Ford seen ditching Microsoft for Blackberry in future cars | Hacker News Reader

Ford seen ditching Microsoft for Blackberry in future cars

detroitnews.com

36 pointsrmason42 comments

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.

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 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 CES 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MbXvyCTVV0

Disclaimer: I used to work for RIM

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.

Switching could afford some decision-maker the means to choose a new development team without losing face.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Not crazy at all. We all had a fair share of problems with Microsoft software during all these years.

It's like the origin story of Knight Rider TV show car Kitt.

ISTR the Knight Foundation generally knew what they were doing tho.

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.

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

Same, except everything else about the car too.

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.

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).

> Same, except everything else about the car too.

I've spent a couple months with a rental Focus and I never really liked it. It's not that there was anything particularly bad about it - it's actually a decent car. It's that there wasn't anything particularly good about it either. It was average on all respects. It was the quintessential rental car.

God, no kidding. It's terrible, even by the standards of car software. Infuriating to use. I don't know what these people are talking about Sync getting "positive reviews", but if that is indeed the case I must have used something different.

Unless it was five years ago, you probably did use something different. Then Ford hired Bsquare to write the touch UI version, using embedded Adobe Flash.[0] I never knew such a thing existed. A guy I work with claims to have written the UI piece (or a large part of it). He said using Flash was one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" things. [0]http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bsquare-prepares-fo...

"I've had enough Fords as rental cars to know that that software is utter garbage" Same here. Last one I rented, I really, really struggled just to tune to a radio station. I eventually got it tuned but several minutes later it decided to change all on its own. I never got it tuned again in the two days I had the car.

I'm glad it wasn't just me, lol. I like to use bluetooth audio, and the last Sync powered car I had was so confusing, and had absolutely no notion of my preference on restart. Something like 5 confusing button presses every time I started the car to get the BT audio selected.

This is not the blackberry OS that they're using and it isn't Blackberry that will be doing the work.

QNX is an operating system company that Blackberry acquired in 2010. They have made and sold automotive operating systems since long before the Blackberry acquisition.

QNX already powers multiple car manufacturers infotainment systems.

Just to clarify... QNX also powers the newest generation of BB phones as well. So while it's not the phone OS getting used, it is very likely an extremely close relative; newer versions of the Car platform clearly borrow from the BB phone OS.

As long as Ford doesn't do the development in-house it might work out. What killed Sync isn't Microsoft. It's the fact that Ford took everything in house.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

QNX has been owned by other companies in the past (e.g. Harman Intl.). There is no reason the believe that it will go anywhere regardless of what happens to BlackBerry. QNX just happens to be operating as a subsidiary of its biggest customer for the time being.

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_.

When did linux become a real time OS?

...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!

Why do you think that if Ford used Linux, your car would not be used for "roving wiretaps." Do you think that if a company uses open source code, they, therefore, make all their uses of it public as well?

Also ... I think "podunk" is a bit much.

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