Oldsmobile joins Plymouth: RIP

DTJ () wrote:
: On Sun, 2 May 2004 10:34:43 +0000 (UTC),
: (Greg Beaulieu) wrote:

: >Greg Beaulieu Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

: Now we know why you are so stupid.

Oh dear. I see I have made a terrible error. I thought we were involved in
an actual exchange of thoughtful views. Instead I see you are the common
usenet asswipe. Since you were commenting about high school graduation and
exhibit the know-it-all attitude typical of that age group, I'll
conjecture you (barely) did that a year or so ago and now are either just
finished flunking out of your first year of college or working on your PC
technicians degree at some crackerjax box tech school. Or, I suppose,
sitting around home guzzling beer and smoking a few doobs. In any event,
cheerio, old bean. It's been fascinating having this discourse (you can go
look that up) with you. Fortunately, most of my American friends are not
as obnoxious as you, and all are far more interesting. If you ever need a
cool breeze, may I ask, please don't come to Canada. Try Alaska instead.
We don't enjoy your kind of hot air up here.

 

Congratulations: You've just defined the MBA.

 

People with money are the customers you want. Youth is secondary.
If your product appeals to old people, there will always be more old
people.

If your product appeals only to the _current generation_ of old
people, then you have a problem.

 

I didn't say retired, I said older. I'm taking folks in the 50+/- age
that was being thrown around as average for some makes of cars. These
folks often have their kids out of college, their homes paid for and are
at their peak earning years. They have lots more to spend on cars that
do folks in their 20s and 30s.

As I just wrote, I never said retired. Learn to read.


Matt

 

All brand new?

George Patterson
If you don't tell lies, you never have to remember what you said.

 

Wait up.. I am been accredited with saying more than I did here.. I heard a
GM representative state on the news that Oldsmobile had an older customer
base that had dwindled to near the point of total extinction, and that the
Olds brand had more or less reached the end too.. I didn't write the
script.. GM wrote it..

My father-in-law always drove Olds, his father before him always drove
Olds.. the F-I-L had a 442 and Cutlasses in earlier years, 2 Toronados, 5
Regency 98s.. his last 98 was rear-ended and he had every garage in town
looking for a 98 to replace it.. he didn't like the latest Olds models.. to
him, they just weren't Olds.. the current models were aimed at younger
buyers than him.. more modern shapes, smaller and lighter.. he remembered
the halcyon days of busting down the highway in his Toronado.. big car
luxury and big car gas mileage.. the Alero just didn't cut it.. marketing
dictated that the Olds brand couldn't just cater to ppl of his age, as that
customer base was fast disappearing, and yet it was this very customer base,
loyal to the end of the 98s, that had kept the brand going all of the
years..

 

LOL

 

...... or in the world of Tennis, 'unforced errors'

 

Matt - I had tried a google search on "Lockheed brake case", but nothing
turned up. Over the last couple of days, things started popping up in
my memory, and one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was the word
"whistleblower" - I remembered that my term paper was, in general, on
the fate of whistleblowers in industry, and the Lockheed Brake Case was
one of several incidents covered in my report illustrating the
not-too-good fate in general for whistle blowers in industry (typically,
the whistleblowers, often engineers with a conscience, get fired, and
the true guilty, usually managment, get promoted for protecting the
company at all costs). How prophetic this would be in my career with
the Titan Missile/Intelsat VI incident in my own life - perhaps had I
not done that term paper, I would have been less paranoid to the point
of not proactively protecting myself like I did, even so, just barely
escaping direct culpability in a serious billion $$ screwup, with
attempts still being made to sabatoge my career after-the-fact.

Armed with that new rememberance (i.e., the word "whistleblower), I went
back to google with the key words "Lockheed", "whistleblower", and
"brake". Some spurious hits resulted, but these two were significant:
http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/goodrich/goodric1.htm and
http://www.aicpa.org/download/ethics/Ethics_Business_Research_Fund-12.pdf.

Bottom line, to answer your question, this is clearly the case that I
wrote about in my term paper, and the plane was the A7-D.

Upon reading the hits found, it appears that my memory was incorrect on
two points:
(1) While there was some mention of and peripheral involvement by
Lockheed in the project, the case would more correctly be referred to as
the "B.F. Goodrich Brake Case", and
(2) There aparently was not (as I had said earlier) a pilot killed, but
rather some serious brake anomalies on actual test flights following the
faked qualification testing concerning which there was due concern for
the pilot's safety which enhanced the issue of ethics in the case.

