Category: Business

“If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

It was the 90’s, we were all at Comdex in Vegas and he was right. Automobiles were indeed slow to develop. China then produced approx. 3.5% of the world’s vehicles. It now past the 1/3 mark, making more cars than the US, Japan, and Germany combined. Why?

Because whether Bill Gates ever really said it or not, he was right. GM and all the auto industry haven’t really been developing much. They made it easy for Korea and China to copy and surpass them.

Contrast that to the infamous case of the Airbus China bought and then dismantled in order to copy. Much much harder to do. Despite being a newer design, 91% of the C919 (the result of the stolen tech) is manufactured by non-Chinese entities. Western suppliers are cautious about sharing their latest, most advanced technology due to China’s history of intellectual property theft and reverse engineering. This ain’t as simple as pulling a Tesla apart. Also their aircraft uses the Leap 1C engine, which is a significantly de-tuned variant that shares more characteristics with the older CFM56 platform from the 1970s than with its contemporary Leap siblings. They just can’t get the latest tech. This technological limitation directly impacts the C919’s real-world performance, giving it a disappointing operational range of just 3,000 miles, which falls substantially short of the competition.

The aircraft remains heavily dependent on Western suppliers for essential systems, including landing gear, flight management systems, and cockpit avionics. There is a complete absence of a worldwide support infrastructure. International operators require reliable access to C919 spare parts, maintenance services, and repair facilities, which COMAC currently cannot provide. It’s not like buying a Xiaomi car. Not even like those early Korean efforts which borrowed car engines from Daimler.

Airlines makers have spend decades making things extremely complicated for any new entrants. From working with radar systems to communicating with flight controllers, international safety standard systems and an extremely confusing network of organizations for the safety of flights, you can’t “just” come up with a new plane and expect it to connect to global airways.

Cars didn’t stagnate because engineers got lazy; the incumbents simply optimized for the wrong things. They assumed incrementalism was enough. They assumed that manufacturing scale and dealer networks would protect them forever.

That assumption died the moment Korea proved you could start from nothing and build a global automotive powerhouse in one generation. It died again when China turned “copying” into “outproducing,” and then into “out-innovating” in areas like EVs and batteries. They caught up because the barriers were low and the legacy players didn’t raise them.

Aviation, on the other hand, built its walls high — not by intent, but by necessity. Safety creates bureaucracy, bureaucracy creates inertia, and inertia creates a moat wider than any trade barrier. That’s why China can dominate cars but still struggles to field a competitive narrow-body jet. That’s why Boeing and Airbus still exist despite everything. And that’s why the Gates quote (real or not) hits differently today.

Some industries evolve like software. Some evolve like skyscrapers. And some — like commercial aviation — evolve like glaciers. The real lesson? The speed of progress isn’t just about ambition or budget. It’s about the complexity of the system you’re trying to disrupt. And unless the incumbents stop assuming their moats are permanent, one day even those glaciers might start to melt.

Oh , and by the way, Microsoft systems no longer crash all the time like GM supposedly had said back then in response.

Everybody has cottoned on to the fact that Apple has no AI know how. Nada. Zilch. I told you two years ago, it was obvious. They will have to buy a way in. But this is nothing new. Apple doesn’t innovate. They never did.

Back in the day I wrote how Apple was a decoy for Microsoft. After Bill Gates bailed them out financially they pretended to be an alternative OS. They never were really. Outside of the US their market share was a joke. But they dominated the media and it worked. Microsoft was not a monopoly because, well, Apple.

Same with Google. The iPhone only sells in the US and a handful of other countries. Globally it’s market share is inconsequential. As of Q2 2024, Apple’s global smartphone share was only 17.7%, routinely second to Samsung, and far behind in regions like Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia where Android absolutely dominates. If you want your Air Tag to be tracked you have to be in a country with iPhones. Anywhere outside the US good luck with that! Apple simply copies features from Android and makes a big fuss about them. Everybody is happy. No matter that no serious company runs an Apple based server. Or that they have failed to enter any market they set their sights on since the days of DTP.

Apple has a history of taking a technology that exists in a clunky, unusable state and making it sleek, intuitive, and accessible to a mass market. Instead of inventing new product categories, Apple used to excel at building a seamless and integrated ecosystem. They often wait for a technology to mature before implementing it. This patient approach theoretically allows Apple to learn from the mistakes of others and deliver a more polished, user-friendly version. Only it doesn’t anymore, does it? When your friends have the Meta AI sunglasses and they are sooo cool, you can put up with that if Apple did theirs a year later. Not three.

Apple’s real problem is the laziness born from too many years of doing well. It is institutionalized, baked into its DNA. They feel they will always be able to build walled gardens for users. But more and more they are too little too late. The Apple watch is a great example. Not enough innovation on any level. 19% declining sales and market share, down to 17.4% share of the broader wearables. It’s just not different enough and the market wants more options. Apple can’t do options. They have three models of phone. No small phone, no rugged phone, no folding phone, no massive battery phone. And they still think that works. This “one size fits all” mentality fails to address diverse market needs and signals a company more interested in defending its margins than genuinely innovating or taking risks.

But they live in the bubble. US media continues to talk about Apple as if they are one of the big boys. The closed nature of the “walled garden” traps consumers and stifles competition, creating high switching penalties and limiting the availability of competing goods or innovative approaches. It’s not just the EU that has cottoned on to this problem. It is customers too. Apple bets on user loyalty and brand inertia, rather than delivering authentic technological leaps.

Apple does not deserve to be in the same breath as Google, Amazon or Meta. They are not influencing anything other than the gadgets fewer and fewer people are playing with.