10 ms·

More Apple Car Thoughts: Software Culture

58 points by subnaught 11y ago

Multiplayer 11y ago
Lutz also recently said he thinks Tesla is in huge trouble and that (I'm going to paraphrase here) "we tried running our own retail locations at bmw and they are much too expensive so they need to get rid of them asap". He had an excellent run in the motor industry, but now he seems to be sadly outdated on what is happening. So I think we should all be happy to take the opposite side of his position. Which is that huge wrenching changes are coming. And not from the incumbents.
paul 11y ago
I love the quote from Ed Colligan: Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
- blub 11y ago
  Mythicizing the iPhone is both dishonest and unhelpful. They didn't just figure it out and walk in, it took them years and many iterations to build a world class product. Apple was able to use the wedge of UX to convince customers to but their devices and gave them time to fix the gaps in their hardware and software.
  - jarek 11y ago
    Also note that Apple wasn't just "PC guys" at the time of iPhone introduction, they had fairly high-profile experience building portable devices through the iPods. Google first bought a software team and then partnered with HTC to get hardware for the first Android phone on the market - again it wasn't a pure "PC guys" "just figuring it out." But the Colligan quote is well on its way to becoming historic out of context, like Olsen's and Gates's.
  - paul 11y ago
    How is quoting the Palm CEO dishonest? The fact that he was so wrong about Apple is kind of the point.
    - blub 11y ago
      The point is that he wasn't "so wrong". Apple didn't succeed immediately and without stumbling a few times. At the same time the competition screwed up monumentally. IMO, Apple will need another wedge and that car makers screw up in order to repeat their iPhone success. This is a possibility, but not a certainty, as some here proclaim.
tormeh 11y ago
Good point, but I think they already have the culture necessary in whatever group is responsible for their CPU design. That's a low-fault tolerance environment, too. The advantage of the incumbents is that cars, as long as they have to be driven manually, are not entertainment machines and cannot really be entertainment machines. Passengers already have their own phones etc. I think Tesla's on to something, but it's not software. I don't think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.
venomsnake 11y ago
Apple's software culture is not suitable for cars. You need real time, reliable, simple and rock hard. Do you really want the company that created iTunes for windows to drive your car?
- bluthru 11y ago
  Do you want one of the PayPal developers to drive your car?
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    Do you want the guy who launches rockets that travel amazing distances to dock with a space station to make your car? PayPal was a merger of two companies BTW. Judging by the work Google put into WebKit before the fork, Apple didn't even have a rigorous testing coverage, fuzzing, etc IIRC. I wouldn't even trust Google to do the kind of stuff automakers and defense contractors do with respect to verification and testing. Someone else was right, this could only come from their hardware groups like PA Semi and not from the guys who write the apps or OS front end.
    - bluthru 11y ago
      Considering the developers will have their friends and family use these machines, I believe the incentive is there to get it right. Also, isn't self-driving vehicles a more difficult software challenge than guiding a rocket?
      - swiley 11y ago
        Having ability is not the same as having incentive. And in this case having ability doesn't just mean "showing that it works" like most people seem to think.
    - IBM 11y ago
      How much testing did Tesla do for Autopilot? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwxEX8qOxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwxEX8qOxA
Animats 11y ago
Note the author: Jean-Louis Gassée. He's forgotten now, but he was head of product development at Apple after Jobs was fired. He left Apple in 1990, not having done much of note. He started Be (an early multiprocessor 680x0 desktop machine with its own OS), but that failed. Since then, he's mostly been a pundit.
- alayne 11y ago
  I think you're being a little hard on Gassée. He held numerous high level positions at technology companies and worked on the Newton, BeOS, and other technology which while not market successes, were still influential. At one time BeOS was considered a contender as a replacement for MacOS.
- draw_down 11y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is, he's been writing this blog for years and it's quite good in my opinion.
- jarek 11y ago
  Read back in the Monday Note archives and you will see he's quite the fan of most Apple things
- pavlov 11y ago
  Not that it matters, but BeOS never ran on 680x0.
crb002 11y ago
It's the Clang IR, same stuff they are making you push to the app store. Realtime software updates passed as proof carrying byte code. That's where Apple will be king, the agility to safely update.
rb2k_ 11y ago
