A few weeks ago, I was discussing the launch of the Palm Pre with my friend Darren. I like the Pre, and he does too. I would rather have one of these than an iPhone, even though by all accounts the build quality of the hardware isn’t that great. It makes up for it by having a better operating system, and by including the one feature I always thought the iPhone should have had: a physical QWERTY keyboard. (Incidentally, the Palm Pre is currently only available for CDMA networks, which means it will be a while before it’s available in South Africa.)

At some point, he made the following observation: “A couple of years ago, nobody would have thought that in 2009, the best phones would be American.”

This struck me as an intriguing thought, and correct on both levels. The best phones today are indeed American: the iPhone, the Pre, and the new Blackberry models are all excellent. The best non-American phones use American software, such as Google’s innovative Android operating system. Compared to “smartphones” of a couple of years ago, like the Nokia N-series, using any one of these devices makes you feel like you’ve just stepped out of a time machine.

It is also true that, not long ago, nobody thought American companies could compete in this market. Everyone was watching to see how the Finns, the grand old men of the industry, would respond to the challenge from the upstart Koreans. The only major American company in the market was Motorola, which was large in terms of market share, but had a painfully slow development cycle and suffered from a perennial struggle to remain profitable.

All of these companies were engaged in a features arms-race, loading up their phones with faster data connections and higher-megapixel cameras. But when Apple entered the market, it didn’t even try to win the arms-race. Instead, it did something qualitatively different, fundamentally changing the way in users interact with the device. Tellingly, when the iPhone was first introduced, competitors such as Nokia ridiculed the phone for its slow data speeds and low-resolution camera. Even when presented with the reality of the iPhone, it took them a while to realise Apple had effectively changed the game in such a way that those things were no longer the main determinants of success. This is the concise version of how Apple and other American companies came to dominate the high end of the cellular phone market.

However, this raises some interesting questions. For instance, what happened to Motorola? Motorola is the largest of the American cellphone manufacturers, and historically they’ve been a pretty innovative company. But they seemed as taken by surprise by the success of the iPhone as everyone else, and they’ve been slow to adapt ever since. The company’s fortunes have improved since last year, when they were considering selling their handset business. But they’re not exactly setting the world on fire, either.

I don’t pretend to know exactly why this is. But I want to bring up one of my pet theories, which is that Motorola is to cellular phones as Chrysler Corporation is to to cars, and vice versa. Consider their similarities: they’re both large American companies competing in markets where American companies have often struggled. Their products both tend to be popular in hip-hop culture (okay, so maybe I’m reaching a bit on this point). Most importantly, both companies have tended to be one-hit wonders. Both of them released an exceptional product in 2004, and then failed to capitalise on its success. In Motorola’s case, it was the RAZR cellphone, which featured high-class materials and unique industrial design. In Chrysler’s case, it was the 300C sedan, which combined spaciousness, performance and rear-wheel-drive handling. Motorola followed up the success of the RAZR with uninspiring phones like the PEBL and ROKR E1, and Chrysler’s follow-up to the 300C was the ugly, poorly-performing Sebring. Neither company has managed to fully recover since then (though Chrysler has fared a lot a lot worse).

It’s a pity that companies like Chrysler and Motorola aren’t more competitive, even though they seemingly possess, somewhere in their corporate DNA, the ability to make good products. But it makes me wonder: just as America ultimately didn’t need Motorola to stay competitive in the cellphone industry, can it compete in the car industry without the Big Three? Obviously, this is an imperfect analogy. The car industry is capital-intensive in ways that the cellphone and software industries are not. You need large-scale production facilities and dealership networks in order to build and sell cars, and this is not the sort of thing that can be easily financed through venture capital. Cars have a long development cycle, are complex to design and manufacture, and must satisfy a dizzying array of regulations. It seems silly to assume that the American car industry could be saved by small start-ups.

And yet, if Chrysler is Motorola, then it’s hard not to see traces of Apple in, say, Tesla Motors. When Tesla was selling stripped-down roadsters for more than $100,000, it was easy to dismiss them as a mere curiosity. But Tesla is currently working on a sedan which, they say, will seat five people, accelerate from 0-60 mph in 5.6 seconds, and cost a mere $50,000 - the price of well-spec’ed BMW 3-Series or Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The sedan is also better-looking than virtually anything the Big Three are currently working on, and of course, uses no petrol whatsoever. Just like Apple when it first entered the cellphone market, Tesla is not content with trying to fight its competitors on their own terms. Instead, they’re trying to fundamentally change the game.

It would be premature to say that the “Tesla model” is the future of the US car industry. Also, Tesla itself is not exactly a triumph of free-market capitalism: the company has benefited heavily from low-rate loans and subsidies from the US government. Still, the fact that a small company like Tesla can generate good ideas and bring them to market faster than the Big Three is certainly indicative of something positive. And it’s worth considering what would have happened if, a few years ago, the US government had decided to artificially prop up Motorola at the expense of its foreign and domestic competitors. In this scenario, it seems likely that neither American consumers nor the American cellphone industry would be as well off as they are today. The “creative destruction” of the marketplace really can be creative.