
Ford seen ditching Microsoft for Blackberry in future cars - rmason
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140222/BIZ/302220033/Ford-seen-ditching-Microsoft-Blackberry-future-cars
======
Codhisattva
Not Blackberry the phone but Blackberry the company and it's real time
operating system QNX.

QNX is an excellent RTOS and is already used in cars, appliances, machinery,
and industry. QNX also has a serious R&D initiative for cars.

So it's no surprise that Ford is considering it. There's off the shelf
products that Ford could purchase and drop into a dash tomorrow.

~~~
icefox
QNX (which BB bought a few years ago) has a QNX Car Platform, for example here
is a press release with some details on it from last year.
[http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_5602_1.html](http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_5602_1.html)
So they might be using the car platform, but as the article doesn't mention
explicitly mention it they could just be using the QNX OS and writing their
own thing on top.

Videos of recent demo cars QNX showed off at CES: CES 2013
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl_uVHg_SSs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl_uVHg_SSs)
CES 2014
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MbXvyCTVV0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MbXvyCTVV0)

Disclaimer: I used to work for RIM

------
lukejduncan
Former Ford Sync engineer here.

It's good that Ford is ditching Sync... but what killed Sync was Ford not
Microsoft. Sync is a forked version of Windows CE that is maintained by Ford
(and offshored to a 3rd party vendor for maintenance).

The bugs, the poor UX, it's all a result of extremely poor execution on the
part of Ford. Switching to a new OS doesn't solve that problem.

~~~
rbanffy
I have worked with both QNX (learned C on it) and Windows CE (the Brazilian
electronic voting system used CE for the 2002 version ballots) and, while CE
is very insular, with some Windows skills being translatable, many developers
already familiar with Unix-like OSs would be readily at home with it. Also,
being used in other subsystems, it will make the potential talent pool much
larger as someone from the on-board entertainment system can be allocated to
engine management without extensive retraining.

Poor execution is still possible, but it's now easier to execute it well.

~~~
lukejduncan
Thanks rbanffy. I don't mean to make any comments for or against QNX. It's
just that the problem wasn't engineering IMHO, it was product management.
Engineering and product are very divorced, in separate buildings, and often
only talk to each other after the product team has written API specs by fiat
to enable some last minute feature they dreamed up.

A very real example I witnessed many times: Bob the Product Manager has an
idea. He calls the contractors in Germany who own the embedded Sync code to
tell them this idea and they take it as a spec requirement. They write the
APIs exactly the way the PM thought aloud. The PM then tells the in-house Ford
team who supports the code after its written this idea and they freak out
because it completely breaks the semantics of the API. German folks didn't
care because they get paid more and they need to keep their customer happy,
the PM. Ford engineers care but don't have much power to fix the solution
other than one off hacks to get the software done in time to meet the vehicle
launch date. Customers suffer. Ever wonder why if you enter the Bluetooth menu
from the phone vs from a media stream it actually does two completely
different things? Or the fact that iPhone requires you're connected over the
Apple cord and protocol but actually streams over Bluetooth and weird edge
cases ensue? All caused by this style of execution.

~~~
rbanffy
If there ever was a case for abandoning waterfall ("waterfail"?) and embracing
agile and embed product into engineering, this would be it.

------
jcheng
My understanding of the situation (based on no inside knowledge, just reading
car blogs) was that Sync was good until Ford decided to take development in-
house and turned it into MyFord Touch. The reviews were universally positive
til then, universally negative after.

~~~
rbanffy
Variations over time like this may also reflect a changing set of expectations
and a product that does not evolve much.

------
rmason
This might seem crazy to those on HN. But Ford has had a lot of problems with
the MS software and it has hurt them.

What you might not know is that Detroit is one of the few remaining beachheads
for Blackberry in the US. Detroit is one of the last two cities in the USA to
have Blackberry retail stores. So the company brand isn't as tainted here as
it might be elsewhere even though I realize this isn't the phone OS.

Perhaps this is how Blackberry makes their comeback - as a car OS?

~~~
freshyill
Oh it's not just ford having problems with that MS software. I've had enough
Fords as rental cars to know that that software is utter garbage. Putting that
in the cars had nothing to do with actual users. It's obviously a case of
Microsoft offering Ford a good deal for doing it.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
"I've had enough Fords as rental cars to know that that software is utter
garbage"

Same, except everything else about the car too.

~~~
NoPiece
I drove about 500 miles in Ford C-Max Hybrid rental car last summer, and
really liked it. But was horrified that I had to pull off the freeway and
reboot because the nav/radio/console had frozen. I would never buy a Ford with
Microsoft software, so I hope this switch works out better for them.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
The last Ford I rented I could only get my iphone to play out through the
speakers about one out of every three tries, and only if it was all plugged in
and ready to go when I put the key in (and forget doing anything other than
listening to songs in alphabetical order).

------
brianbreslin
I first read the headline and thought "oh god, how can they strike a deal with
a company that will be dead in a few years". However since QNX is a separate
business line than the phones, that could easily be spun off to its own biz.

I have a Ford now and the Microsoft sync software is atrocious. I have to run
patches every few months and it takes hours to do it each time. Still randomly
crashes on me too.

------
relaxatorium
I have a Ford with the older, speech only Sync system (2009), and I've been
pretty happy with it. Has is quirks, but does what it needs to do for the most
part.

Am I correct in my history that it's really with the touchscreen version that
Microsoft fell on it's face? That's when I recall hearing super toxic reviews.

