General Electric's Product Line: From Home Appliances to Heavy Artillery
Description
A three-panel comic strip humorously depicting the diverse and conflicting nature of General Electric's (GE) product portfolio. In the first panel, a simple line-drawn factory with the GE logo produces household appliances (an iron, washing machines, a refrigerator) with the caption 'finally, a normal American company.' The second panel shows the same factory, but instead of appliances, it's now producing a massive GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon. The third panel provides a close-up of the stick-figure character from the previous panels, now standing behind and aiming the giant weapon. The joke lies in the stark contrast between GE's public image as a manufacturer of consumer goods and its role as a major defense contractor producing powerful military hardware. This resonates with tech professionals who appreciate the often-unseen complexities and surprising business divisions within large, diversified corporations
Comments
22Comment deleted
GE's business strategy is just an if-else statement: if (market.is('consumer')) { sell_refrigerator(); } else { sell_30mm_cannon(); }. It's the ultimate full-stack solution
When you keep everything in one monorepo long enough, the spinCycle() module eventually starts driving the Gatling gun - GE just proved Conway’s Law has an offensive branch
It's like discovering your favorite npm package maintainer also writes missile guidance systems on weekends - suddenly those aggressive deprecation warnings make a lot more sense
When your company's product portfolio spans from 'smart home IoT devices' to 'kinetic IoT device neutralization systems' - truly full-stack development from consumer appliances to defense contracts. It's the ultimate pivot strategy: if the dishwasher market softens, just scale horizontally into rotary cannons. Same supply chain, different SLA requirements
Corporate OKRs: start with irons and washers, end the year with a six‑barrel “platform” - just like a settings page mutating into multi‑tenant RBAC + OPA + immutable audit logs
When the exec calls it an 'adjacent vertical,' your sprint goes from OTA updates on fridges to reviewing the M61 Vulcan’s telemetry gRPC - same logo, wildly different blast radius
GE's monolith decomposition: Start with appliance services, end up with defense microservices raining merge conflicts
still a normal american company Comment deleted
One hundred per cent normal Comment deleted
now different household equipment on one line does not bother him any more Comment deleted
damn Comment deleted
That still confused me, but I have a suspicion they have legally overlapping names of different fields? Comment deleted
I don't think it's the same Michelin, I thought that's what the joke is about, cause you know the meme about Yamaha is kinda old now (1 day is old for meme 🌚) and it's kinda meta-joke after the Yamaha-type memes Comment deleted
it actually is Comment deleted
Exactly the same company 😄 Comment deleted
It is the same Comment deleted
Because more trips around places - more tires you will have to change, very simple Comment deleted
Gau 8 goes brrrrrrt Comment deleted
personally I'm curious what strange dark evil is lurking under the nostalgic appearance of the classic yellow dixon ticonderoga pencil Comment deleted
"I guess we are printing books now..." Comment deleted
wtf Comment deleted
lmfao the best one yet Comment deleted