On a side note, I find this statement (which, to my best recollection
sums up the conclusions in my term paper) from the 2nd link I
referrenced above, to be interesting, and worth pointing out to any
young pups just starting out in a new career who might be reading this:
"Nevertheless, figures from 1991 paint a glum picture of the effects of
whistle blowing. 90% of whistle-blowers lost their jobs or were
demoted. 26% sought psychiatric or medical care. 15% divorced after
the incident. 10% attempted suicide. And 8% went bankrupt."

Bottom line: There may be costs to you and to your family in maintaining
your integrity throughout your career. The job that has the potential
for netting you the most money isn't always (actually very seldom is)
the right answer.

Sobering thoughts from a jaded old fart!

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

The answer is buried in my second post following yours. It was the
A7-D. (Read my second post for more details and ramblings if
interested.)

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

Obviously I meant "unintended consequenses".

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

Which I said in another post in this thread, so I agree with you.
Good to see somebody has enough brains to understand. Of course,
having read a lot of your posts, I already KNEW you had a lot of
brains, AND that you use them.

Supply and demand. Companies try to find the market niche that will
buy the most units at the highest price. Sometimes that means
lowering the cost, as in DVDs compared to video tapes. Other time it
means keeping the cost high, and selling less units, as in some
expensive cars. Every company makes a determination of what they feel
is best and most profitable. Sometimes they are wrong. Oldsmobile
for example.

 

That is NOT older. Middle age is generally looked at as 40 to 55 or
60, now that people are living a little longer. Maybe when you grow
up and get to high school you will understand the use of terms such as
older, younger, et cetera.

What, are you 12?

 

On Sun, 2 May 2004 22:33:21 -0400, "Mike"


BTW, my previous post should have been the "problem" rotating among
Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac.

Do you agree with it?

Gee, in 2000, Buick had an older customer base than Oldsmobile. I
think Buick has probably always had an older customer base. I don't
see anyone saying to get rid of Buick or change its focus.

The point is, there is nothing wrong with having older customers as
long as you have a lot of them. In fact, with most companies
following conventional wisdom and going after the kids, Oldsmobile's
best opportunity of recovery was to try something different with the
older customers. "Something different" is **not** William Shatner and
his daughter saying "this is not your father's Oldsmobile".

 

Not with a car that big. What is to be noted is that it gets BETTER
numbers than the Pacifica, while being much more powerful and faster.

 

dizzy wrote:
thing there.

Whatchoo talking about? The bar-none coolest interior that EVER went in
any vehicle was in the '66/67 Charger, and that's just one example. The
60s were FILLED with cars that had classy interiors. The plastic assault
didn't come along until around 70, although my '69 Coronet has a
noticeably inferior interior to my '66 Polara.

 

Daniel J. Stern wrote:

Provided that you keep folks from ever realizing how much was getting
spent on warranty claims, "improvement" programs, TSB service, etc. etc.
etc. etc. that wouldn't have to be spent on a fundamentally better product.

 

The Alero and Bravada may be somewhat better than their siblings, but
they're still just "Oldsmobuicks." (Fletch). What baffles me is why the
Aurora didn't succeed. I didn't follow its fall too closely, but when it
first showed up I was VERY impressed with it. It was unlike any other GM
car, both in terms of styling and engineering (engineering more than
styling). I guess those differences were not obvious enough for a buying
public that had been burned by Oldsmobuicks so many times before.

 

An argument often promoted, and while true for beer, candy bars, and
sneakers it is not true for big-ticket items like cars. Young buyers
don't have any MONEY. If you target just young buyers, you wind up being
Hyundai and Kia. The optimum target is somwhere in the middle, and a
bias slightly toward an older demographic isn't a bad thing. Its when
the demographic slides ALL the way to the end that there's a problem.

 

I call it 'ledger theory'. Those things must not show in the numbers used
to make a judgement IMO. They are on a different ledger. With regards to
stuff made in china, all that seems to be seen is the conversion cost.
Scrap rate, field returns, product quality problems, extra engineering
time spent, travel, etc don't show up in the decision making process by all
appearances. These additional costs don't appear when only looking
at one segment of the cost.