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Love the Moto Guzzi offerings. Hope they can manage for years to come.
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Would still love to see a HD "scooter". It doesn't have to look like a scooter as we know them today, and certainly not a Vespa. This would be done on HD's terms, with HD metal, their interpretation for the modern world and how it would play in it. A product that bridges low dependence on dino (i.e. I fuel economy), but durable, if not even bulletproof in implementation. It would be cool for all ages, and likely owned by traditional HD riders who want a toy to rack up on the back of their RV.
Honda and Yamaha are already executing on fusion scooter-ADV recipes and they appear to be popular in some countries. I am sure HD could come up with a recipe that would just reek, " ... I must have." ... if they had the courage. Think Honda Monkey, but heavy-duty HD style (without being heavy, of course).
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In many circles, Moto Guzzi is considered the "Italian Harley-Davidson," though I can't imagine a merger would play well in Peoria. Or Paris (France or Texas).
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Peter Lynch from Fidelity years ago said : invest in a company any idiot can run because sooner or later an idiot will run it.
There are plenty of motor cycle manufactures run by idiots in the past and some broke the company.
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Hate to say it but Harley is circling the drain with no "rebirth" coming. The Buell experiment had promise but Eric was goofy and a bad executive. Remember the stunt when he put a new 500cc Blast into a crusher and said that "this isn't who we are"? That was dumb. Upgrading the Blast into a reliable and fun entry-level platform would have made sense. But Eric's hubris quickly brought on the Harley shut down. Karma's a b***h, eh?
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I suppose anything is possible: HD almost went bankrupt in '69, only later to give birth to the HD "Confederate Edition" in the 70s. Not much of a birth there.
Look at Blackberry (formerly RIM) in 2010: Top of the world in smartphones commanding about 78% of the market. Today, they no longer manufacture smartphones. No bail-outs, nuttin'. Just arrogance by the corporate leadership.
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The sleek, sexy, intuitive, disruptive, open-architecture iPhone killed them.
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Apple is a good example for HD management to copy. Jobs brought Apple back from the brink with laser focus on design. He put Jony Ive, his design guy, right next to his office in the C-suite and together they put together the iMac, MacBook, iPod, iPad, iPhone, IOS, etc.. The HD guy is still thinking profit margins. He needs to move the CFO to another floor and bring in people focused on making cool bikes they will be relevant now and for decades to come.
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(09-25-2019, 02:19 AM)DAC_imp Wrote: Apple is a good example for HD management to copy. Jobs brought Apple back from the brink with laser focus on design. He put Jony Ive, his design guy, right next to his office in the C-suite and together they put together the iMac, MacBook, iPod, iPad, iPhone, IOS, etc.. The HD guy is still thinking profit margins. He needs to move the CFO to another floor and bring in people focused on making cool bikes they will be relevant now and for decades to come.
(+1)
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That’s somewhat dismissive. I’m not trying to compare the impact of Jobs on our society as a whole with what WG did for Harley. Jobs was gifted and was able to draw talent around him which pushed his visions into reality. WG in his own way was gifted and had a significant impact on the motorcycling world. He’s was with the company since the 60’s and at one time was their chief designer involved in a number of MoCo’s key product lines. Probably his best known and most enduring design was the Super Glide. He was an executive there when the company was bought back from AMF and contributed significantly to the meteoric rise and take over by Harley of the American domestic market for the niche it targeted. One could make the case based purely on data that Willies retirement was the beginning of Harley’s slide downward. You say tomato I say......
It’s easy to forget that back in the 70s Moto Guzzi sold more bikes for a number of years than Harley did.
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^ agree with all of that.
