GM: Where's Steve Jobs when you need him?
Posted
Nov 18 2008, 09:05 AM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
General Motors looks worse than Rocky after his bout with Clubber Lang. The whole company looks sadly beaten down, a dying animal flailing hopelessly around. "Please sir, can I have a bailout?" While politicians and economists argue about life support, the future seems pretty clear: GM is DOA.
The implosion of GM would be a terrible thing for thousands of workers and their families. Lost health insurance, lost retirement benefits, lost seniority. One giant after another has fallen in the last year -- and the shockwaves just keep multiplying.
The collapse of GM would be a terrible thing for the American soul. It’d be like losing the Statue of Liberty. Or baseball. Or Delaware. We’d feel like something was missing: An amputee reaching for a phantom limb.
But if we let ourselves forfeit our fascination with cars, the fault will be ours alone. In the next decade, America will need to reinvent its automobile industry the way it’s reinvented the tech sector. GM could stand to benefit from learning how to do this from another GM: That is, Generation Me.
Arguing for a need for automotive innovation, Flat-Worlder Thomas Friedman suggests in the New York Times that “somebody ought to call Steve Jobs…and ask him if he’d like to do a national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the GM iCar.”
Friedman is right to evoke Jobs. Apple succeeded because it appealed to the tastes of the “next” generation. Think about it: How many kids owned iPods before their parents? How many kids used e-mail first? I got my first text message from my Dad about a month ago. He asked, “How are you?” And I knew life would never be quite the same again.
Companies look to kids not just because they’re the next wave of consumers, but because they establish what’s hot today. As those tastes change, big companies will need to be nimbler, smarter - more like tech start-ups, if they want to remain viable.
After all, tech businesses never enjoyed the luxury of laziness. The moment your new toy feels stale, you’re out. Remember CompuServe? Or Wang computer? Or XyWrite?
Dead. Dead. Dead.
Nevertheless, Friedman himself may have missed his own point. American car manufacturers need to start thinking like the next Steve Jobs. They need to find the next design, the next way to fuel-efficiency, the next way to excite. We can only hope that there, standing in the shadows of General Motors, looms the next great innovator.
So I challenge car companies to think big. Why stop at hybrid cars? Make ones that float. Make a Mustang that literally transforms into a real mustang, so when traffic gets bad, you can hit a button and gallop softly away into the sunset. Let’s all agree that 2010 is the year when all cars, regardless of size, shape or color, can finally move sideways.
Top Stocks blogging partner Todd Harrison is founder & CEO of Minyanville.com. This post was written by Minyanville Contributor Cory Bortnicker.
Related reading:
GM Declares Itself Essential to World As We Know It
Toyota: Most Overrated Company on Earth?
No Life Support for GM
