A keeper from Monday's Wall Street Journal: Once, General Motors was Microsoft and Apple and Toyota all rolled into one.

The below is the link to an article you might want to read and save, sort of like keeping the story on the day the music died, etc. A sad day indeed.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Once, General Motors was Microsoft and Apple and Toyota all rolled into one.

GM set the standard of how a company should be run, how utilitarian products could be made cool and how they should be sold. It helped win a World War, drive American prosperity and reinvigorate business-school curricula.

"Nobody else could cover the whole range of the marketplace like GM, not Ford, not Chrysler," said Gerald Meyers, a former chief executive of American Motors Corp. and now a professor of business management at the University of Michigan.

In the end, though, GM was a victim of its own success -- its path to bankruptcy paved with the very management, marketing and labor practices that made it the world's largest and most profitable company for much of the 20th century. Strategies that had once been deemed innovative "became a millstone on the whole company," said Mr. Meyers.