15th September, 1998

Time to Worry; Gates Agrees

  You may recall some time ago that I went on about people who buy a Jackaroo, Prado, Landcruiser, Patrol or some other off-road vehicle and pretty much confine themselves to the tarmac. I said some 90% will never see any off-road action. Well, what do you know - yet another study has unearthed these same figures;

"Urban Cowboys - A survey by Microsoft found fewer than 10 per cent of US four wheel drives ever get their tyres dirty. The number one reason they don't take them off the beaten track? They don't want to scratch the paint or dent the panels."

  That's from the Sun-Herald's Sunday Drive, 13 September, 1998. Now, in all honesty the figures are both unsurprising and uninteresting to me - I already knew this from different sources. What does interest me, however, is who did the research - none other than my good friend's Bill Gates' company, Macro$loth (aka Microsoft).

  At first, the thing that worried me was that the company of the biggest idiot in the world has presented data which backed what I previously said. I mean, this is a corporation headed by someone who once said that 640kb RAM should be adequate for anyone's computing needs. They now publishes bug-ridden wares which have minimum requirements of 16MB RAM to run, and 32 or 64MB to do anything approaching useful, while taking up many hundreds of megabytes of hard drive space. Then again, Microsoft shouldn't really be blamed - it rarely writes its own software, prefering to buy up other software companies.

  But after this initial worry, I realised something else - why the hell is Microsoft interested in the 4WD habits of US citizens? What new expansion/purchase are they planning? Is this the basis of some form of new product for the off-road market? And if so, what exactly is it?

  Well, many new companies have appeared on the 4WD market. Companies such as Honda, who (despite selling rebadged Isuzus in the US) have never had a 4WD in their product range, now sell the CR-V. Some companies are new to the entire automotive world - Samsung, for example, has started building vehicles.

  But far be it from Microsoft to be innovative enough to design their own 4X4 - they'll want to buy up an existing manufacturer. A while ago, I would have thought Ssangyong to be the prime candidate - but this has recently been taken over by Daewoo. But not to worry, the economic crisis has weakened Daewoo and it's already been discussed if perhaps the auto divison may well be purchased by someone like GM. If Microsoft were to take over, it would not only gain control over the Musso and Korando off-roader product lines, it would also gain the regional rights to some Mercedes-Benz licensed products, and operations such as FSO of Poland and Rodac of Romania.

  At last, having bought things such as libraries, and a plethora of electronics companies, Microsoft would be at home. After all, this is an area where designating years to products is a common practice. But I myself would be wary of getting in a MS Leganza 98 or MS Musso 99. Leaving any Microsoft hatred aside, it would be worrying to find that the car had to be restarted every five minutes due to "undocumented features", or that the function of changing gears was to be added in a new patch due in a few months. But if nothing else, you would no longer have to worry about your car dropping in value - the fact that all succesive Microsoft products rise in price will guarantee that although you may not be able to afford the latest MS Nubira 99, your current MS Espero 95 will be sought after as an alternative. Now if you could only get it to work with Netscape brand petrol...

Copyright � 15th September 1998.
Opinions expressed here are purely those of Adam Smolarczyk.