A shining example

DETROIT — It’s a long way from Henry Ford’s gritty factory complex on the banks of the Rouge to the light-filled atrium of Apple Inc.’s corporate headquarters in sunny Silicon Valley.

But events this week have leaders of Detroit’s Big Three automakers thinking less about differences and more about similarities between themselves and the once-troubled company that brought the world iPods, Macintosh computers and — starting in June — iPhones.

Apple’s problems, circa 1997, are familiar: red ink, falling market share, tumbling stock price and persistent doubts about its future. Analysts questioned whether it could find someone to permanently replace ousted CEO Gil Amelio, who had been hired to turn the company around.

The key to the turnaround — engineered by returning co-founder Steve Jobs — was in ideas as old as capitalism itself: Make something new, something people want to buy.

Detroit is watching.

“I admire their pure understanding of the brand and the type of customer they’re going after, and married to that, a product and a design strategy that they do not veer off of,” said Mark Fields, Ford Motor Co.’s president of the Americas.

This week, Jobs introduced the iPhone, a cross between the cellular telephone, a computer and the company’s wildly successful personal music players. In Detroit, automakers unveiled multiple new models, each carrying the hope that people will buy enough of them to change red ink to black.

For the Big Three, the problem — for the past few years, anyway — has been product. They made boatloads of cash on trucks and sport utility vehicles when gas was cheap and the economy was booming, but were late in changing when petroleum costs spiked and people wanted something more efficient.

Now they’re all losing billions and scrambling to catch up with customers who are increasingly being drawn to cars made by foreign-based automakers, particularly Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.

Auto executives know they can learn a lot from how Jobs used a new product and clever marketing to raise his company from the grave.

“We’re really trying to be more like companies like Apple, where we can innovate and move faster,” said Mark LaNeve, vice president of sales, service and marketing for General Motors Corp.

Before October 2001, when the first iPod was launched, digital music players were clunky and had limited storage capacity. They were fueled by tunes torn from CDs or pirated via Napster. Syncing with a PC was difficult, and even navigating through songs was a chore.

Apple saw an opportunity and jumped on it, introducing a sleek player with a hard drive large enough for thousands of songs, a click wheel for quick navigation and, within months, an online store that offered a legal means for filling up the iPod.

Jobs, who is fond of car analogies, had tried the same approach with the original 1998 iMac: Introducing a sleek machine that made other computers look like a gray 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera.

There are differences, of course, between a 3,600-pound car and an egg-shaped iMac or a featherweight iPod Shuffle, chief among them the time it takes to design and build them.

The new iPhone, for example, took about two and a half years to bring to market — and even that’s a long time in the consumer electronics niche, where many products live in six- or 12-month development cycles. The average car takes four or five years.

Also, Apple contracts out virtually all its manufacturing, where the Big Three have billions invested in plants and machinery and must bear the health care, pension and salary costs of a huge — though quickly shrinking — and expensive unionized labor force.

Still, Apple’s core focus on consumer appeal can serve as a model. “I think a fresh, creative mind is something that you can appreciate and focus simply on some complicated things,” said Eric Ridenour, chief operating officer of DaimlerChrysler AG’s Chrysler Group.