Car ecosystem is changing in front of our eyes – from tape recorders to pre-installed head units and now to In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. So the most popular topic in auto software community is the future platform for ”infotainment systems” – as if somebody knows what it is. Let’s talk about expert opinions, starting with most common one – MeeGo. Notice that we consider MeeGo and GENIVI equivalent for the purposes of this discussion.
MeeGo pros are:
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Why can’t people make really good stuff? Of course, sometimes, they simply don’t know how to do their job at a high level. Some try it this way, others try it that way, but normally the result is nothing to shout about. Things happen.
Sometimes the only way to get a good result is to pay a high price. And if you try to save a little, the result isn’t going to be that good. With wrong materials and inappropriate technologies you deal with what you have at hand. It’s a compromise…
There are some people, negating the experience of the others, people who like to understand everything for themselves. Usually this does not include companies. Companies which ignore the history of industry file for bankruptcy so fast that they don’t have the chance to learn enough to become successful. That’s why we monitor what giants do, study their experience, work to reproduce their success and avoid their failures.
These days we keep our eyes on Google and Apple. The conflict between these companies is seen by almost everybody who has ever typed “google.com” or kept an iPhone in their hands. They were analyzed as competitors, as former friends who became enemies, as companies having very different stories and very similar impacts to the market… But they’re also symbols. Symbols of two conflicting lifestyles: perfectionism versus uncontrollable innovations.
I am discussing the future of automotive very often. Sometimes with people who are smart and experienced in the subject. And… It seems to me something is wrong in “mass mind” regarding electric cars, which are the strongest technology trend in automotive.
We all see that everybody considers electric cars are to be “vehicles of future”. Nobody doubts: petrol is ending, earlier or later it will become too expensive. Electric motors are having better ratio, easier in control, ecologically clearer and so on. And many people wants to push e-cars to the market just now. But fails. Fails due to the small distance to recharge, worse dynamics, not ready infrastructure… many reasons. Or many claims?
I insist in the main problem is outside of this area. The main problem is in “mass mind”. There are two main trends in e-cars engineering. One is “just a car, but on electric power”. They try to replace gasoline engine with electric engine not changing other characteristics like body design, dynamics etc. For smooth transfer of the users from traditional to e-cars. It doesn’t work. Because e-power is not gasoline power and e-car can not be the same to traditional cars.
There is another trend. People try to do “something very different”. Exotic. Non-functional, non-native, but looking different to traditional cars. And mass user doesn’t accept this. For sure.
I am wondered why nobody does the very simple thing. Position e-car as “not a regular car”. Just vehicle with obvious and native characteristics. E-car must be (technically) light? Make it for one/two persons. The most time we are driving alone. It must have good aerodynamics? Make it in traditional sport style. Retro. Carbon. Plastic. It can not be as fast as traditional cars? How many people in big cities need to go faster that 50 km/h? Just don’t position it as a competitor to gasoline car. Do it special “everyday” vehicle. For students. For young. For active. Who needs wheels. Who wants to be different. And would not want just to compete with others. I am sure, it will work. At least electric scooters idea is working. Just now.
RFC1925 – The Twelve Networking Truths
Network Working Group R. Callon, Editor
Request for Comments: 1925 IOOF
Category: Informational 1 April 1996
The Twelve Networking Truths
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Hell… Delphi Corp. and Visteon are under bankruptcy! It seems automotive is on the bottom, lower than anything else.
In the past I was asked a lot of times about the same thing: how to choose a car? You like cars, you know cars, you work with cars… how to choose a car? And every time the person who was asking was unhappy with what I answer.
Each time when anybody wants to purchase a car (not only a car, but…), he does the same mistake: he wants to be objective. Car is expensive, we usually buy car for a long use, so we must do the optimal choice. And the long run becomes. What I want? Cost? Comfort? Silence? Design? Luggage capacity? Travel with family? And so on. Many factors, many weights, lots of test drives, hours of Internet search. And one of two results: either the ‘right’ car becomes ‘wrong’ after being bought, or person buys a car which is very different from what he considers ‘optimal’, just because he likes this particular car.
