Has this author ever heard of the Lisa? The Mac wasn't trying to elbow aside the Apple III. Lisa had done that already, although the Lisa was too expensive to sell much -- about $7,000 as best I remember. Apple re-jiggered their product line, then, making the Lisa the development machine and the Mac the target machine. At the time, every personal computer was expected to be both a development machine and the target. The Mac infuriated programmers because we could not develop anything on it. The Mac was nothing more than an end-user machine, like a TV set or, at best, a smart terminal.

Boeing was supposed to adopt Six-Sigma when my old GE Information Services boss, Jim McNerney, became the boss. Six-Sigma was a quality improvement program that Chairman Jack Welch pushed through GE. It reminds us that fixing a defect early in production is far cheaper than having to recall product after the defects cause the product to fail as customers use it. When I was training as a Six-Sig "Green Belt", the instructors warned us, over and over, against defects that might cause an air-liner to crash. A defect can cost more than money, they taught. - The 737-Max 8 had a grotesquely stupid design defect. It had an automatic control feature that depended on one single "angle of attack" indicator. We call that a single point of failure, and even rookie "software engineers" know to avoid it. That single point of failure caused several crashes and killed people. That is a failure up front, in the design process. - Boeing mechanics, if we believe this report (and who doesn't?), neglected to re-fasten four bolts on the door panel that blew off the Alaska Air liner.