Macs and motorcycles
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 anyo
Follow @infoworldApple'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.
