Car infotainment is full of examples of why the car manufacturers can't be trusted to have *short term* success. Garbage UI, constantly charging huge money for obsolete-before-you-get-them updates. The Google Graveyard looks like a fertility clinic compared to the car entertainment systems put out by GM/Ford/BMW/Toyota/Everyone
We’re talking about the same auto executives that would sell you a $100k+ car and then try to charge you $200/year for map updates so that the built in navigation wasn’t out of date 1 year into ownership? Those are the guys worried about the tech stack in your car being “abandoned”?
Apologies if I’m skeptical that that aren’t just hoping to use the infotainment as another source of recurring revenue. Especially when they’ve said as much in earnings calls.
This has intrigued me because eventually that’s what they ended up doing - although with two major caveats.
Firstly, the mobile space did not have room for 3 players - MS tried very hard and their Nokia phones were pretty good. But it was just one platform too many. They just couldn’t find a niche for itself as Android was being used everywhere due to their open source branch. Proves the point made by you though, there wasn’t space for a second Android if MS were to embrace open source. Nokia tried hard with Meego - I loved the UI but the market was moving at light speed back then.
Secondly, HMD started by branching off from the Nokia of yore and their Android devices are also very good.
I’ll always miss my old Nokias, they were the duopoly with the BlackBerry in the pre-smartphone era.
The phones themselves were very good. I have a functional Windows phone in a drawer, that I sometimes charge (and it still works!), but after playing with the tile UI for few minutes... eww
No car manufacturer suffered that badly from using standard-sized single-DIN/double-DIN radios for a couple of decades. CarPlay/Android Auto are just software versions of those. It's a way to let your car stay more relevant 3, 5, 10 years down the line.
But that conflicts with short-term revenue optimization, data gathering, advertising, etc.
At least Polar had a watch that would run in low-power mode by default and had a separate CPU that could run Android Watch when needed but that would drain the battery quickly. They had the sense to not make it the flagship model and it looks like the current models don't have anything like that.
The automakers should seek to win over customers by making the better experience, not by excluding the other options.
Which in-house OS this was about? For Symbian, "burning platform" was at least honest.
Just.. mirror my phone onto the display. I don't need a car companies 10 year old ideas of "user experience." Just give me a few knobs for the climate controls and then get out of my way.
I, as the user, am happy to "take responsibility" for this.
Could you imagine the situation they were in as the most high-tech watch company in the world? For mainstream relevance you now have to anchor yourself to a smartphone platform that is either a) hostile to your very existence or b) completely abandons their platform and leaves you and your customers out to dry.
I know people complain about car manufacturers being hostile to CarPlay and Android Auto. But I think in the long run, the executives are being smart. Looking down the history of other companies that turned over responsibility of their user experience to tech companies - there's not a good track record of long-term successes.
I still think about the way the CEO of Nokia back in 2010 described what it would be like for them to abandon their in-house OS for Android: "Peeing yourself to stay warm".