Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several professional masseuses.
Dell, with a history of managing a great supply chain and relatively little innovation in management or analysis software, has the longest road to travel to this new model.
The company's boxy, no-frills 800-cc model has been king of the road for more than a decade - even though there have been precious few changes in its interior, exterior or the engine.
To measure the frequency of repairs for a particular vehicle, it compared the percentage of reported check engine failures for that model to its share of all 136 million 2002-2012 model-year vehicles on the road.
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Jerome Guillen wants to gun a prototype Tesla Model S up a steep, twisty road on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, but a Porsche blocks his way.
The person Shamsaddinov fought with was parked by the side of the road in a Soviet-era Zhiguli, the ubiquitous model favored for cheapness rather than quality.
The laser beams on the Tele Atlas vans scan each building on the road thousands of times, creating a three-dimensional model of the neighborhood that, when matched to photos from the high-resolution cameras, can be used to re-create a realistic cityscape.
"The whole point is to take a gas guzzler off the road and replace it with a newer, more fuel efficient model, " Wood said.
That may not be surprising, but the model also shows that the length of a slip road is decisive in determining what happens to traffic.
Two sedans with big, brightly painted, carefully hand-built model airplanes lashed to their roofs were turning off the road onto the dirt track.
Ballooning losses were easily explained away by the investment bankers as the new "EBE (earnings before expenses) Model" of valuation, which buy-side analysts on the road show swallowed like ice cream.
This thinking and the painfully long time it took DELL to learn it was wrong is precisely what led DELL down the wrong road and is the reason why DELL is still struggling to build a durable business model.
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The company wants to have a tangible Android-powered (2.3.5 Gingerbread, to be exact) model to give to potential partners, so they can craft something similar down the road.
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