General Motors: There is an insightful analysis by Peter Cohan, author of You Cant Order Change, outlining 5 reasons why

GM failed. Heres a summary of the reasons: 1. Bad financial policies. GM made money primarily by loaning money through its finance arm, not by manufacturing and selling vehicles. 2. Uncompetitive vehicles that had little going for them took too long to build and were poorly designed and built. 3. Ignoring the competition for over 50 years (with the exception of the Saturn venture). While GM was ignoring the competition, Toyota was capturing market share. 4. Failure to innovate. Cohan claims that GM focused on financing and ignored its core business of building and designing better cars. 5. Managing in the bubble. GMs culture was insular, and promotions were based on that inward focus, not on paying attention to customers and the marketplace. Almost no one was ever fired for poor performance. APPLE Dellss loss, Apples Gain? The American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ASCI)* second quarter report indicates that within the Personal Computers category, customers perceived Apple as the best company in terms of customer service. Apples baseline score was 77 (on a 100-point scale), and the Q2 2006 score was 83. Computerworld, discussing Apples number one ranking says, The Companys focus on product innovation and customer service has won it a cadre of famously loyal customers, unlike any other PC vendor. And why are Dells scores slipping? The article elaborates, Survey respondents complained mostly about the quality of Dells customer service, not its products, Van Amburg said customers were clearly more frustrated with Dell than they were last year, he said. This blog post New Virus Found! The You Suck Virus, states, Part of being excellent in business is being innovative. If you agree with that one criteria (I know there are more) then Apple is the clear winner when it comes to innovation. Companies like Dell, HP, and IBM make good computers but once you compare them to a really excellent product (like an Apple) it is easy to see the difference. This 2003 article indicates that Apple is pretty consistent when it comes to high-quality customer service, Apple did garnish the number one customer service ranking in the 2001 Consumer Reports Annual Questionnaire, and a number one ranking for desktop repairs in May 2003. Here are some customer compliments for Apple.

Apple: Apple sold almost 5 million iPads during its March quarter--and it still couldnt keep up with the demand, company executives said during a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday. CFO Peter Oppenheimer said the company has not been able to keep its preferred 4-6 weeks of inventory. "We sold every iPad 2 we could make during the quarter and would have liked to have ended the quarter with more channel inventory." A total of 4.67 million iPads were sold--including both the older and newer models. The company recognized $2.8 billion on revenue on both iPads and accessories. "The demand on the iPad 2 has been staggering," said Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. "I wish we could have produced a lot more iPad 2s because there were a lot of people waiting for them." Neither executive pinpointed the cause of the shortfall, deflecting questions about whether forecasting was the cause. They did say, however, that the shortfall was not due to the Japan tsunami, which they said had not impacted supply chains for any of their products, thanks to contingency planning. The new iPad 2 was announced in early March and went on sale in the United States on March 11. It was in another 25 countries by the end of the month. Cook said the device will roll out to 13 more countries next week and "even more" by the end of the year. Part of the demand is being driven by businesses. Oppenheimer said the devices are being adopted by the enterprise "at an unprecedented rate"--75% of Fortune 500 companies are either deploying or testing it, including, Oppenheimer said, Xerox, ADP, Boston Scientific, Estee Lauder, Rite Aid, and Disney. The iPad is also making traction in the schoolroom. Schools picked up as many iPads as they did Macs last quarter, Cook said. "This was surprising to me," he said. "K-12 is even more conservative than enterprise in adopting new technology." The iPads' performance in the educational market "really demonstrates what kind of opportunity there probably is there," he said. Cook said Apple is suffering from "the mother of all backlogs" and will continue to crank out iPads as fast as it can. "I'm confident we're going to produce a very large number [in the coming quarter], whether that will be enough to meet demand I don't know," he said. "I'm not going to predict when supply and demand will come into balance." Cook also did not offer a prediction on how many the company would produce or sell in the coming quarter.