Taking the Connected Home on the Road

Aug 18, 2008 10:31 AM, By Jeff James

I see a safety communication technology development curve. When Internet access is available in the car [and becomes broadly available] that's going to completely change the entertainment/communication features and possibilities within the car. If you had continual Internet connectivity, we wouldn't build in a navigation system. We wouldn't build that large map database in your car, we wouldn't need to put a big routing engine in the car to help you calculate routes with the navigation system. We would do that all offboard and just have the car be a terminal to provide directions. There's going to be tremendous change as soon as we get reasonably consistent coverage with some kind of broadband Internet standard and enough customers with access to it.

JJ: What are some of the most surprising things you learned about Microsoft during the development of Ford Sync? Did you have any misconceptions about Microsoft going into the project?

GJ: Microsoft has a substantial relationship with Ford on the IT side of our business, but not so much with product development, so I didn't really have any preconceptions [about Microsoft] going into the Sync project. There are [a few] things I would say: We signed contracts one day, and Microsoft had an army of engineers ready to go to work the next day. The team approached a hundred engineers at various points, probably—I never got an exact headcount from the Microsoft side—but [it was] a massive team that went to work all at once. They do a tremendous amount of work with a large team in a very short amount of time. That's very different from traditional automotive design. A lot of the automotive lead times are governed by some of our processes and how long it takes us to get all the surfaces and styling of a car decided, and then the long tooling lead times to bend sheet metal. We tend to have more time because of other things in the automotive development process, so our teams are generally much smaller and our progress is much slower, because we really don't have to be faster, because there's someone other than us that is slower. This dynamic of flipping a light switch and having a huge team ready to do tons of work was a complete surprise and change for us.

JJ: What about the urban legend in which Bill Gates reportedly said, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon." Did any of that come up during the project, even in a humorous way?

GJ: I think I've heard the quote you mention before. From folks outside our team, I can't tell you that during the course of the project the words "control," "alt," and "delete" didn't come up. The automotive group within Microsoft is really a pretty unique group within Microsoft. The automotive environment is a very tough environment to put software—you have to deal with lots of noise, a lot of power fluctuations, a lot of interactions with customers that you can't always predict, and really a very limited ability to be able to patch things later. God, I wish I had the desktop Windows model where if I made a mistake, I could go to my desk and fix it and deploy it to everybody on the planet. We don't have that kind of connection, so it has to be robust, and perfect, and right the first time, when the customer takes delivery. I think that takes a little bit of a different mindset. The automotive group at Microsoft has been in this business a long time.

There are Microsoft naysayers that I've met over the course of this project and during talking to customers and in the media, and my response to them usually is this: "There's a good chance—especially if you're driving a luxury car—that you have Microsoft software in your car right now." So for people to be concerned that there would be Microsoft software running in a car is a little bit silly. You can't draw a direct comparison between [experiences you've had with] any other Microsoft product and the [Microsoft Auto] group, because they really are different products.

The other entertaining fact about Microsoft is that we may have been the instigator of one of the few relationships between Apple and Microsoft. Sync would have been uninteresting if it couldn't play an iPod, so there's actually Apple technology inside Sync to enable that function. It was entertaining to watch those two companies figure out how to work with each other.

JJ: That's probably worth a separate story in itself.

GJ: I don't know how much more I can tell you about that story. [laughter]

JJ: What part of Ford Sync are you the proudest of? Is there anything that made you think you really hit a homerun with it?

GJ: From a technology perspective, the voice-recognition technology in Sync is head and shoulders above anything else that I'm aware of on the market, including anything that Ford has done before this. Its ability to find contacts in your phone book, to find one of 10,000 songs on your iPod [using voice commands], very reliably, is just stunning. Especially to customers who have no prior experience with voice recognition. When a customer speaks to their iPod for the first time—and it listens—it's an epiphany for some.

The element that is most extraordinary from a broader Ford perspective is that we're offering this technology on our most affordable vehicles at a very affordable price. It's available as a $395 option [by the end of 2008] on virtually every Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln product. On many of our products, it's standard equipment. You won't be able to buy a Lincoln without it. Sync does things that Mercedes, BMW and Lexus [vehicles] can't do. I can go out and buy a Ford Focus and have technology in it that is better than the luxury auto brand of your choice, and do it at a price point that is extraordinarily affordable.

When we announced Sync more than a year ago, people were guessing it would have a four-digit price tag. To offer it at $395 puts it within the reach of a whole collection of customers that would never have considered this before. I can't say it was part of our strategy when we started this, but making this technology affordable is a great analogy to Henry Ford starting this entire company to make cars affordable for everyone. It fits very well with our corporate culture.

Jeff James is a senior editor for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server magazine. He has written hundreds of articles and reviews covering the IT, video gaming, computer gaming, and automotive industries. He has more than 15 years of experience as a writer, editor, book author, and digital content producer. He can be reached at jjames@windowsitpro.com.