I think the problem is that the auto industry is so entrenched in gas-based cars, and the system has been running for so many decades that it's hard to start producing an entirely new product. A car has thousands of pieces, many coming from different suppliers.
You can't blame Microsoft for awful Office file formats. Remember, they wrote this stuff before the web came along, and before they generally started sucking really bad. It's just the accumulation of decades of feature creep, add-ons, re-dos, compatibility hacks, bug fixes, and workarounds.
Eventually, all software needs a rewrite. Not just MS's.
IMO it's also about education, not just wealth. On the sites I manage, the quality of Google traffic is significantly higher than from others. I'd rather have one hit from Google than two hits from another source.
You can't downvote until you have enough karma, and a comment cannot be downvoted after it's been around for more than 24 hours. This is to prevent someone from vindictively going through a person's "threads" and downvoting all of their comments in an effort to kill their karma.
You can never downvote article submissions; they can only be upvoted. Downvoting sumbmissions has merit in some cases (removing spam), but in practice it has been used on other sites to kill everyone's submissions except your own, rapidly leading to a downmodding war where the winner is whoever is more committed to their karma score, instead of the one who is submitting the best articles.
I asked this a while ago on here because I was wondering if parakey was going to end up integrated into Facebook. A YC founder answered that he didn't think Parakey had gotten very far before the acquisition and that it was a talent acquisition.
That's exactly what they're targeting here -- Alienware's existing (and not altogether small) market, full of gamers, geek chic, and those that might wear t-shirts advertising their hackitude.
Designers look at it and wince, but I can definitely see that phone being successful in that crowd.
EDIT: Argh. I should've paid closer attention to the text. As others pointed out, this thing's completely fictional. They're not targeting anything. Mea culpa.
My first startup made that mistake. We built the entire product before getting any customers. Since then, I've always started new projects as pseudo-consulting gigs. That way, the product is designed around a real need.
Facebook is a LOUSY ad platform because users are interested in interacting with friends, not watching ads.
The subject is bang-on: Facebook's fall will be EPIC