4 ms·

No chance. Ford is just a company of managers and labourers. All of the creative/R&D work is farmed out to vendors. They didn't even design their new super car,

by jbob2000 9y ago

No chance. Ford is just a company of managers and labourers. All of the creative/R&D work is farmed out to vendors. They didn't even design their new super car, the Ford GT; it was done by a Canadian engineering firm. You can't turn that kind of machine around. Whenever they're faced with a problem, the only thing they know how to do is ask someone else.

gumby 9y ago
Is that a problem? Cisco pioneered the model of outsourcing a lot of its technical research (two different teams would quit and start startups to solve problem X; one would get traction then Cisco would buy it -- bonus for the team! -- and the others get their jobs back). Big Pharma has pretty much outsourced early stage candidate development. In both these cases (and many others) the large company has strong development, manufacturing, distribution and sales pipelines as well as strong balance sheets, none of which a startup is likely to develop. If Ford chooses this path I don't see it a reason to criticize.
- runT1ME 9y ago
  The question becomes does the outsourcing firms they engage have the talent to build what they want (is top talent really applying to IBM/Accenture/etc?), and is the overhead of outsourcing (both monetary and time wise) going to allow them to be competitive with tech companies. I'm going to argue for any large scale project, the answer will be no.
  - gumby 9y ago
    The other parts of the car industry became vertically dis-integrated during the second half of the 20th century, so there's no reason to believe they couldn't pull this off. (Separately they have to adapt to a different market model; I'm not talking about that).
Yeaw 9y ago
That's not really accurate. Suppliers do provide large portions of any car, but the creative design and much of the control system design including software is all in house at Ford. They also have a very large research organization. Even though Sync 3 was developed in house, Ford also earlier this year hired 400 additional developers from BlackBerry to expand to even more software and connectivity in the vehicle. The average car right now has on the order of 100 ECUs and 100's of KLOC. You just don't buy all of that from a supplier and jam it in there, cars are already far too complex for that to work. The Ford GT was designed in secrecy in the basement of the design studio. The 3.5L EcoBoost engine was engineered in house and with Rousch including all of the engine controls. Multimatic is just assembling the vehicles in Canada, since Ford doesn't do by hand construction of cars. I work for Ford as an engineer, but I am only speaking for myself, not for Ford.

gumby 9y ago

Is that a problem? Cisco pioneered the model of outsourcing a lot of its technical research (two different teams would quit and start startups to solve problem X; one would get traction then Cisco would buy it -- bonus for the team! -- and the others get their jobs back). Big Pharma has pretty much outsourced early stage candidate development. In both these cases (and many others) the large company has strong development, manufacturing, distribution and sales pipelines as well as strong balance sheets, none of which a startup is likely to develop. If Ford chooses this path I don't see it a reason to criticize.

runT1ME 9y ago
The question becomes does the outsourcing firms they engage have the talent to build what they want (is top talent really applying to IBM/Accenture/etc?), and is the overhead of outsourcing (both monetary and time wise) going to allow them to be competitive with tech companies. I'm going to argue for any large scale project, the answer will be no.
- gumby 9y ago
  The other parts of the car industry became vertically dis-integrated during the second half of the 20th century, so there's no reason to believe they couldn't pull this off. (Separately they have to adapt to a different market model; I'm not talking about that).

Yeaw 9y ago

That's not really accurate. Suppliers do provide large portions of any car, but the creative design and much of the control system design including software is all in house at Ford. They also have a very large research organization. Even though Sync 3 was developed in house, Ford also earlier this year hired 400 additional developers from BlackBerry to expand to even more software and connectivity in the vehicle. The average car right now has on the order of 100 ECUs and 100's of KLOC. You just don't buy all of that from a supplier and jam it in there, cars are already far too complex for that to work. The Ford GT was designed in secrecy in the basement of the design studio. The 3.5L EcoBoost engine was engineered in house and with Rousch including all of the engine controls. Multimatic is just assembling the vehicles in Canada, since Ford doesn't do by hand construction of cars. I work for Ford as an engineer, but I am only speaking for myself, not for Ford.