This video is going to be a little different
to my normal ones. I usually need to do lots of research to get
the story straight. But not this one – this was basically a
brain dump! If you don’t know, I once, many moons ago,
worked for Microsoft in the Automotive Business Unit or ABU, in fact this is an ABU t-shirt. I started working on the Auto PC – the car
stereo you see behind me there – and although I missed ABU’s crowning glory, the Ford
SYNC system, I was back in the team to witness first-hand the chaos of the infamous MyFord
Touch project. Not much is out there about some of the background
to what happened, and I’ve always wanted to tell the real story, what Ford’s PR department
didn’t want you to hear. So, sit back and learn about the project that
helped sink Ford’s JD Power ratings, and the story of how they dug themselves out of
the hole. This is the MyFord Touch Story. (music) It all starts with Ford and Microsoft’s
work on the Ford SYNC project between 2005 and 2007. If you want to know more, I’ve done a whole
video about it. Long story short, Ford SYNC was a small piece
of hardware that mainly used speech to allow for Bluetooth hands free phone calls, and
to play music through iPods or USB memory sticks. Although the team at Microsoft was burnt out
getting it shipped, it was a massive success. Microsoft handed the product off to their
support team to work with Ford on expanding it eventually to pretty much every car Ford made. Ford thought SYNC was fantastic, due to popular
demand it sold more cars and they sold it for 10 times the cost of the hardware. Customers liked it as well, SYNC was worth
more in a used car than the price you paid for it when new. For the next version of SYNC, Ford wanted
it to have its own touchscreen, and for it to control more of the car’s features such
as climate control. This meant fewer buttons, which meant a cheaper
vehicle, while allowing for higher revenue. This was the early days of Android and in
particular the iPhone, which had launched the day after Ford SYNC broke cover, and touchscreens
were on everyone’s lips. So, Ford was keen to work with Microsoft again,
but Microsoft wasn’t so keen to work with Ford. They’d spent years producing essentially
a custom system for Fiat – “Blue & Me” – and now they’d done a second custom
project for Ford. Most departments in Microsoft want to write
code once and sell it many times, and there was a keen desire to move back towards a standardised
Microsoft automotive operating system. This could be taken by OEMs or Original Equipment
Manufacturers such as Bosch or Delco and offered to car companies. Microsoft had had some success doing this,
but they wanted to do more of it, especially now their product was in high demand after
the success of Blue & Me, and Ford SYNC. When Ford came calling to work on the next
project, Microsoft were happy for Ford to use their operating system, which they called
Microsoft Auto but didn’t want to do all that customisation work. And with this being a v2 product, and Ford
being much more adept at helping create in car entertainment systems, it seemed to make
sense that Ford run the project. Ford looked around for a software company
to help them build on top of Microsoft Auto. One promising candidate was a company called
bSquare. They worked just a stone’s throw from Microsoft
in Bellevue, Washington, and one of their first projects was extending Microsoft Auto’s
operating system - Windows CE to support other CPUs. With a good working knowledge of how
Microsoft Auto ticks, connections to Microsoft, and an ability to write custom code,
they seemed ideal. This is where my knowledge gets a bit hazy,
as I wasn’t working for bSquare, and don’t know what happened between Ford and bSquare. What little I do know has come from stories
that were told by Ford and Microsoft people I met when working on the project later. So, take all of this with a little bit of
a pinch of salt. However, one thing’s clear – Ford have
always had very definite ideas about what their product will be. They create very detailed specifications and
expect the product to follow them to the letter. This ended up working out well in the Ford
SYNC project because Microsoft wasn’t afraid to push back when they saw a Ford plan as
unworkable, or they felt there was a better solution. And of course Microsoft didn’t understand
some of the nuances of the car industry and why Ford was making the calls they did, but
on the whole it was a productive time when each company gave as good as they got, and
the friction created a better product. bSquare were a tiny company compared to Ford, and the demanding Ford
relationship didn’t work so well. bSquare were an outside contractor, so when
they were told to make a product the way Ford wanted, they made it the way Ford wanted! They didn’t have the muscle to push back
on what could be bad design decisions, and this laid the groundwork to the problem. Now I’m not rubbishing bSquare here. They are a fine company that have made some
excellent products. But what I think happened was a failure for
both companies to connect on technology and timelines on this particular project. Those early decisions would have disastrous
consequences. One choice was to use Adobe’s Flash product
for the user interface. There were a lot of different screens on the
proposed MyFord Touch product, and building them in Flash was a much faster way of creating
a user interface. Microsoft Auto didn’t have its own compelling
user interface at the time. If this were to be done today, likely bSquare
and Ford would have used HTML5, but this didn’t exist around 2009 when the companies were
working on it. Flash had been made to work on Microsoft Auto,