The problem is modern cars are very similar. Even cars of different classes, having different motors, equipment, materials, they all are having almost the same functions and capabilities. Yes, BMW enables you with driving 250km/h, but how frequently you drive 250km/h? Yes, S-class is big and comfortable, but Hyundai Sonata is also big and… also comfortable. If you forget about the brand name and skip very minor details.
Another problem, nobody is objective when chooses a toy. Car is a toy more than for 50%, therefore all careful arguments we use are not really inline with what we want. We selects one toy from a long long list of very similar toys… trying to use formal proofs of our choice. We deceive ourself.
As a result, being asked about the right way to choose a car, I always answer the same thing: take what you like. You can even buy a car in Internet, by photo, by description… no difference. You will either love or hate it and it is not depending on how accurate you are in your selection process. You should only use two simple rules: take a thing you have money for, and remember everything is relative, safety is absolute.
But. Who cares of safety before an accident?
I think this idea is not my one and not being new. However it looks rather interesting. For me it looks like current crisis is not a kind of ‘financial crisis launched by subprime mortgage problems’, but just a crisis of innovation ideas.
Let’s see. 1930s… Crisis, Great Depression. 40s… no comments. 50s – years of Big Automotive Dream, cars are the main engine of the progress and trading. 60s – nuclear and space technologies. 70s – no main innovative idea, crisis. Exited with Computer Epoch. 90s – mobile telephony. And with the tail of Cellphones Age, with smartphones and PDAs we entered the new millenium. And get stuck. No new great innovation, driving our mind, which we ready to fund, inflating world economic.
If I am right, there is only one way to completely exit this crisis: to identify another innovative idea which becomes the goal for mass market. The only a problem, typically ideas come themselve, it can not be brought from outside and enforced to the mind. So, waiting.
Do you monitor what Google does? Do you monitor what Google does as close as I do it? Couple years ago I considered that Google is only a company going the right technological way. At least having solid (although hidden…) roadmap I fully understand. Now it is not so clear for me. It looks like they lost their way after did an attempt to extend their business from Internet to in-PC world and… probably failed. At least they didn’t get a market share comparable with what they have in online space. After that they become doing strange things, and I was unable to re-construct their strategy by what I saw.
Now these guys announced Google Chrome OS. And shortly after that Microsoft announced Gazelle browser as an OS. I was wondered. At the first moment I decided it is just a marketing trick. Google has no own OS (Android is just Linux clone and it seems failing as well…), but they want or at least wanted to be everywhere in computer world like Microsoft is. OS is mandatory for that, they can not create their own OS… The conclusion for experienced marketing strategist is obvious: let’s rename something different to our own OS and capitalize our brand with this light fake.
However after Microsoft responded with Gazelle, I am not so sure in what I thought. Microsoft has its own OS, moreover their market share is huge. And they are not interested in support Google in their market tricks, they are hard competitors, even enemies. It seems what’s easier than just say: “Guys, you see they try substitute real OS with just a phantom”! However Microsoft did vice versa, they practically confirmed: browser becomes an OS.
And… It might be they are correct. Current browser (regardless on which one) is looking as not just UI to see web pages, but first of all it is a kind of virtual machine to run online applications. If we assume, that most of applications may become online, browser really becomes an OS. Moreover, you even do not need any other OS than just browser. And it has much more convenience that traditional operating systems: applications are cross-platform, flexible, always on and always safe (I did not say “secure”, right?).
However I feel some fake. And now I believe I know where is it. These guys still trying to push us to online with everything we do. It makes a lot of benefits for them: if we give them all our data and involve there resources to everything we do, they become the unrestricted owners on regular computer activities. They may just make money giving us their resources in rent, but they can also blackmail us, block our jobs, smoothly refocus us to what we didn’t plan initially and control what we do. It might have some visible convenience, but I don’t think IT-community will choose this way. People wants to remain independent. If I am right, they will fail another time with making browser an OS and people continue working offline with the most of their activities.
