zlacker

>>cmcgin+(OP)
Make cars people want.

>>edw519+c1
It's kind of tough to succeed when your workers (with the same skills) get paid 2-3x what competing car companies pay. Profit margins are just as important to a company's success as demand. See Internet math of the late 90's for a perfect example of what 1000000 * 0 equals.

>>josefr+L2
Profit margins are just as important to a company's success as demand.

On what planet?

Wanna buy a buggy whip, a cassette player, or a 5.25" floppy disk drive? All marked up 100%, but still good prices.

>>edw519+S2
You wouldn't happen to have better examples? These only reinforce his point -- which alternately worded is: "Demand is just as important to a company's success as profit margins".

>>jcl+J3
You wouldn't happen to have better examples?

No. These weren't "examples". They were caricatures.

Because the statement is absurd. What difference do your margins make if no one wants to buy your stuff?

We're all so good at tech and so used to eyeball driven apps that it's easy to lose sight of the single most important fact of business: sooner or later someone has to be a customer.

I never entered the "labor vs. management" debate here because it's a complex issue that won't easily be resolved here (or anywhere else). Instead I offered a play on pg's "Make Something People Want," slightly modified for Detroit.

I don't know whose fault it is (nor do I care), but face it: hardly anyone wants Detroit's cars. They've delayed the inevitable by bolting 4 door bodys onto pickup truck chasses for 15 years now without preparing themselves for $4 gas. Duh.

Look out your window right now. After the first 100 Camrys, Accords, and Altimas drive by, do you see anything from Detroit that you'd rather have? Neither does anyone else. That's Detroit's biggest problem, so I'll restate my original, they need to "Make Cars People Want".

I know this is Hacker News (thus the questioning about the applicability of this post). We must not forget that the business aspect is just as important as the tech aspect.

No matter what your other financials are, without demand, you have no sales. Without sales, you have no business. Then all of this is just one big hobby.

>>edw519+84
Last month, GM sold 262,329 vehicles in the US alone. Toyota, in second place, sold 193,234. Ford and Chrysler took the third and fourth spots, with Honda in fifth. You can't claim that "hardly anybody" is buying Detroit's products.

And that's just in the US. You wanna know what the top-selling car in Europe is? It's the Opel/Vauxhall Astra -- a GM product -- with nearly half a million sold last year. The Ford Focus comes in third, after the Renault Clio. In Australia the top-selling cars are almost always GM's Holden Commodore and Ford's Falcon.

If you think nobody's buying American cars, that might just be a function of where you live (Northern California?)