Maybe only partially related, but one of the things that surprised me the most when moving to the US from Germany, was seeing the large Mercedes star on one of the buildings while driving through Sunnyvale [0]. A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ... As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here. It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here. I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley. That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,243.23h,88.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sus2JnQFTcKWtu8UHjbe4_A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,... [1] http://www.mbrdna.com/ http://www.mbrdna.com/ [2] http://www.vwerl.com/ http://www.vwerl.com/ [3] http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm
- dognotdog 11y ago
  All big players in the car industry have a research center in SV nowadays, it seems, not only the Germans. There is undoubtedly a lot of talent in the Bay Area, yet the rush of the car industry to SV smells of cargo culting.
- blumentopf 11y ago
  Based on my experience (from working there), car manufacturers often do not implement stuff themselves, they outsource. E.g. the HTML5-based infotainmemt system in the Porsche 918 was not created by Porsche (though they market it as if it was), but by S1nn. From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring. The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.
Rezo 11y ago
The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software. Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc). Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision. A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.
  - Retra 11y ago
    If Apple Maps was mission-critical industrial-strength navigation software (as you'd have to assume in this hypothetical) then maybe Apple would have put more money and effort into making it work well. Why would you assume the software they wrote for a smart-phone would be the same software they'd write for a car?
    - venomsnake 11y ago
weinzierl 11y ago
… but does Apple’s personal computing software knowhow translate into the high-reliability real-time code required for a safe, reliable and, of course, elegant electric car? It doesn't have to. Not all the software in a car is high-reliability real-time code. My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. The reason I think so is that it's not enough to write the high-reliability real-time code. Besides thoroughly testing it you will have to get it approved by authorities - worldwide. Proud incumbent automakers look down on the interlopers. Dr.-Ing. Dieter Zetsche, head of century-old Daimler-Benz, has no patience for Silicon Valley companies intruding on his turf: “What is important for us is that the brain of the car, the operating system, is not iOS or Android or someone else but it’s our brain […] We do not plan to become the Foxconn of Apple,” Mr. Zetsche said, referring to the Chinese company that manufactures iPhones. That sounds like a Daimler car had a Daimler brain but that's just not true. The most important ECUs are made by companies like Bosch, Continental or TRW. These suppliers sell to all car manufacturers and they will be more than happy to supply one more. Thinking about it this makes me really curious how Tesla handles this. Has anyone an idea which third party ECUs from which suppliers they use?
- jarek 11y ago
  > My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. That's actually a very interesting point in light of the Foxconn comment - it seems to make a lot of sense for Apple to get the car hardware from a Chinese manufacturer, e.g. Geely.
- abalone 11y ago
  > My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. That would only make sense if there was no further development of high-reliability, real-time functions. But a lot of the opportunity for advancement involves software controlling key driving functions, not just the user interface. There is no way to get around having to engineer bug-free code in new assisted driving features. Which are about to get a lot more complex than they've ever been before.
spotman 11y ago
Toyota got a lot of heat over their software implementation surrounding the whole stuck accelerator debacle. They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience. Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu's for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense. They have already hired staff that has a lot of experience in this field, and already had all the engineering chops and bank account to fund this. While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don't think it will be amateur hour. Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?
lordnacho 11y ago
I don't see why Apple couldn't win this one as well. His criticisms are correct; ordinary software crashes all the time and people are cool with it. Heck, I even spent all of Friday discovering a Swift compiler bug. I'm sure Apple appreciate that certain kinds of software need to be more sturdy and can find the expertise somewhere. But I don't think Apple's products tend to win because of better engineering. They somehow do OK on making the product and a stellar job of selling it. They've built a cult around their nice looking things with simple interfaces. Whenever they make something new, you can always find a friend (non technical) who praises their stuff. Undoubtedly, when they build this car, that same friend will be praising the 8th wonder of the world.
walshemj 11y ago
I don't think I agree that OSX helps Apple - Apple succeeds inspite of OSX Look at finder its worse than windows 95's file explorer
swiley 11y ago
After Toyota I don't think I would trust a closed source self driving car.
ksec 11y ago
May be this Zero Error tolerance for Car Software will help shape the future direction of Swift ( If it hasn't already been done )

