Is it my imagination or did the rise of expense-account restaurants purposely building-in conversation-evaporating high-volume noise levels (partly by not building in the architectural elements that muffle them) coincide with the market run-up to 2008?
Nevertheless, Nissan is vulnerable in another way if demand for electric vehicles softens, because Nissan is building a dedicated factory in Tennessee to produce a much higher volume of the Nissan Leaf, starting in 2012.
In the early 1990s the company squandered enormous resources and billions of dollars on a series of failed consumer products like the Newton PDA. Its efforts to do everything itself, building capabilities as varied as cutting-edge hardware development and volume manufacturing, led to huge losses and massive layoffs.