Apple Cars...

My friend KstreetKate (http://www.kstreetkate.net/) twittered this morning about this entry on the Huffington Post. What if Apple Designed Cars? I didn't read Bono's Op-Ed in the Times about this but this is an old idea. In many forms it has been floating around the deisgn and progressive business community for years. It probably takes someone like Bono to give the idea the traction it needs but I can tell you we've always thought this was such an obvious fix that it had to just be more retardedness (is that a word?) by the US car industry that kept it from getting done. Say all you want about safety, gas mileage and all the other reasons that people will TELL you that they bought a car. As when we used to do customer value research, there are always two stories; the one that consumers tell you because they think its what they should be saying, and the real story. US cars are simply ugly, not sexy, not interesting; that's why no one buys them. Why wouldn't Detroit just outsource the design work to Ideo or Imagination? It's so obvious that we all just figured they'd thought of it and then convinced themselves it wouldn't work because they had all the talent they needed in-house...(NOT). Anyway, I hope someone with half a brain in Detroit....might be asking a lot...read this and what Bono had to say and does something about it. Jobs are created by smart creative people, not by people who think they know everything and can't possibly learn from someone outside of their organization.