~~~
RandallBrown
You are correct.

The original Sync system was developed by Microsoft for Ford and has gotten
generally positive reviews.

MyFord Touch, the touchscreen system, was contracted out by Ford and developed
on the Microsoft Automotive platform. So it is "powered by" Microsoft but was
not originally built by them.

------
oddshocks
As a 2013 Ford Fiesta SE owner, I can attest to the poor quality of
Microsoft's SYNC system. I was so frustrated that I even wrote a blog post
about it some time ago. I would have even more negative commentary now.

The Sept. 2013 post, for anyone curious:
[http://oddshocks.com/2013/09/microsoft-ford-sync-
review/](http://oddshocks.com/2013/09/microsoft-ford-sync-review/)

~~~
Fomite
Ford electronics were a good part of the reason I'm a 2013 VW GTI owner.

------
ulfw
The title is so misleading. Hello link bait. They are considering switch to
QNX, which has been used my many car nav systems for years (e.g. BMW). While
yes, QNX has been bought by RIM (now Blackberry), it makes it sound like the
godawful ugly Blackberry phone software was now running in Ford trucks...

------
51Cards
I think the QNX purchase by BlackBerry was a very wise move. I have been
hoping they could hang on long enough to leverage it in the market again. It
is a really nice product with a lot of potential. This is good to see.

~~~
serge2k
They have been trying. The problem is the first version was the overpriced and
missing key features (the playbook had no email at launch). The next attempts
were years late and after the brand already had a rep for being boring old
tech.

------
alexeisadeski3
Wonder what % of non-fleet Ford buyers have smart phones?

The transition away from bloated onboard software can't happen soon enough.

------
JoshGlazebrook
The main problem that I experienced on our 2013 ford edge is when I would play
Spotify over bluetooth audio, for some reason the car itself would start
skipping songs halfway through for no reason at all. After install the latest
update for the my ford touch, it doesn't seem to happen anymore.

------
higherpurpose
These guys at Ford seem to really have their finger on the pulse of
technology, don't they? Ditching one bad company for an even worse one.

From what I've seen, QNX is technically pretty great and has the most advanced
and smoothest multi-tasking system on mobile, in a very battery-efficient way.
I just don't think Blackberry, the company, will be around for long or in a
very strong shape to support big customers in the future. That's why I believe
Ford made a bad bet for the future, here.

That being said, my hope is Blackberry open sources QNX before it goes belly
up, so it can benefit all of humanity. To do otherwise, and leave it for dead
on the shelf of a corporate scavenger or a patent troll like IV or Rockstar
when the inevitable sell-off comes, would be a damn shame.

~~~
rdl
Ford could easily buy the QNX business. PE could also come in and buy the
automotive RTOS business (if they didn't want to be only used by Ford. I
assume Ford purchasing is smart enough to negotiate this -- the biggest risk
is that QNX development efforts might stagnate if Blackberry is failing, but
if the QNX business is viable enough on its own, that seems unlikely.

------
undoware
Yay, a car company is choosing between two closed-source, almost certainly
compromised, podunk OSes.

It's not that either is particularly bad (even though at least one is); it's
that there is a free, as-good-or-better option. It's a much more secure, much
more _trustable_ option, and it's obviously to use Linux, *BSD or even Android
instead.

I'd rather not have the speakers in my car turned into roving wiretaps,
thanks. My conversations might not be relevant to national security, but their
privacy -- even hypothetical privacy -- is relevant to _me_.

~~~
serge2k
When did linux become a real time OS?

~~~
Theodores
...and when did some glorified clock radio need a RTOS?

Or, put another way, what happened to Americans to go from normal people to
these obese things that spend an inordinate amount of time 'sitting in
traffic' every day, trashing the planet with their vehicle emissions? Is that
trip to Burger King so mission critical from a glorified clock radio
perspective that they need to listen to something really important on their
iPhone connected wirelessly to the vehicle's 'Real Time Operating System'? Or
will plain Android/Linux suffice?

Maybe 'Peak Oil' will bring back the street car, bicycles, conversation,
buskers and things like bird song and we won't have these quandaries!