58 points by subnaught 11y ago

Lutz also recently said he thinks Tesla is in huge trouble and that (I'm going to paraphrase here) "we tried running our own retail locations at bmw and they are much too expensive so they need to get rid of them asap". He had an excellent run in the motor industry, but now he seems to be sadly outdated on what is happening. So I think we should all be happy to take the opposite side of his position. Which is that huge wrenching changes are coming. And not from the incumbents.

paul 11y ago

I love the quote from Ed Colligan: Messrs. Zetsche and Lutz might want to meditate on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s infelicitous words mocking the newborn iPhone in 2006 [emphasis mine]: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

blub 11y ago
Mythicizing the iPhone is both dishonest and unhelpful. They didn't just figure it out and walk in, it took them years and many iterations to build a world class product. Apple was able to use the wedge of UX to convince customers to but their devices and gave them time to fix the gaps in their hardware and software.
- jarek 11y ago
  Also note that Apple wasn't just "PC guys" at the time of iPhone introduction, they had fairly high-profile experience building portable devices through the iPods. Google first bought a software team and then partnered with HTC to get hardware for the first Android phone on the market - again it wasn't a pure "PC guys" "just figuring it out." But the Colligan quote is well on its way to becoming historic out of context, like Olsen's and Gates's.
- paul 11y ago
  How is quoting the Palm CEO dishonest? The fact that he was so wrong about Apple is kind of the point.
  - blub 11y ago
    The point is that he wasn't "so wrong". Apple didn't succeed immediately and without stumbling a few times. At the same time the competition screwed up monumentally. IMO, Apple will need another wedge and that car makers screw up in order to repeat their iPhone success. This is a possibility, but not a certainty, as some here proclaim.

tormeh 11y ago

Good point, but I think they already have the culture necessary in whatever group is responsible for their CPU design. That's a low-fault tolerance environment, too. The advantage of the incumbents is that cars, as long as they have to be driven manually, are not entertainment machines and cannot really be entertainment machines. Passengers already have their own phones etc. I think Tesla's on to something, but it's not software. I don't think it will necessarily transfer well to Apple.

venomsnake 11y ago

Apple's software culture is not suitable for cars. You need real time, reliable, simple and rock hard. Do you really want the company that created iTunes for windows to drive your car?

bluthru 11y ago
Do you want one of the PayPal developers to drive your car?
- cromwellian 11y ago
  Do you want the guy who launches rockets that travel amazing distances to dock with a space station to make your car? PayPal was a merger of two companies BTW. Judging by the work Google put into WebKit before the fork, Apple didn't even have a rigorous testing coverage, fuzzing, etc IIRC. I wouldn't even trust Google to do the kind of stuff automakers and defense contractors do with respect to verification and testing. Someone else was right, this could only come from their hardware groups like PA Semi and not from the guys who write the apps or OS front end.
  - bluthru 11y ago
    Considering the developers will have their friends and family use these machines, I believe the incentive is there to get it right. Also, isn't self-driving vehicles a more difficult software challenge than guiding a rocket?
    - swiley 11y ago
      Having ability is not the same as having incentive. And in this case having ability doesn't just mean "showing that it works" like most people seem to think.
  - IBM 11y ago
    How much testing did Tesla do for Autopilot? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwxEX8qOxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwxEX8qOxA

Animats 11y ago

Note the author: Jean-Louis Gassée. He's forgotten now, but he was head of product development at Apple after Jobs was fired. He left Apple in 1990, not having done much of note. He started Be (an early multiprocessor 680x0 desktop machine with its own OS), but that failed. Since then, he's mostly been a pundit.

alayne 11y ago
I think you're being a little hard on Gassée. He held numerous high level positions at technology companies and worked on the Newton, BeOS, and other technology which while not market successes, were still influential. At one time BeOS was considered a contender as a replacement for MacOS.
draw_down 11y ago
I'm not sure what your point is, he's been writing this blog for years and it's quite good in my opinion.
jarek 11y ago
Read back in the Monday Note archives and you will see he's quite the fan of most Apple things
pavlov 11y ago
Not that it matters, but BeOS never ran on 680x0.

crb002 11y ago

It's the Clang IR, same stuff they are making you push to the app store. Realtime software updates passed as proof carrying byte code. That's where Apple will be king, the agility to safely update.

rb2k_ 11y ago

Maybe only partially related, but one of the things that surprised me the most when moving to the US from Germany, was seeing the large Mercedes star on one of the buildings while driving through Sunnyvale [0]. A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ... As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here. It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here. I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley. That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,243.23h,88.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sus2JnQFTcKWtu8UHjbe4_A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,... [1] http://www.mbrdna.com/ http://www.mbrdna.com/ [2] http://www.vwerl.com/ http://www.vwerl.com/ [3] http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm

dognotdog 11y ago
All big players in the car industry have a research center in SV nowadays, it seems, not only the Germans. There is undoubtedly a lot of talent in the Bay Area, yet the rush of the car industry to SV smells of cargo culting.
blumentopf 11y ago
Based on my experience (from working there), car manufacturers often do not implement stuff themselves, they outsource. E.g. the HTML5-based infotainmemt system in the Porsche 918 was not created by Porsche (though they market it as if it was), but by S1nn. From a software engineer perspective, if you work at a car manufacturer, you usually do not write software yourself, you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conformant. Which honestly is boring. The car manufacturers should react to the influx of new competitors (like Apple, Google) by becoming software companies themselves, but management is too stupid to see that. S1nn is a perfect example: Apple or Google would have bought the company right away, so should have Porsche. Guess who bought them instead? Harman.