Otherwise they win. We lose.
Everybody sees that IP protection is now in very deep crisis. Computers, networking, peering networks and media exchange made the situation very unstable. But it is becoming much more unstable due to ethical conflict. From one side, any efforts must be paid and people doing software or music expect to earn money using what they do. From the other one, it seems stupid and not too honoring to prevent people from copying content they obtained legally. Paper book is what I can share for everybody, why I can’t share electronic one?
This crisis became quite long time ago, but last years it becomes more and more impacting the real world. Music, literature, innovative ideas, almost all non-material property is in scope of it. However software is under the biggest pressure. For example, we still don’t have any kind of software components market, many companies prefer to re-write even simple modules than buy ready to use ones due to very unclear situation with licensing and payments. Private developers, freelancers, small companies who would have a chance to make and sale intelligent software components are under high risks pressure and prefer avoiding so narrow way. It is a huge efforts wasting, big inconvenience, but it’s just an example. Any of you can easily find another example from software world.
Couple years ago it was looking as new business strategies can resolve this issue. In particular, “pay for what you use” seemed very effective, many people including me expected that users will be happy to pay for only usage of modules, not for software products and packages. Web applications gave a chance for this strategy.
However now it seems this idea is failing. Web applications are occupying their place in computer world, but not being a replacement of the local and distributed ones. And people… people wants to own what they pay for. Good example is Amazon S3. It could be quite effective replacement of the local hard drive, but people don’t want to pay for what they can not take with them and overall success of S3 is much much less than it could be. For me, it looks like other “new” marketing approaches will go the same way or limited, very limited success. Nobody can avoid simple goods-money-goods exchange, which is simple, clear and well understandable for the most of human population.
However it looks like it’s possible to search for the solution beyond another door. The main question is why product maker keeps IP so long? 10, 20, 70 years are typically many times longer than the product lifecycle. And it really produces a lot of troubles. For example, creating new solution, company is able to block usage of the older ones as it still keeps copyright on it. IP conflict provokes monopoly conflict as well.
But. Why not to reduce the period when author keeps copyright on his product? Let’s say two or three years for software (and for example five for music, ten for books…). It would authorize users using older versions and products for free. And it will speed up the progress, because corporations will be aware that in three years their current solutions become obsolete and they must do new ones, moreover, significantly better ones to continue getting revenue.
For sure, such approach is not to excite corporations as they will need to work more for less. But it will be a chance to break the chain of mutual claims between IP creators, owners and consumers. It will also give a kind of fair solition as the most part of IP is not valuable enough to bring money to the author, his legatees and legatees of his legatees. And it may stimulate people to think faster.
Why not?
Excuse me for slightly offtopic message. It’s really non-technical, but might be interested for discussing and stimulate people to use this blog for other things too…
I am not a typical aero traveller. I never fly for vacations, Egypt and Turkey are out of my regular routes. I am not so particular for the service: rarely drink alcohol during the flight, almost never sleep onboard, don’t use lounges and so on. Airplane for me is like a bus, I need it to be ontime, have enough place for my legs, be careful with my luggage and so on. And I like friendly people, clear routines and reasonable answers.
Although I am not typical, I have quite experience with some different aero carriers and it might be good idea if I share it with others. Frequent travelers may append my observations, other people could use it planning their business and private trips.
So, my rating of avia companies is like following:
1. Finnair. It’s very careful to passengers, everything is convenient, accurate and predictable. Like all Scandinavian people, crew is always polite, smooth and well speaking English. And I was impressed that even on board of the very small aircraft (a bit bigger than the normal van) the service was the same to Boeing-767, including English (although it was domestic Finnish flight). I see nothing I can claim to this company expect… costs. My old dream to visit Rovaniemi with my family was ended on reading Finnair price list.
2. Swiss. Accurate and convenient, aircrafts are clear and looking new, good meal. AVRO aircrafts for Germany domestic flights are comfortable enough and, it’s important, always arriving ontime.
