst Buy and Future Shit et al, more people would opt out of paying the "Microsoft Tax". Retailers don't want to do this, because it means less money for them - fewer anti-virus sales, etc. And fewer people upgrading their boxes because their 2-year-old machine is so infested with malware that they need 4 cores. So much for doing what's best for the customer.
By doing what every other industry does: try to please customers instead of entrap and bilk them?
"Industries" don't function that way, though individual companies can and do.
GM and Chrysler sold crap, they knew they were selling crap, and their "exit strategy" was to have you and me and everyone else REWARD them for producing crap. Toyota, on the other hand, focused on what their customers wanted - a reliable means of transportaiton.
More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers. Vista was supposed to be "the best Windows ever." That has changed to "We feel your pain - Windows 7 will be the best Windows ever." But no refunds for the millions who ended up stuck with crap. Costomer-focused? Nope - you're just peons to be lied to and raped and your wallets and purses pillaged.
Show me this dream world where whole industries are trying to please their customers. It's still the exception, rather than the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't a rumour - it was a fact. Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple shares to help prop up Apple back in 1997, when Apple looked like it was circling the drain. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=google&word2=bing
google: 2,130,000,000 results
bing: 10,800,000 results
winner: google
http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=google&word2=yahoo
google: 2,130,000,000 results
yahoo: 2,310,000,000 results
winner: yahoo
I suspect a lot of us can't even remember our yahoo account details ... we just used them as a source of throw-away emails before discovering mailinator, etc.
The same could probably be said for gmail and hotmail ... some site wants you to register, you don't want lots of spam, you quickly register an account, then ignore it.
In the end, it still means the death of yahoo. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Welcome to the search/advertising duopoly; duopolies, because of their lessened competition, end up costing end-users more, and it's not like google doesn't already set an artificial floor price for all their adwords.
Fucking shill.
Hey, it's all good. Toyota will probably make a profit in the last half of their financial year, so their annual loss won't be so bad, and return to profitability by 2012. GM, on the other hand, certainly won't be paying back those bail-out "loans", and may still end up in a second bk. I know people who will never again buy a GM or Chrysler, even at half-off. Screw me once, shame on you - screw me twice ... and we've all been screwed by bailing out GM management. And the banks management.
Okay, you're crazy :-)
So, there's approximately minus 2855 days left?
I just want to know if netflix gets to keep John Titor's time machine ... the time frame (2001) is right ...
Toyota, on the other hand, lost 4.4 billion for the entire YEAR.
That's some kool-aid you're drinking :-)
When I bought mine, I was told the cancellation fee would be pro-rated depending on how long I had the phone. $20/month to a maximum of 20 months (I didn't buy low-end).
They didn't actually make a profit in 93. What they did is known as "channel stuffing."
In other words, GM decided to try to cook the books (and inflate its' stock value) by forcing dealers to carry MUCH more inventory than was financially sound. The SEC doesn't like this; you may recall that Corel did the same thing, lost investor confidence, and then ended up circling the drain. Chrysler is another company that did this as it lurched towards bankruptcy.
Channel stuffing in order to show a profit when GAAP would show a loss (ie: you don't make reserves for the discounts and incentives you'll have to pay out to move the goods you artificially stuffed into the channel) tends to piss off the SEC. More importantly, it weakens your dealer network (siphoning off cash from your dealers to pay the carrying costs of the bloated inventory), weakens your business in the next year (too much inventory means more incentives for "inventory clearances"), and is a sign that you aren't able to properly forecast demand so your figures shouldn't be trusted in the future.
So no, no profit. Ever.
What next, a "baddiseaseanalogy" tag?
Microsoft Hatred is a symptom, same as when your body is fighting off an infection and you get a fever and a runny nose.
Microsoft is the disease.
I think that, in your example, they've passed ludicrous - they've gone plaid!
The old Stinkpads are TANKS. I've got an old 320D that's now taking up space as "shelfware", but it still works more than a decade later.
Nah - laptop hard drives today have their own built-in motion sensors - plus, when it popped out, that cut the power, so the heads would retract automatically (if they hadn't already been parked because the hd had spun down to save power between reads/writes).
I have a battery, you ignorant clod!
doesn't save the screen, which is more likely to be damaged, since, with a laptop, power management will spin down the hd much of the time. Also, you can buy laptop hds that come with a motion sensor and will self-park, so this is no longer a "premium", but a standard feature.
