Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

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Ecosystems are the key, not so much in which house or how public it is built. (see: iOS) It's also a system for a car, and probably a niche one at that.

There are a few things that are relevant in Car-OS these days:

  - Ecosystems
  - Long-term maintenance
  - Integration with a phone that takes over most day-to-day interactions
  - Car should work without it

If MB.OS and BMW's version and Audi and whoever else wants to build one doesn't support CarPlay or Android Auto (or whatever their future incarnations will be), it is already irrelevant. If anything, MB.OS is about as relevant to a consumer as QNX is. Or VxWorks for that matter. (spoiler: consumer doesn't care and doesn't really want anything to do with it)

That doesn't mean that all car makers should just keep using an ancient QNX version statically forever, or whatever some OEM happens to install with the head units, but an in-house Linux distro with some vendor branding sauce really is about as relevant as blinker fluid.

This makes an odd assumption about what drives, and does not drive, sales. Companies don't buy 300 company car because it has the best center console OS.

No, it doesn't. What I wrote is the exact same thing you condensed here:

> Companies don't buy 300 company car because it has the best center console OS.

However, I centred mine more around personal consumers, rather can organisational buyers. It's also not just some console OS, but an ecosystem that also reals with sensors and self-driving features.

I also went more into the technical aspects of operating system success, but rather than say something to the extent of "yet another QNX-style lineage is about as useful as Windows Mobile", I wrote a slightly more expanded story, just like Mercedes-Benz did on their announcement (but they added a whole lot of extra fluff about how their OS is a value add).

> If anything, MB.OS is about as relevant to a consumer as QNX is

QNX isn't exactly defining for an ecosystem, MB.OS probably will be.

I beg to differ with that. If you shut down QNX globally it would pretty much end civilization. So much stuff runs on that little core that it boggles the mind.

The great gift of QNX is that it is so reliable that you forget it is there. But no mistake: it is still there and it still works and without it you'd miss it right away.

Yep QNX and VxWorks, for smaller stuff RTEMS and FreeRTOS are just everywhere.

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