3. Rossiya (ex-Pulkovo). Initially I expected nothing good from Russian carriers (and finally decided I wasn’t so wrong), but “Rossiya” is looking like normal European company with appropriate level of service. Nice stewardesses 
, not bad crafts, good meal… I saw nothing I can say “oh, it’s like always in Russia”. The only problem is Pulkovo airport. Even smallest Turku airport is better from my perspective than Pulkovo-2. Even after re-construction.
4. Lufthansa. It was the most frequent carrier for me and I treat it as ‘zero mark’ for all flight companies. They never fail seriously, except delivering “Miles-and-more” cards. My one is travelling to me more than a year, it was issued three or four times, at least officially, but I don’t see it yet and don’t believe to see in future.
5-8. US Airways, United Airlines, Delta, American Airlines - I can’t say anything special about these companies, they’re very regular and very similar to each other. I don’t see any evidences of the rumors about domestic US flights, it seem the same to domestic flights in Russia if you are adopted enough to the specific of US life style. Socks of some fresh latin immigrant are not too clear and not smelling good… but you’ll see the same picture everywhere with only change of the person’s face.
9. KLM. I have to thank KLM for the first experience of sleeping in the airport. It was my first aero travel, we were going to business trip to Tel-Aviv and had to spend 6 or 7 hours in Amsterdam due to connected flight delays. For sure, nobody of us had Schengen visa. While we stayed there overnight, one of colleagues didn’t leave bar and finally he was drunk enough to lose his passport in Ben Gurion airport. Sure, I don’t think it was provoked by KLM too, but since that moment I had no chance to update my impression.
10. Air France. My understanding, French and Russian people are very similar to each other. At least nowhere in Europe I saw as many stupid things as in France. Air France is not an exception. My first flight with them was the most impressive one I ever had. First of all they missed my luggage and it was travelling to Seattle while I travelled to Chicago. They found and returned it in a week. I had no chance to get compensation as AF staff in Chicago didn’t speack English (in US), at least they didn’t speak English about the lost baggage . But… the crew members alerted me about my bag isn’t on the aircraft even before we left Paris, so they have good enough tracking system. The problem was I had a device of $8K in my baggage and it was only an instrument of it’s class in the company. Finally I spend more than a week in Chicago working on things not being a goal of my trip as I had to wait this instrument… and thinking what to do if it will never return.
The return from this travel was even more impressive. I had quite short connection and certainly my first flight was delayed. I landed in Paris in 5 minutes before flight to SPb should take off and asked security guy how to find my gate. “Oh, you should go to that door”,- he said,- “and you’d better run”. It was the only moment in my passenger’s career when I ran through the airport area between buses, special vehicles and small aircrafts from one external door to another. Finally I came to the gate 10 minutes after deadline, found a door keeper and asked where’s the flight to SPb. “Oh, don’t worry”,- she said,- “It is delayed for 2.5 hours”.
Since that moment I had several trips with Air France and each one were surprising me with something extra ordinal. The best surprise was when they had no economy seats due to overbooking and gave me a seat in business class for free. It allows me reducing the number of my claims to AF, although other surprises were not so nice.
11. SAS. When I travelled SAS , it was not worse and not better than Lufthansa. However since that moment they stopped providing meal except for additional costs even on transatlantic flights. I believe company with so greedy approach has to be downshifted in my list.
12. Aerosvit. I don’t want to say anything bad about Ukrainian airlines… Except it was only flight when I had to be a detail of the airplane. I suspected something strange when saw that some parts of cabin equipment are assembled with using black screws for cardboard definitely not being there when Boeing released this vehicle. And I didn’t make a mistake, one of panels was falling to me just after we left the take off lane. Fortunately it was not to heavy, I caught it and held all the time while take off. But it seems Aerosvit understands the problem: just after horizontal flight starts, cabin attendee found a technician with screw driver and big box of black screws and he fixed the panel even before we landed in Kyiv.