Rezo 11y ago

The software folks (Google, Apple) are going to figure out how to build great cars much faster than the car folks are going to learn how to build great software. Car companies are incentivized through their engineering know-how, massive supply chains and complex dealership relations to keep optimizing complex gas engines that require significant maintenance. The software folks, having no burden of legacy on the other hand are incentivized to make the engine and car platform as simple as possible, basically an electric motor (or 2, or 4...) with virtually no serviceable parts. The cost and profit structures of the two sides will look very different, and that is going to make the customer experience much better on the "innovative" side (no more haggling the price of a car for example, 1st party servicing, etc). Forget the Palm quote. Look at Nokia in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced: 50%+ marketshare, 100,000+ employees, 100 million+ devices/year, they already had "advanced" features like app stores and web browsers. But they were fundamentally a hardware company and supply chain oriented, optimizing the bill of materials and crippling their products to death, and could not make the transition. Not even 10 years later, they are extinct! That is what BMW and friends should be worried about.

venomsnake 11y ago
Just image how fun would have been the Apple Maps rollout if it was deployed on cars. With the software glitches that has plagued smartphones in the last decade - we would have had a small genocide on our hands if it was translated on fast chunks of metal, able to kill couple of people on collision. A single messed OTA (or heaven forbid maliciously corrupted) could inflict some serious pain.
- Retra 11y ago
  If Apple Maps was mission-critical industrial-strength navigation software (as you'd have to assume in this hypothetical) then maybe Apple would have put more money and effort into making it work well. Why would you assume the software they wrote for a smart-phone would be the same software they'd write for a car?
  - venomsnake 11y ago

weinzierl 11y ago

… but does Apple’s personal computing software knowhow translate into the high-reliability real-time code required for a safe, reliable and, of course, elegant electric car? It doesn't have to. Not all the software in a car is high-reliability real-time code. My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. The reason I think so is that it's not enough to write the high-reliability real-time code. Besides thoroughly testing it you will have to get it approved by authorities - worldwide. Proud incumbent automakers look down on the interlopers. Dr.-Ing. Dieter Zetsche, head of century-old Daimler-Benz, has no patience for Silicon Valley companies intruding on his turf: “What is important for us is that the brain of the car, the operating system, is not iOS or Android or someone else but it’s our brain […] We do not plan to become the Foxconn of Apple,” Mr. Zetsche said, referring to the Chinese company that manufactures iPhones. That sounds like a Daimler car had a Daimler brain but that's just not true. The most important ECUs are made by companies like Bosch, Continental or TRW. These suppliers sell to all car manufacturers and they will be more than happy to supply one more. Thinking about it this makes me really curious how Tesla handles this. Has anyone an idea which third party ECUs from which suppliers they use?

jarek 11y ago
> My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. That's actually a very interesting point in light of the Foxconn comment - it seems to make a lot of sense for Apple to get the car hardware from a Chinese manufacturer, e.g. Geely.
abalone 11y ago
> My prediction is that Apple will make all the user facing software and buy all the rest. That would only make sense if there was no further development of high-reliability, real-time functions. But a lot of the opportunity for advancement involves software controlling key driving functions, not just the user interface. There is no way to get around having to engineer bug-free code in new assisted driving features. Which are about to get a lot more complex than they've ever been before.

spotman 11y ago

Toyota got a lot of heat over their software implementation surrounding the whole stuck accelerator debacle. They have set the bar pretty low, despite their myriad of experience. Pretty sure a technology company that designs cpu's for a living can do better than toyotas example of what not to do, at least in an electronics sense. They have already hired staff that has a lot of experience in this field, and already had all the engineering chops and bank account to fund this. While they have a lot of experience to catch up on in the auto industry, I don't think it will be amateur hour. Has Apple ever released a cpu that had the same quality control issues as Apple maps?

lordnacho 11y ago

I don't see why Apple couldn't win this one as well. His criticisms are correct; ordinary software crashes all the time and people are cool with it. Heck, I even spent all of Friday discovering a Swift compiler bug. I'm sure Apple appreciate that certain kinds of software need to be more sturdy and can find the expertise somewhere. But I don't think Apple's products tend to win because of better engineering. They somehow do OK on making the product and a stellar job of selling it. They've built a cult around their nice looking things with simple interfaces. Whenever they make something new, you can always find a friend (non technical) who praises their stuff. Undoubtedly, when they build this car, that same friend will be praising the 8th wonder of the world.

walshemj 11y ago

I don't think I agree that OSX helps Apple - Apple succeeds inspite of OSX Look at finder its worse than windows 95's file explorer

swiley 11y ago

After Toyota I don't think I would trust a closed source self driving car.

ksec 11y ago

May be this Zero Error tolerance for Car Software will help shape the future direction of Swift ( If it hasn't already been done )