Windows Embedded Automotive

» see microsoft.com/windowsembedded as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There was a Windows machine in the dashboard for twenty-two years and almost nobody who drove one ever knew. That part was deliberate. Nobody wants a boot screen standing between them and the radio, so Microsoft sold this as a component to carmakers, who wrapped it in their own name and never mentioned whose kernel was down there.

It began as the Auto PC, announced in January 1998 and shipped on 4 December that year, running Windows CE 2.0 out of a slot in the dash. The renaming started almost at once. It became Windows CE for Automotive in October 2000, then plain Windows Automotive in October 2002 when it picked up the.NET Compact Framework, then Windows Embedded Automotive with version 7 in October 2010. Four names in twelve years describes a product that kept not quite landing.

When it did land it landed properly. Ford Sync arrived in 2007 and became a reason people bought Fords, because voice control and a paired phone were not yet ordinary equipment in ordinary cars. Out of a three-year project with CRF and Magneti Marelli came Fiat's Blue&Me, launched at Geneva in 2006. The same platform sat under the Nissan Leaf's touchscreen, and under the UVO system Kia showed at CES in 2010 running Microsoft's own Tellme speech recognition.

This is the rare Microsoft product that genuinely reached Turkish roads, and it reached them wearing somebody else's badge. Fiat has been built here by Tofaş since long before I was born, and the Linea rolled out of Bursa in March 2007 with Blue&Me in it. Anyone who pressed the button on that steering wheel and told the car to dial a number was talking to Windows CE and was never informed of the fact. I have spent my working life on embedded systems and it is still an odd sentence to write, because Windows CE was a thing you developed against, not a thing you expected to be sitting inside at seventy on the highway.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day ford walked ~

Ford killed it, and Ford killed it by using it. MyFord Touch was the consumer face of the platform from 2010 onward and it failed in the way embedded software fails: it rebooted while you were driving, and the touch controls answered late or did not answer. The complaints were heavy enough to move Ford down the JD Power quality rankings, which is a remarkable thing for a radio to do to a car company. Consumer Reports told its readers not to buy a Ford or a Lincoln, and gave that as the reason.

In December 2014 Ford announced Sync 3 built on BlackBerry's QNX and retired the MyFord Touch name altogether, ending a partnership that had run more than seven years. That was the real death, and the calendar took another six years to agree. Kia had already moved later versions of UVO onto a Google-based system. Support for Windows Embedded Automotive 7 formally ended on 1 March 2021, ten years to the day after it reached general availability, by which point there was very little left under it to support.

~ what it was right about ~

The awkward part is that Microsoft was early and it was right. In 1998 it argued that a car would eventually be a computer with a screen in it and that drivers would talk to that screen out loud instead of pushing buttons. Both of those came true completely. They came true on QNX and on Android Automotive, and the voice answering now belongs to Google or to whoever assembled the car.

What Microsoft never solved was the position it had agreed to occupy. Selling an invisible component to a carmaker means the carmaker ships your bugs under its own badge and absorbs the reviews for them, so the day the reviews turn bad it has every reason to leave and none at all to defend you. Ford wore MyFord Touch in public for four years and then walked out. QNX has held the same job quietly for a decade since, which suggests the job was always doable and Microsoft simply did it badly.

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