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That last is funny because I now push my electric car’s start button to turn it off. Gates allegedly said at COMDEX that, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.” GM’s then CEO allegedly responded with a list of things that cars didn’t do that PCs, unfortunately, did at the time, like crash twice a day, weren’t based on standards, needed to be rebooted, would ask before it deployed something like an airbag and that you’d have to push a start button to turn it off. The weird nature of the post web PC marketĪn old and almost legendary argument came from something Bill Gates said about cars. The Surface Laptop Studio is one of the rare PCs that does target actual users, and the users it targets, somewhat ironically, are those that have typically favored Apple products “creators”. For instance, given that male engineers typically define these personas, it shouldn’t be a surprise that PCs focused on women don’t exist, even though the marketing collateral that comes out surrounding PCs is often very diverse. Many vendors use “personas” to design PCs, but as the book Technically Wrong points out, that approach often creates products targeting people that don’t exist. Apple, who should be focused on creators, has created a far simpler line but treats everyone as if they had the same job and workload. Targeted PCs are rare, and I think that is a generic mistake made by OEMs who shotgun out many different PCs with little knowledge of who will use them.
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