Why? Are you typing a murder mystery while under the covers? oh, right - surfing pr0n!
Sounds like the most common point of failure is the user. Maybe a "don't drop me" sticker would help?
For this end-user, premium means gobs of disk space, cpu, screen, ram, and decent battery life. For under a grand, I've got twin 320gig hds, 17" screen, full-sized keyboard, 4 gigs ram, dual core 64-bit cpu and decent (a couple of hours with everything running) battery life. And those self-parking-when-you-drop-me drives.
It's usually thrown in a pull-behind, along with camcorder, charges, extra batteries, tripod, cabling and media, etc (It's my video-production-studio-in-a-box).
Just saying that "premium" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I was willing to pay a premium for a bigger keyboard and space for a second hard drive. I can buy 3 x 17" laptops for less than the cheapest 17" mac laptop. for others, the mac might be a better deal, but not for me, and I suspect not for many in this crowd.
"You're losing $100 on every sale!"
"That's okay - we'll make it up in volume."
Kind of evokes the dot-bomb era ...
Saturn has NEVER turned a profit (though individual dealerhships have).
It wasn't just the gaps because of polymer expansion - the fit of the glass was always a weak point with Saturns - they'd even pop windshields in transit from the factory. That's in indicator of both bad engineering AND bad quality control.
Also, 200k is now easily attainable by any properly-built car. My last Nissan made it easily over 300k w/o major work. When the distributor went, it was easier and cheaper to just scrap it and get something different. My Mazda needed major work at 220k only because a huge pothole ate the front tire, rim, and suspension. It'll probably make it to 300k as well.
The 12 years that the S series went w/o change was due to GM not putting any money into the brand for a decade.
The writing was on the wall for the gas-guzzlers - we've been saying as much for decades (remember the first oil crisis???)
The only reason that GM and Chrysler lasted longer than they would have normally was the "don't care" attitude of back-to-back bubbles - tech and housing/debt. Once we returned to reality, they were both caught with their pants down around their ankles.
Fact of the matter is that Toyota, Honda, and the Germans are the only entries in this year's Kelley's Blue Book Top 10 residual values. Quality. They have it - GM and Chrysler don't, and the market residuals say so.
A lot of us have permanently removed GM and Chrysler from any future consideration - they would have to be half the price of the competition to even get a glance, because neither company has the processes in place to produce what we want - cheap, reliable cars. And the residual values clearly show that, even ignoring price, they can't produce quality products.
GM is the new "Jap Scrap". Chrysler? Not even on the radar for most people any more.
Here's something that's NOT anecdotal - the only way GM and Chrysler can now compete is by undercutting prices ... in other words, by using bail-out money to subsidize the sale of their crap cars, because if the price was the same, people would rather buy Asian, or even Ford.
http://mediaroom.kbb.com/kelley-blue-book-releases-2009-residual-value-analysis
Toyota (Toyota + Scion brands) takes 6 of the top 10, Honda takes half of what's left, and the Germans (Volkswagen and BMW) take the rest.
The fit and finish on Saturns is substandard. Remember the problem with the "dent-free polymer side panels" that was so bad that they had to drop what was a major selling feature? The design is blah, the ride is like sitting in a bathtub nailed to a skateboard after just a year or two. Good luck with your resale value. BTW - in its' 20-year history, Saturn has never turned a profit, so consider that what you got was actually subsidized by other brands and the lenders (and now the taxpayers).
Funny how the Windows fan-boys point to statistics to justify their "Windows isn't crap" - sort of like "Eat shit - 10 trillion flies can't be wrong."
Lots of people eat at McDonalds, but I wouldn't consider them to be haute cuisine.
A billion people don't have clean water - doesn't mean I should consider making dysentery a high point of MY day.
Don't confabulate marketing and lock-in with quality. Windows is still shit. People cursing their computers all the time because they don't know there are alternatives says so.
Yes - read my other posts in this thread. GM makes craptastic cars. They might look good to someone not used to driving something from Asia, but in side-by-side comparisons, the "Jap Scrap" comes out on top.
I ask people which they'd trust more on a drive to Thunder Bay in the middle of winter - a brand-new GM or a 10-year-old Toyota. They say that's unfair - the new car needs tome to find the bugs. So I reverse it - would you trust a 10-year-old GM car more than a brand-new Toyota? In both cases, the Toyota wins.
