Pat,
Here is the article that you talked about from Time magazine in it's entirety:
pathfinder.com
FROM MONDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1999
Gentlemen, Please Reboot Your Engines
Microsoft and Sun want their software in your car, but little-known Wind River has a head start.
You're driving along at 65 m.p.h. on the Santa Monica Freeway. Suddenly your dashboard starts flashing this message: FATAL ERROR 60438. YOU WILL HAVE TO REBOOT.
Ummm ? what now? Pull out the instruction manual? Call the help center on your cell phone? Where's the reboot button, anyway? Of course, this is just a bad fantasy, but as software makers vie for space on (and behind) your dashboard, "operating system" is taking on a whole new meaning.
This past August, General Motors announced its "Web vehicle," featuring voice-activated access to the Internet right from the driver's seat. To bring the Web vehicle to market next year, GM has turned to Sun Microsystems, maker of the Java programming language and operating environment. Sun CEO Scott McNealy probably shocked a few Detroit executives at a press event when he said he "often refers to the automobile as nothing more than a Java browser with tires."
Despite McNealy's enthusiasm for the automotive market, Sun will be racing behind longtime rival Microsoft, whose Windows CE-based Auto PC replaces your car stereo with a souped-up in-dash computer that plays your CDs, scans for radio stations, reads you all your e-mail, looks up the address of your next appointment and tells you the best route to take to get there. The Auto PC has been out for about a year.
Sun and Microsoft, while well known in the personal-computing and business worlds, are relatively new to the space between your bumpers. Wind River Systems, a lesser-known rival, has been selling its lightweight, powerful operating systems to automakers for years. "The typical car has more than 50 microprocessors in it," explains Jerry Fiddler, chairman and cofounder of Wind River. "They help you make your car more reliable, more fuel-efficient and much safer."
Unlike those in your laptop, these systems need to be extremely reliable, as they operate so many mission-critical functions in your car ? and become more pervasive with each model year. But Wind River isn't stopping at your car's brakes. Fiddler envisions a future in which a Wind River-driven computer in your engine communicates seamlessly with the Wind River-driven computer in your dash. Your car could tell you it's time for an oil change, find the nearest service center, set up an appointment that fits your schedule and give you directions to get there.
Wind River may have already captured the pole position in the race for your dashboard. According to Fiddler, Wind River's software is inside half the car-navigation systems built today.
Whoever ends up developing the systems installed in your car, you can expect to see a growing list of technology options available to new-car buyers. The challenge for Sun, Microsoft and Wind River is to develop software that exhibits the same qualities drivers look for in their car's hardware. You guessed it: reliability and performance. Crashing, after all, isn't an option for auto software.
--MICHAEL SIPPEY
Regards,
Karim |
