Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the insight - having worked for long in the Enterprise trenches I can certainly understand the difficulties of moving one thing to other. However it mostly takes strong management to get over the inertia in the name of doing something greater.

But as far as the Open Source indemnification goes - for the Android Auto use case it would be completely irrelevant right? That would be like suing Vizio for showing a pirated movie on the screen as far as I can tell.

For using AOSP - I can see that there may be some reservations there. But it is not unprecedented - Honda I think is using Android 4.0.4 to run their in-car system. Besides the biggest threat to Android from a patent / legal standpoint is Microsoft. Worst case Ford would pay up the $5 or whatever and still win on not paying QNX and having a better solution.

As for the dependencies / ecosystem - they could still support the older released models and start working with vendors/suppliers to get what they need supported on the new system. It's doable because presumably with the new Architecture - most things are either built in or you don't need those and people already have experience building what's missing. For example I don't see why they can't build the CAN Bus connectivity into Android in a way that it supports the same existing functionality.

I know it's work, money and risk but I think it would be towards a better outcome and there are some potential saving in not rebuilding everything from scratch and maintaining it and paying less royalties etc.

I presume the older software is tied to a relationship with B-Squared that has deteriorated beyond what current economics will allow and B-Squared doesn't know QNX or Linux. B-Squared's claim to fame is they talk about how much they know WindowsCE very well. It's their tool of choice even though Adobe ActionScript is largely to blame.

Keep in mind to add SYNC to your vehicle, it's $300 (or it was when it first came out). Cheap right? Ford is in the business to sell cars and what sells more cars, they want.

I'm not a lawyer, I see your point and was somewhat vocal on my own, but in my tenure I learned that Ford is a very successful company and they pay smart people to keep them out of trouble. I have to give Ford props for not taking any bail out money but I digress...

One more tid-bit I will add is that Ford never deals directly with the public. You get your vehicle serviced through dealerships.

So when Ford SYNC came out, they were trying to find away for customers to buy additional services via the SYNC system. This of course meant Ford had to now deal with the whole concept of accepting credit cards or finding a partner who knew how to accept credit cards.

As an architect on the team, one of my tasks was to assess the whole PCI compliance, what it would do to us if we got hacked, etc... In the early days, Ford tried to partner with PayPal to handle the credit card stuff but because Ford has a products it would collect for that are also provided by 3rd parties, it just made things very challenging. I'll spare the details but one of the issues I worked on was single sign on technology. You have a mix of technologies like WS-Federation, SAML, etc... and trying to get Ford and all the partners to adopt and stand up this stuff takes a L O N G time. Consider also some of these smaller companies don't have same budget as a Fortune-5 or even know what SAML is so you have a lot of educating going on too.

I've always wondered how B-Squared got such big design wins. They also did the Coca-Cola Freestyle.

Best I can tell is that they're so tight with Microsoft (ex-employees, maybe?) so when a large F-100 class company wants an embedded GUI and goes to Microsoft first, MS sells them on WinCE and then points the client to B-Squared to finish the work.

Or maybe B-Squared is the only firm left still writing GUIs for WinCE.

Your comment hit me like a bolt of lightning. Every time I use a Freestyle machine I can't believe someone delivered a product that is so agonizingly slow. It's such a basic idea, why does it take what feels like 1-2 seconds to respond to Every. Single. Click.

Last time I ate at a restaurant that had a Freestyle machine, the thing was stuck in an error state and everyone had to stand around and wait for the cashier to go reboot it before they could fill the soda cups they had purchased. Disaster.

Freestyle has been a very successful marketing concept, mostly for Coca-Cola. Less so for the stores that adopt the machine. It isn't exactly driving traffic into the stores like Coke had promised. They've also had a slew of maintenance problems.

Pepsi has had time to catch up and has recently launched Spire, their multi-flavor machine. They chose a simpler approach and skipped the whole microfluidic flavor cartridge thing. It's simply a revamped fountain/flavor dispenser with a new interface. It works just as well as Freestyle IMO, and actually has an advantage of using less physical space up front (but still needs the whole syrup stack behind the scenes)

http://www.pepsispire.com/

I know of no cars in the US that are selling with Android-based head units (those Honda ones are Europe-only). There are plenty of cars with Linux-based head units though

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