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.
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.
I hope Tesla succeeds, but I wonder whether it's even possible for a new North American car company to succeed, regardless of their technology. With the falling dollar, maybe their odds have increased. And yeah, a Democrat president will likely make it easier for electric car companies. But we're only a couple of years away from Tata Motors cars, air cars, mass-produced DIY electric kits, etc. And in the midst of a recession, Tesla's cars are especially expensive! Brave souls, they are.
Regarding News.YC, I fear that it may eventually suffer the same fate as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Trolling is a minor problem compared to self-promoting. The challenge is that there's no scarcity on the internet, so you have to create artificial scarcity. It may be that the best way to fix the problem (i.e. to create scarcity) is through fees. For example, a $1.00 (rising with demand) fee per submission would keep a lot of junk out of any discussion site. And any serious content producer or blogger wouldn't blink at the notion of a small fee. The assumption that everything should be free is what kills many of these sites.
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