What's wrong with your alternators going so quickly - they still using those crappy diodes from the '80s?
They're still crap. When you have a 1-year-old Malibu that has half a tank of gas and fails to start without being left overnight, there's a quality control problem. When the people next door, who were crowing about how great the build quality on their 2008 Malibu was, sell it at a loss in less than a year, and all you can get out of them is "don't get me started on that piece of shit!" there's a problem.
The underfunding of the employee pension and health care funds was done by management, over the protest of the employees - because GM and Chrysler took a "payment holiday" for 2 decades, because of the high returns on the stock market and the at-the-time lower employee claims. This helped the bottom line, which helped management claim higher profitability, higher rewards for stock options, bigger bonuses, etc., but doomed the plans.
Labour costs aren't the problem at GM and Chrysler - shitty products are. Even if you were to remove every single penny of wages, they would be losing money. Why? Crap design, crap customer service, crap quality control, crap engineering, crap management, and a "blame-it-on-the-workers" attitude. If it's the workers' fault, then who the fuck hired them and created that disastrous work environment in the first place, if it wasn't management?
Management HAS to accept responsibility, and not just at GM and Chrysler, but in ALL businesses, all the time (if you want credit for the profits, you should take the blame for the loses), or they won't be able to take it to the next step - which is change. The Toyota Way works - in any business. But if you don't understand the underlying mindset, the Toyota Way won't work for you - you're just going through the motions.
No question about it - inertia is the main reason that things don't change. People don't act in their own self-interest because it's "too hard" to change. Then they complain that "the gubb'mint" isn't protecting them, rather than accepting some of the blame for refusing to vote with their dollars or, $DIETY forbid, do without by not buying the product or service.
I refused to buy a cell phone until I saw the deal that was rignt for ME. It meant some inconvenience, but when the right dela came along, I acted, and I've been satisfied since.
People complain about the early cancellation fees, but "forget" that their "free" cell phone was actually several hundred bucks, and that there's no reason for $EVIL_PHONE_CO to eat that.
Same as people complain all the time about their computers, but won't take a day to actually learn how to use an alternate OS - even though they'll not only save time, but also money. Laziness, inertia, and a lack of curiosity.
It's like someone who spends $3k on an accounting package (true example from last week) and then complains that it's too complicated - well, you DID buy a package more suited to an accountant than someone running an SMB. Next time, instead of asking an accountant, do your own research, or ask someone who is running a small business and ISN'T an accountant what THEY use.
Next up - people who buy exercise machines and treadmills and complain that they don't lose weight while the hardware sits unused in a corner gathering dust, followed by a special feature on people who complain that they quickly grew bored with the Wii, even though they haven't tried more than the freebie demo disks that come with the hardware, didn't know they could surf the web with it by spending $5 for Opera, or play against others all over the world for free (and email them, etc).
No it doesn't.
Unless your copy was an unlicensed one from some white-box builder who also "gives" you a "free" (pirated/cracked) copy. Maybe along with a bunch of "free" games, and a "free" copy of Office.
If the cost of the OS were a separate line item on the invoice at Worst Buy and Future Shit et al, more people would opt out of paying the "Microsoft Tax". Retailers don't want to do this, because it means less money for them - fewer anti-virus sales, etc. And fewer people upgrading their boxes because their 2-year-old machine is so infested with malware that they need 4 cores. So much for doing what's best for the customer.
"Industries" don't function that way, though individual companies can and do.
GM and Chrysler sold crap, they knew they were selling crap, and their "exit strategy" was to have you and me and everyone else REWARD them for producing crap. Toyota, on the other hand, focused on what their customers wanted - a reliable means of transportaiton.
More to the point, for the slashdot audience - Windows. It's crap. And yet, any efforts to end the lock-in are met with all sorts of fud, both from Microsoft, and teir partners, in an effort to continue to entrap and bilk and ass-rape their customers. Vista was supposed to be "the best Windows ever." That has changed to "We feel your pain - Windows 7 will be the best Windows ever." But no refunds for the millions who ended up stuck with crap. Costomer-focused? Nope - you're just peons to be lied to and raped and your wallets and purses pillaged.
Show me this dream world where whole industries are trying to please their customers. It's still the exception, rather than the rule.
I *so* want Spaceballs 2 - the Search for More Money!!!
Gotta be one of the best comedies of all time, and we were PROMISED it in the original!