Posted on 02/21/2015 9:50:45 PM PST by Swordmaker
Apple fanboys and Samsung’s “Next Big Thing”ers would hoot with derisive laughter if The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times reported that GM or Ford planned to rewrite the rules of smartphone innovation. But when media coverage suggests Apple may redesign the automobile, even the most cynical car-lovers quiver with righteous curiosity. They should.
Could Sir Jonny Ive be the next Battista Pininfarina, Harley Earl, or Akihiro Nagaya? Don’t bet against him. Steve Jobs’ successors are at least an order of magnitude more credible as disruptive innovators than the heirs of Ford and Sloan. The computer, software, telecoms, music, broadcast, publishing, photography, retail, and consumer electronics industries certainly believe so. Apple demonstrably understands design, UX, and global supply chain alignment in ways few organizations ever have. According to data from Yahoo finance, company’s market cap exceeds that of Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Tesla, and Daimler combined. Apple’s cash hoard currently tops $175 billion.
If Apple truly wants to fundamentally transform the driving experience and global automobile business, it surely has the ingenuity and resources to do so. Super-investor Warren Buffett’s admonition that “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact” doesn’t apply. Unlike commercial aviation, automobile economics brilliantly reward the brilliant. Apple is brilliant. Don’t bet against them.
Who knows what an iCar might look, feel, or drive like? I don’t. But the better and more challenging question is, how would the automotive industry’s incumbents respond to genuinely disruptive competition? How might the industry splinter, shatter, or consolidate when truly well-endowed innovators commit to upending expectations around the DX — the Driving Experience? The money, frankly, is secondary; the real issue is creativity and capability.
Consider what happened with the iPhone. Incumbents Nokia and RIM—the handset status quo—collapsed into irrelevance. They simply couldn’t compete. By contrast, entrepreneurial non-incumbents like Google counterattacked with Android. Samsung and Xiaomi—a company that didn’t even have a smartphone five years ago—quickly became dominant players.
No, an automobile is not just an iPhone with wheels. But is GM a Blackberry and Ford a Nokia when Apple competes with a DX, a business model, and an iCar “genius bar” support network that makes their offerings look last century?
The failure of Shai Agassi’s Better Place and the ongoing production challenges confronting Elon Musk’s Tesla underscore how hard being an entrepreneurial 21st Century automobile start-up can be. Musk, whose company is reluctant to hire people from the industry, has bitingly observed that his established automotive competitors are innovation laggards. “I had thought the big car companies would be coming out with electric cars sooner,” he observed in late 2014. Their failure to do so was “mind blowing.”
But Apple would deny any and every incumbent their “too small to matter” excuse for inertia. Indeed, precisely because Apple knows how to profitably scale its design, UX and supply chain expertise, automobile manufacturers would be compelled to react and respond. Traditional retailers smirked and cried “niche!” when Ron Johnson began rolling out Apple Stores in 2001. Yet those stores have successfully redefined retail norms and customer expectations well beyond Apple products and services. Apple dramatically influenced even its indirect competitors.
So put aside its brand equity. Apple’s command of UX and technical infrastructure create multiple opportunities to transform the economics and expectations of every value-added aspect of the automobile experience. Building a car is the least of it. Apple needn’t build a car any more than it must build an iPhone or an iPad (thanks, Foxconn). All Apple has to do to force fundamental industry restructuring is do what the incumbents have not—redesign the end-to-end purchase and DX, not just the cars themselves.
That’s a bold vision for an entrepreneur, but a revitalizing challenge for a post-Jobs Apple. A partnership with Uber, for example, could be as DX transformative as special arrangements with the traffic management authorities in Beijing, London, Los Angeles, and New Delhi. How might Apple leapfrog or reframe Google’s autonomous vehicle approach to DX? Even a modest Apple incursion into the automotive industry would likely prompt an entrepreneurial explosion of innovation—and innovative—partnerships. To what extent might an automotive counterpart of “apps” and the “app store” generate new automotive expectations and value?
Indeed, it’s easy to see how a Google has as much or more incentive than Apple to “own” tomorrow’s DX as the future of personal mobility and sustainability evolves. After all, Google’s Waze is already evolving into an indispensable global DX standard. More difficult to anticipate is how a Toyota or Ford or Volkswagen will respond. These companies haven’t had to respond to a truly disruptive innovator in over forty years.
Toyota, without question, is the real incumbent to watch. If Apple drives into the automobile marketplace, Toyota has the most to lose. Between the Lexus and the Prius, Toyota’s the one dominant market leader that consistently respects design and business fundamentals even as it innovates.
Even if it never built a single car, Apple would likely prove the most serious and worthy competitor Toyota ever confronted. Toyota knows that Apple could design, build and deliver a DX that Toyota’s best customers would like. Maybe it wouldn’t be a “car”….but it would be something that redefined how people thought and felt about what it means to buy, own, and drive a car.
I bet BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford know that, too. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Will the incumbents wait and see? Or will they take the wheel?
If Apple hits the accelerator on its DX option, the next ten years of automobile innovation will be more interesting than any ten years of the automotive past.
I notice that our fellow with the 18 XP computers controlling his process network hasn’t come back to answer my questions. . .
Yep, true; then again, if I allow reboots and only count crashes, my Win7 machines have been "operating continuously" for many years, too. We both know that the monthly Windows Update reboot serves to keep a system from getting stale... anyway, there's no argument that on average, Macs stay up longer and more easily, with fewer hangs and crashes, than any other modern consumer or pro-sumer system.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.