13. Transaero. Oh… Why I was under impression that to be a stewardess you have to be good (Okay, not bad) looking, smile and polite? Transaero attendees are always gloomy, their exterior is… no, I can’t said these words about ladies and passengers are definitely a big problem for them, they’re always thinking how to eliminate. Transaero staff woke up my reminiscences about employees Soviet shops: “take what I give you or go away”! If you consider the song they’re always playing through the craft speakers: “you’d only fly with Transaero”, you’ll have very non-solid impression about this company.
I will update this list as much as I will gather new impressions about new aero carriers. Dnieproavia and S7 are in queue.
By the way… I forgot British Airways. It’s to be put somewhere around position 7 or 8. Being regular European aircompany, it is extremely expensive. It’s only disadvantage I found, but it’s important, isn’t it?
Automotive Multimedia and generally automotive electronics is being very specific market with trends not always looking obvious. Initially, let’s say ten and more years ago, we saw the picture characterized by many small and very narrow focused devices based on proprietary plafroms and true real-time (RT) executive environments, including operating systems and all related technologies.
After some period, things became changing. Powerful integrated CPUs with enough MIPS and integrated peripheria gave an ability to build complex devices with a number of functions packed ‘in one’. The classic example is Head Unit device, which integrates the most of multimedia functions being very hard loaded with different kinds of features and having onboard almost all functions, initially distributed across the number of devices like CD-changer, telephony gateway, navigation unit and so on.
As automotive market is one of the most conservative, initially even complex user-oriented devices were built on RT-platforms reusing many of historically verified and trusted solutions being mostly legacy of 90th. And that time it was looking as world will go the same way and increase sophistication of proprietary platforms keeping existing decisions and smoothly extending it with yesterday’s technologies packed in very specific RT framework.
The alternate way which was presented in about Y’04 by some minor market players was like “to bring a computer to the vehicle”. It was based on the idea that PC and maybe even PDA already have the most of functions potentially needed for vehicle user and well extensible due to open plaforms (or at least APIs), availability of tools and libraries as well as reduced engineering skillset required for programming.
The attempts to bring PC/PDA to the car were failing. The main reason was in quite specific user’s interaction needed for in-vehicle context: user can’t operate with traditional keyboard, mouse and wide display and software can’t be easily reworked to use very different vehicle controls. Another problem is in software nature. Car driver can’t wait, he’s acting quickly: junctions, merges, traffic jams, he does every action very fast and gets very fast feedback on it. The same is what he expects from every car device including multimedia. He can not and doesn’t want to wait for application download, deployment and launch, couple minutes of software startup are incredibly long when you drive a car. But desktop and even PDA software is oriented on much slower lifestyle and fast feedback isn’t a top priority for the developers.
It is what we saw by now and majority of these processes is what we can see at the moment. The vehicle multimedia functionality expected by the user is very similar to PC or at least portable multimedia devices like PDA, however it is implemented using RT-oriented, not UI-oriented tools of the day before yesterday. We also see more and more aggressive attempts to change the nature of in-vehicle multimedia with bringing Linux and especially Windows Auto as the target platforms for head units and other user-oriented devices and enable in-vehicle user with the functions already implemented in desktop and portable computers. However the results are not completely successful due to the very specific environment, assuming easy controls like button pads instead of full-size keyboard, voice recognition or the worst case touch screen instead of mouse and so on. But…
But we are definitely at the turn point. Legacy technologies are unable to provide the modern level of multimedia capabilities wanted by vehicle user, they are hard for extension and making troubles in integration with other parts of the current ‘electronic’ and ‘online’ worlds being more and more common for the most of us. And we need to expect the mutual process: vehicle multimedia will migrate to computer technologies, leaving it’s real-time basis in the past and becoming more and more user-oriented, not device or communication oriented. And computer technologies will need to be adopted and enabled with speech technologies, small touch screen instead of wide display, three-five buttons input etc. to fit to not only automotive, but ‘on the move’ environments.
… To be continued…