so it seemed to make sense to use that. However, what both companies hadn’t done
was work out how fast Flash worked on the proposed CPU Ford wanted to use –
a 400Mhz chip if I recall. Both companies would find out much too late
that the system worked at a glacial pace with Flash as the user interface, and as neither
company could change the Microsoft Auto operating system or the Flash implementation, they weren’t
able to make it any faster without choosing a faster CPU. That’s also a tough thing to do when the hardware’s
been finalised, and manufacturing has begun. Both companies had also underestimated the
amount of time it would take to get the product ready. And Ford had put a firm date on the release
that couldn’t be slipped. They were launching MyFord Touch in the Ford
Edge, Explorer and Lincoln MKX in 2010. The Edge and MKX were particular problems
as some parts of the car, for example the climate system, could only be operated through
the MyFord Touch system. They literally couldn’t release the car
without MyFord Touch, and with tooling and factories being geared up for a release date,
slipping wasn’t an option. Despite this, bSquare’s PR department was
touting the new product they’d created with Ford up until July 2010. So, when MyFord Touch launched in the summer
of 2010, what the public got was quite frankly a mess. It was slow, and using a resistive touchscreen
for drivers with gloves didn’t help as it was inferior to capacitive touch used on modern
smartphones. The hazard warning button was installed just
under the screen, so your palm hit it as you were trying to steady your hand to hit the
touch controls. The screens were a bit of a chaotic mess. Presumably neither team had employed
the necessary user interface staff, or maybe they’d simply run out of time. But the main problem were the bugs. So, many, bugs. It wasn’t uncommon for the device to reboot
every time you took a short 20-30 minute drive. When you’re trying to listen to music, make
a phone call, or alter the climate this was simply unacceptable. The reviews for the new car were scathing. The car itself was just great, but MyFord
Touch was torn apart. This, and the poor quality of the Ford Fiesta’s
automatic gearbox were the two blackspots that sent Ford’s J.D. Power ratings plummeting
from 5th in 2010 to 23rd in 2011. Lincoln’s rating fell from the 8th to 17th. Consumer Reports recommended customers not
buy any car with MyFord Touch installed. And with these consumer ratings being
so highly thought of by the public, this was killing Ford’s sales. Where Ford SYNC had been the goose laying
the golden egg, MyFord Touch was the touch of death to every car it was installed in. So, this is where I enter the picture. I’d just started working on the next version
of the Microsoft Auto operating system when in 2011 we were told to down tools and fix
MyFord Touch – now. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Ford CEO Alan
Mulally knew each other well, and of course the Ford and Microsoft team’s were old friends,
so when Ford realised, too late, that bSquare couldn’t dig them out of the hole they found
themselves in, they turned to Microsoft to fix MyFord Touch. No more crashing, a faster system, and a user
interface that made sense. I remember just after we started working on
MyFord Touch project the entire team went on a training course to improve our skills
running projects. The speaker showed us some of the things we
should never do, and one was to try to fix a project that was badly broken. The sheer amount of work it takes to fix bad
code is a magnitude higher than writing the whole thing again from scratch. Yet this is just what we were being told to
do! We couldn’t just take 12 to 24 months and
rewrite it. Every day Ford had the product in the market
was a day that they were losing market share, and there was a very real worry
that a class action lawsuit could be put together by MyFord Touch owners. In fact, in 2013 this exact thing happened,
and Ford set aside $17M (£13M, €15.6M, $23.2M AUD) to pay affected customers. Ford couldn’t simply stop building three
of its mainstream cars while Microsoft rewrote the code, and the team wasn’t large enough
to fix the existing product and write a new one at the same time. Ford would simply lose too much face from
something so deeply embarrassing. We agreed with Ford to have updated versions of the
code every 3 months to slowly improve the product. This meant MyFord Touch had to keep using
Flash, and this limited the amount of improvement Microsoft could make. The first goal was to stop the most heinous
crashes in the first three months, and to fix the ugly user interface, which was actually
the easiest job as Microsoft already had a team of user interface people. But fixing this mountain of bugs was so hard
– I remember going through lists of hundreds of customer reported bugs – just in the
product area I was working on. Becoming acquainted with bSquare’s code
would also take time, and the team had to decide what modules of the system could be
rewritten, and what needed to be patched. To give you an idea the gargantuan task to
get MyFord Touch working correctly, the Microsoft Automotive team started hiring immediately,
and at one point there were 250 people working solely on fixing MyFord Touch. The main thing that annoyed me at the time
was what the press said about MyFord Touch. They laid the blame firmly with Microsoft,
and Ford didn’t rush to correct them. It was Microsoft’s operating system, so
it was their fault. As I’ve already laid out, it clearly wasn’t
Microsoft’s fault, and in fact we were the knights in shining armour,
coming in to clean up the mess. But Microsoft’s marketing team agreed to
take the fall. