Macs and motorcycles

[Bolt_Gundam510]

by Ephraim Schwartz

Apple's cult appeal has a somewhat unlikely predecessor: Harley-Davidson

In an attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Apple and why it has such a loyal following, I thought I would take a look at a company that achieved that haloed status first, by about 80 years. It's one of the few that can claim a similar kind of loyalty among its customers: Harley-Davidson Motorcycles.

Aside from the fact that hardly anyone gets the Apple logo tattooed onto their body, both companies have a lot in common.

One of the more curious similarities that Harley and Apple share is the fact that both have a charismatic leader whose roots go back to the company's founding and who, after losing the company, took it back from the philistines.

In Harley-Davidson's case, it was Willy Davidson, grandson of the founder, who became part of the group that bought the company back from bowling ball company AMF. In the case of Apple, of course, it was Steve Jobs, once ousted by his own board of directors but who returned in triumph as CEO.

The similarities don't end there.

When I bought my first Harley, the salesman rolled it out of the showroom and into the street and started it up for me. The first thing it did was backfire two or three times.

I was worried. Why did it do that, I asked?

"It's a Harley. If you want perfection, buy a Japanese bike," he told me.

Way back in the early '80s, while editing a car and motorcycle magazine, I became fascinated by the new world of high tech. I decided to leave publishing and got a job selling computers at one of the first computer retailers on the East Coast.

If memory serves, the Apple II -- not the Apple II Plus or the Apple IIe -- sold for about $2,495. Sometimes, only days after having bought one, a customer would come back into the store carrying the Apple in his arms like a baby and announce, "My Apple is sick. Can you fix it?"

Unlike the Harley salesman, I didn't say, "What do you expect? It's an Apple," but it did amaze me that someone could be so good-natured about forking over $2,495 for a brand-new, nonworking machine.

Love, even for an inanimate object, does not spring from perfection. Rather, I suspect it is the imperfections of the object of our desire that make it lovable.

As for Harley, its bikes were never the most comfortable machines to ride. In fact, a kidney belt was recommended before the company recently rubber-mounted its engines. And its V-twin engine is way out of date in terms of motorcycling engineering.

In the beginning, far fewer programs ran on Apple than the IBM standard. For the most part, Apple innovated more slowly, late to the table on the hard-disk drive and lagging in memory. Its first business machine, the Lisa, was a total flop.

And now, even the flaws in the iPhone are meaningless to the faithful.

Another attribute both Apple and Harley share is their status as an underdog. By the late 1960s, British motorcycle companies had all but died, and the Japanese had the fastest, most reliable bikes on the street. Harley was tired, unreliable, and doomed, it seemed, to memory. But it came back through a series of shrewd business decisions and the help of the U.S. government, which put a tariff on imported bikes to help make the local marque a bit more palatable.

For its part, Apple has been counted out too many times to mention. As soon as IBM introduced its first PCs, Apple became the underdog. I was there in that first computer store when the owners brought in Big Blue. It took over immediately, riding its trusted name in business to account for nearly 80 percent of the store's PC sales almost overnight.

What's interesting, however, is that whereas Harley keeps its image old-school, playing off tradition to keep its audience loyal, Apple appeals to modernity to keep its edge. Either way, though, Harley or Apple, both companies make products that are eye candy to their followers.

Yet to perpetuate their appeal, each company must win over new customers. And this is where the two companies may really diverge.

Next time you're on the street, take a good look at the Harley riders as they pass. I will wager you will see gray hair and a somewhat weather-worn face beneath the helmet. Harley owners are aging, and so, in search of a more youthful demographic, Harley took two bold steps. It revamped its line, adding the sporty Buell to its big-cruiser-only product line. And even worse, to attract more buyers, the company produced the first non-air-cooled engine, a move anathema to traditionalists.

Unfortunately, neither strategy has proved to be a roaring success for Harley.

On the other hand, Apple was able to transition its systems from the PowerPC processor to Intel, the very brains that power its archrival Windows PCs, with barely a complaint from the faithful.

The company also diverged from its core business when it introduced the iPod and now the iPhone. Not only have both products sold extremely well -- the iPod becoming a huge success and the iPhone likely heading in a similar direction -- but they are driving new customers to consider other parts of the Apple product line.

In fact, longtime Apple watcher Tim Bajarin, principal at Creative Strategies, estimates that 50 percent of the people coming into Apple's stores are new to Apple.

For both Harley and Apple, customer loyalty has provided a tremendous competitive advantage. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that the next generation will be as loyal as the previous one.

So far it looks like Apple has come up with the right answers. I hope Harley does, too. In the meantime, it will be exciting to see how both companies evolve to keep their phenomenon factor going.

Source: InfoWorld

[Fr.jack hackett]

now the thing id like to know is:

'If it aint harley, it aint shit'. What does it mean?

so if its not a harley then its NOT shit. So if it is a harley then it IS shit

Perhaps i miss the point maybe :)