How 'bout the seveties? We still had our pride on, but the truth was we were getting beat. Japanese and European import products were simply better. With smug complacency, we didn't even see it coming. We drove our piece of crap cars with pluged up large displacement engines making a measly 125HP and getting 14MPG. Meanwhile, the Germans were exporting the Porsche 930 and the Japanese were sending over Mazda RX-7s and Sony televisions and video recorders.

By the nineties, we started waking up but we'd already lost most of the market share in several industries. So I ask you, what have we learned?

I've been dealing with a bunch of folks who evidently haven't. They want to be seen as a leader, but they are doing the same old tired dance. Sell whatcha got and don't waste money with product development 'til the market just won't bear it anymore. What they arrogantly forget is that competitive forces are then allowed to introduce better products and yank the market right out from under their feet. And rightfully so.

The egotistical snake oil salesman is the same kind of deal. He sells his products until people discover real medicines to replace them with. Of course, the snake oil salesmen fight hard to give the impression that their elixers are worthy. Magic elixers come in different flavors and some of them aren't even medicines - Look at what Edison did to convince people that Tesla's AC current was more dangerous than Edison's DC. What a load of crap. We shouldn't celebrate Edison's multiple patents; Most were insignificant anyway. We should have kicked his ass for being a manically obsessive lying sack of shit.

I'm just really tired of that sort of thing. I've seen too much snake oil and too many ho-hum products touted as the end-all and beat-all. Rather than actually make something with a competitive edge, these snake oil salemen load claims to get patents on insignificant ideas and fabricate performance data to sell their ho-hum products. It's bullshit, stamping out copies of the same old stuff but giving it twelve sylable hyphenated names. I guess the idea is that if it sounds fancy, it must be really high tech stuff.

It's no big deal in the scheme of things, I mean, nothing really is. But I felt like ranting a minute about the BS in the industry. End of rant.