While Microsoft is known the world over for products like Windows, Office, SharePoint, the Zune, and the Xbox 360, it has also been entering new markets with their software products. The high-performance computing (HPC) market is one such area, and the automotive world is another.
In 2008, the Ford Motor Company released Ford Sync, an automotive technology product -- co-developed with Microsoft -- that allows drivers to connect their mobile phones and MP3 players to their car audio system. Sync also provides voice recognition, making it possible for drivers to use basic verbal commands to make phone calls and play music. We tested Ford Sync last year, and it worked as advertised: After configuring my mobile phone with the Sync system, I could call numbers saved on my phone, play CD tracks, and change radio station, all by speaking some basic commands, like "call home," or "play CD."
With an increasingly mobile workforce, systems like Ford Sync will undoubtedly become much more common. As an IT professional, your area of responsibility may soon overlap into company vehicles as well: What if your sales department need helps setting up their mobile phones to work with the system, or your CEO needs help picking a car to work with your company phone? It's a brave new world...and a mobile one at that.
Last year I had the opportunity to interview Walter Sullivan, the Lead Program Manager at Microsoft for the software powering Ford Sync. Sullivan works in the Microsoft Automotive Business Unit, and worked on the team that partnered with Ford to bring the Sync platform to fruition. (You can also read our interview with Gary Jablonski, manager of Telematics at Ford Motor Company, to get the automaker perspective on the development of Ford Sync.)
Jeff James: When did you guys first start talking to Ford about FordSync?
Walter Sullivan: We signed a contract with Ford in the early part of Spring ’06. There were several discussions leading up to that, obviously, but it was under 6 months. The progression is that Microsoft has developed the concept for this kind of device/gateway in the car, and we actually built an earlier version of this functionality with Fiat in Europe. It’s a part of what they called Blue & Me. It’s not as fully-capable as the Ford version is, but it’s the first generation. We wanted to continue developing the concept, and we talked to some auto makers, Ford included, and Ford had a vision that was very similarly aligned with ours, and after a few discussions we realized that we wanted to build this the next-generation of this device together for a North American market.
Jeff James: Did Ford approach Microsoft, or did you approach them?
Walter Sullivan: We are in fairly regular dialogue with almost all of the car makers, so this probably came out of a discussion in one of our regular meetings with different people at Ford. It would be hard to say who approached who, because I wasn’t personally in that discussion. I suspect it came out of one of the regular meetings we scheduled.
Jeff James: How long were each of the stages in the development process?
Walter Sullivan: In the automotive world, the project end-to-end was 14-15 months, which is actually fairly fast in a typical automotive development cycle. In the specific work we did with Ford, we didn’t spend a lot of time prototyping, because we already had an implementation with Fiat, and we were pretty sure what we wanted to enhance it with, so we went fairly quickly into the implementation with Ford. We spent a few weeks with them, probably on the order of 2 months or so, defining the specific enhancements we wanted to do, and the specific user interface that Ford wanted to expose to their users. We don’t really define a standard interface for Microsoft devices in cars at this point. The car makers are very interested in exposing a specific interface to their owners, so we spent some time really defining and specifying the user experience that they wanted, and we moved pretty quickly into the implementation phase of that device. We also did a pretty significant hardware revision, so that took 2-3 months to do the design and layout and get some prototype boards built, testing those boards, before we finalized the design.
Jeff James: In terms of specifications, what specific types of hardware are you running on? Also, can you give a technical background on what types of what version of Windows you are running, and what modifications you needed to get it to run at a FordSync level?
Walter Sullivan: The hardware is based on a single main processor which is a Freescale MX31L, which is an ARM-based processor, the same processor that’s in the Zunes, and it’s a good industrial-grade processor that actually has subsequently been qualified for automotive use. We have 256MB of flash storage, and 64MB of RAM, and then there’s the Bluetooth hardware which is on there, which is supplied by CSR, and finally a gateway into the vehicle network. It’s a vehicle CPU that does a firewall between the processor that’s connected to all the consumer devices in the vehicle network. That vehicle CPU is done by Continental, who is our tier-one hardware partner as well for building the device.
The software is based on Windows CE5, and we take Windows CE and build a bunch of different automotive-grade components on top of it, and we call that the Microsoft Auto Platform.
Jeff James: Probably one of the big challenges you faced with a solution like this is that, if you look at most of these vehicles, there are so many variables in the environment. From a hardware and software engineering perspective, how did you solve some of these real-world challenges that anyone would face with working on something like a vehicle?