I assume he means the Vickers, which was a derivative of the Maxim design, Vickers having purchased the Maxim company in the late 19th Century?
And yes. My fondness for that literally Victorian beast has to be measured against the GPMG, which of course owes more than a little to certain German designs of WW2 ...
Evolution.
WW1: all sides used the Maxim (or variants), incluidng (surprise!!) the U.S. (our boys didn't get AMERICAN machineguns until relatively late-they were stuck using French or British kit for most of their involvement).
WW2: Germans, recognizing that the Maxim 15 was a bit too heavy and that the LMG's were a bit too light, came up with a compromise design that could serve with the mobility of an LMG and the sustained battering of the WW1 era French heavy (an air-cooled strip-fed beast whose name escapes me). Basically they took the chassis of an LMG design, and fed it with a belt, which worked pretty good and the MG-34 was born, followed by realizing they need to make 'em cheaper and faster, so upon that, they came up with the cheaper-and-faster MG-42, which soldiered on into the 2000s as the MG-3 in German service (and limited export).
From that thinking derived the M-240G (FN-MAG), and the M-249 (FN MINIMI).
Why? because when you're stocking parts, if you have to stock two .30 (7.6x-7.9x) caliber machine guns it's more expensive than stocking parts for one .30 caliber that does two (or more) jobs...andthe more jobs you do with it, the cheaper them parts are (economies of scale) and the cheaper it is to train your maintenance (economies of scale again-oh, and you don't have to train your armorers on an additional design, so saves money and time there) which also improves your total uptime, even when replacing a perfectly good LMG and HMG (the British BREN and Vickers)
