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.
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.
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?)
But that's not what josefresco said. He said that profit margin is just as important as demand. I say it's not. Nothing "violent" about it.
A huge corporation has violated the most basic business rules, including perhaps the biggest, "Make something people want." And we debate about it.
But if GM was a web app and this was a "How do you like my app" posts, we would be shredding them here. You lost 75% of your equity in one year?!? You have no small cars to sell?!? We'd be telling them to go to barber college.
Doesn't "top selling car in Europe" mean anything to you?
If you have a nice fat profit margin but nobody wants to buy your product, that's no good. If you're selling lots of products but making no profit on it, that's no good either.
But if you're like GM, and you're selling millions of units a year, each for tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still not making a profit, I think we can diagnose the problem as being in the margins, not in the sales.
Seriously though, if you want to go on a whine about how bad American cars are, I suggest the comments at autoblog.com which are suitable for that kind of inanity. But for this site, I have to say that the sales figures don't support the idea that demand for GM cars is small.
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