GM Diversifies — Say Hello to Ross Perot
1984: Acquisitions of Hughes Aircraft and EDS distract GM's management from the company's core business. By the mid-1980s, then GM chairman Roger Smith was eager to change the automaker into a high-tech giant. He really believed that buying Hughes and EDS, vastly different companies with distinctly different cultures, held the key to GM's future. And it has been argued that these investments were a better use of GM's capital than the auto industry was. But the expensive add-ons were never integrated into GM and created immense distractions for GM executives, including a very public spat between Smith and EDS founder Ross Perot at a time when Toyota and Honda were pushing deeper into the American market. Some GM watchers believe these acquisitions also helped lead to the creation of a jobs bank — the source of an enormous money drain — during negotiations with the UAW in 1984 as a way to help ease the introduction of new technology harvested from Hughes and EDS into the company's factories.