As The Fires Burned

My entire life, it seems, has been lived in the decline of General Motors.

For decades, you and I have sat there, and watching GM waste away in market share, product offerings and quality ratings, and so on.

GM has had many geniuses working for them. They bought Hughes Aerospace and invented XM radio and DirecTV. They bought EDS from H Ross Perot when they realized that – based on their projected outlays to EDS for the next five years (back in the 1980s) – GM would be less to acquire EDS than to give EDS for its consulting.

Smart people, therefore, GM has had in spades.

But still we've all watched, and waited… "When is GM going to get a handle on their products? When are they going to take back market share? When are they going to deal effectively with their unions and their dealers?"

When… when… when?

The answer, as I write this, is too late.

Too damn late.

I was reading an article in The Economist about the US office worker's per-capita use of paper. Back in the 1990s, we were all snide about it. The "paperless office" was a misnomer. There was a big spike in paper usage when it cost so much less to print, via the cheap laser printer, than it ever had before.

But, it turns out, it's happening now. US office workers are simply printing less these days. We have better monitors, fewer folks to whom an electronic document is anathema, and office paper usage has been declining rapidly.

So giant trends, it turns out, can and do happen. Like paper usage, they may take a different form than you expect. They may not be immediate. But the giant trend is still there, an amorphous movement that cannot be denied.

Which brings us back to GM. The whole country has watched and waited as the fires burned. For decades, management assured us that GM had things under control, that it was moving forward… "just wait until we get our union agreements looking like this", or "wait until our new body styles hit the marketplace".

And every year bought a slight decline in share, a slight improvement in product quality, and an ever-increasing financial leverage against the company.

As an outside observer, and a patriot, it has been frustrating to watch as this American giant has wasted away.

What happens now to GM? God only knows. Their products are decent. Their price points are decent. Yet there's not a single person on my block who has a GM car. Something must still be wrong.

It's the big trend. In GM's case, the big trend is the gradual wearing down… to the point where the company's defenses against a downturn are so compromised that its sole salvation is a government bailout.

It's nice that the government has the money. Of course, that's you and me who are bailing out GM.