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.
If cars crashed as often as computers... PC computers crash, Macs just run ...
The M$ car: giving new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death ...
Apple makes all of their stuff in China.
Except the Mac Pro and iMacs, as well as made to order imacs.
The free Linux car comes with a free ugly Administrator, just provide room and board ...
The iCar, affectionately known as the AppleCart, will be so reliably aware of traffic as to safely be able to cross any intersection without stopping. It will also know when the cops are monitoring the intersection . . .The iWatch automatically reminds its wearer not to sit in a chair for an hour without standing up and walking around; this based on the motto that “sitting is the new cancer.” The implication for car design is obvious; the AppleCart will be configured to safely allow the driver to transition from a seated to a standing position, and to get exercise, while the vehicle is in motion.
You heard it here first.
I was the biggest Apple detractor around, until my sister finally got me to come over to "the dark side". I was having my Dells crash a few times per year, and was replacing them every 2 years. I've had the MacBook pro for just under 6 years so far, and have not had it crash once.
I did have an ant get inside the screen once when I was using it outside, and the mouse trackpad had to be replaced when I spilled water on it... but that is the sum total of all of my problems with this laptop, and I have never once downloaded a single anti-virus program of any kind.
You can hate on the extra cost (which seems worth it to me after 6 years), and the weird Apple culture that some take to extremes, but you cannot accuse Macs of being crash-prone.
You could call it a VW Type 1.
I miss my Bug.
Did the computer crash, or did the iTunes and Safari software crash. I have never heard of either iTunes or Safari crashing the system. That would be very hard for either to crash OS X requiring a reboot. Usually if they crash, merely reload the program.
About 10-15% of iPhones are made in Brazil.
Want to play my computer is better. I have 18 Dells running WINDOWS XP 24/7/365 controlling my process network. Not one BSOD or hardware failure in 6 years and this is in a dirty. cutting fluid fumes and temperature hostile environment - not some office.
Are they connected to the Internet? And from what you say they are not used by people daily. . . pretty much dedicated machines doing the same things over and over. Right?
Ummm, Sword. Hang on a minute.
It is impossible to legitimately operate any Windows computer -- including Windows Server -- continuously for more than about 720 hours. Because Windows Updates every Patch Tuesday, and the virtually guaranteed need to reboot. Windows continuous operation is a joke.
OTOH, what the hell version of OS-X is she and are you running that hasn't required an update restart in seven years?
I daresay that, while the long run is impressive, it is hardly laudatory from a security point of view. What say?
I think if you'll go back and notice, I stated ". . .except for software updates" it has not crashed. . . and when we refer to updates, those are major updates. Minor updates often do not require system restarts. Third party software updates seldom require a system restart as they often do on Windows because software is not allowed to modify the system. On the other hand, we do have a server that has not had a system update in that entire time. . . it does not go on the internet—ever—and happily sits there running OS X.5 Leopard working as a back-up server with a RAID set-up. It's on a heavy duty UPS and has never even gone down in a power failure. Two drives have failed on it. . . but not the boot drive. Perhaps, one of these days, it will. I think it's been six to six and half years since we upgraded it to OS X.5.8 which would have been the last time it was rebooted.
Perhaps because of my long history with Unix, DEC VAX and RSX servers, and high-reliability industrial control systems, I still define "continuous operation" only in terms of "no interruptions of service", and I'm pretty hardline -- for example, restarting Apache to pick up a config file change can be done gracefully and inperceptibly, but it is an interruption of service if anyone's download gets stepped on.
A reboot is an interruption of service lasting typically a few minutes, between the start of service shutdowns and the time when all services are up again. But perhaps more importantly, a reboot reinitializes the system structures, clears caches, all sorts of refreshing cleanup occurs. The test of long-term system stability is whether it keeps going without that refreshment -- that proves there aren't any slow memory leaks, tables that don't have enough space and fill up, etc.
I know I'm being picky here, but my background taught me that counting "continuous operation" and ignoring reboots is just as, ummm, incorrect as counting "continuous fasting" and ignoring snacks. Fasting is fatal; anything less is not fasting, it's partial fasting. The reason RAIDs in HA systems are designed with hot-swap spares is exactly because in some systems any interruption is intolerable. For the smaller computers most of us work with, a reboot is actually a breather. :)
That said, I certainly acknowledge the validity of your description and achievement.
Like being a little bit pregnant. . . but we were discussing operating without crashing. . . and I was quite specific to include downtime due to updates.
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