A link was posted to this in JDgreen227's thread on complexity. I'm reprinting the guts of the link here:
IF MICROSOFT BUILT CARS
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive--but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.
7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all fluids, but the packaging would be superb.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
11. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.
14. There would be an "Engine Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade to use existing stuff.
16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!
17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22 / CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!
18. If you couldn't affort to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friend's, and then copy it.
19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganize the ignition for a few days before it worked.
20. You would need to by an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.
I add:
21. You would buy an upgrade to run on the remaining 1/3 of the roads, but suddenly your car was twice as big and twice as heavy with the same sized engine.
22. If you upgraded your Microsoft tires, you would have to buy a new car because the tires would not be backwards compatible.
23. When you applied the brakes, a panel on the dashboard would light up saying "Are you sure you want to stop?"
24. Sometimes a message would appear on the dash saying " The gearbox cannot access the differential - do you wish to - CONTINUE - RETRY - ABORT ?
25. Dealers would constantly be trying to sell PanTechs to pensioners to do the shopping.
