Why not? Lasseter (who DID the technical work) credited him with making Pixar what it was. Without Jobs, they'd still be doing contract work and/or shorts. In fact, Jobs was the one who said it was OK to produce shorts. More than likely, they would have been out of business.

Boeing is now the owner of North American. Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged to form Lockheed Martin. Morton Thiokol is now part of Alliant Techsystems (ATK.) The players are the same, but the head offices and business cards are different.

1. Mulally is a competent CEO. The jury is still out on Apotheker. 2. Mulally actually knows how to design and build planes. He led the project to build the Boeing 777, which is a high-margin product that kept cash coming in during Boeing's last decade, which has been rough for other reasons.

To be sure, both examples you cited have long-since jettisoned their automotive divisions. "Rolls-Royce" is really BMW (Rolls-Royce wound up with BMW's aircraft engine division) and Volvo is in the hands of Geely, one of the ruthless photocopying Chinese firms.

I guess those Jeopardy-playing robots don't count as research? That's just an example, but you know and I know that IBM has a strong research arm (including important basic research) that HP lacks. Indeed, IBM's research arm is world-class.

Here is an interview with Bill Warren on The Roe & Roeper radio show on Chicago's WLS-AM station. http://www.wlsam.com/article.asp?id=2213142&spid=37724 If you want to skip past the B.S., just listen to to the last four minutes where a professional salvage operator completely shows him up.

Well, there are other projects that were "canceled" and then resurrected as black projects. The Dark Star UAV is one example. Canceled about a decade ago and it has reportedly been seen in combat since then.

It should be noted that Scaled Composites has been a unit of Northrop Grumman for a couple of years now. With Burt Rutan retiring, it will become more under NGC control. However, NGC does not have a regular rocket launch unit as Boeing and Lockheed does, so there's no reason that NGC will not continue allowing Scaled Composites to prosper.

Yes, a Corvette would be hard-pressed to do anything worthwhile once it leaves the pavement. Or were you trying to be insulting?