What’s left to say? It sucks to be Microsoft. For years, Ford Sync, created in partnership with Microsoft, lead the auto industry in driving in-car automation and device integration. And, then Ford Sync stopped leading and began pulling down Ford’s customer satisfaction ratings.
Whereas Apple regularly kills off popular products, they usually do it with a better product (i.e. MacBook > MacBook Air, iPod mini > iPad nano). Not Microsoft.
Users loved XP and then hated Vista. Users loved Windows 7 and then hated eight. Zune was generally well regarded, by critics and users alike, but was left to rot and die. Plays4Sure never really did and was replaced by Marketplace, which is currently rotting in place.
So, is anyone at all surprised to read that Ford will fire Microsoft and, this is the really hurtful part, replace Redmond’s software with Blackberry’s QNX? Actually, didn’t see that last bit coming, but we’ll get to that later.
“Ford, struggling with in-car technology flaws, will base the next-generation Sync system on BlackBerry’s QNX and no longer use Microsoft’s Windows, writes Bloomberg’s Craig Trudell and Jeff Green.
With 7 million Ford Sync equipped vehicles on the road, Ford + Microsoft were the early in-car automation and device integration market leaders. However, over the last year plus, the company’s car sales have been hit hard by Sync reliability issues, aka Microsoft incompetence.
Ford Sync: Change for the Better?
But why Blackberry and QNX? While Blackberry smartphones are dying hard in the marketplace, the company’s QNX operating system is doing very nicely indeed and is currently in use in Audi (Volkswagen) and BMW cars.
QNX is used in nuclear power plant and US military unmanned drone control systems. General Electric, Cisco Systems and Caterpillar all use QNX, too.
Yeah, it sucks to be Microsoft. Hopefully, Ford Sync will stop sucking soon…
What’s your take?
This is the logical conclusion to a company’s operating system that itself was a copy of Digital Research’s CP/M and ported it to x86 processors. But Microsoft didn’t have the expertise to even do that so they bought the company that made that clone of CP/M and renamed it DOS and convinced IBM to put it on every IBM PC sold. And Microsoft has been copying other people’s work ever since. Windows 3 and 95 and XP which they copied MacOS, Windows Vista and 7 in which they copied Mac OS X. Windows NT 4, 2000, Server 2003 and beyond, in which they copied Unix, and finally Windows 8 in which they pitifully tried to copy iOS and Android.
Microsoft has been riding the coattails of the banality of big business computing desires….not NEEDS….but desires which is mainly….uniformity and stability all these years. The ironic thing is….Microsoft has for the last 30+ years failed massively with the stability side of things. But what they gave businesses was uniformity which was a greater need. We know this as we have seen businesses spend 100’s of millions of dollars over the course of those 30+ years setting up, maintaining, fixing and upgrading Microsoft products just so that they could have the same looking interface since 1990 with the release of Windows 3. That was….until Windows 8. Now….the veil has been rent. That interface was a bridge too far. It’s bad enough to spend all this money fixing Microsoft products…..now we have to retrain everyone from scratch to use this touchy, fruity monstrosity ??
Not no but HELL no !
But what is even more pathetic is that Microsoft can’t even engineer something simple like a smallish (compared to a desktop OS) Real Time OS to be used in cars and electronics. And now….their death will accelerate as the various flavors of *Nixes….(Unix, which is in Mac OS X and iOS…. and Linux which is in the VAST majority of servers in the cloud and that power the internet and 85% + of the world’s supercomputers….not to mention Android.. (which is also Linux).. which now has 80% + global market share for smartphones and climbing)…circling the Windows wagon and choking it off. Once more governments and schools around the world wake up to the economic benefit of free and open source on the desktop, (which they are and will accelerate due to the Global Recession), then Microsoft will become another entry in the pages of computer history littered with the bones of former behemeth computer companies that never really innovated but just knew the right people and had great marketing peddling their cheap imitations of someone’s else’s engineering.
Dead company walking.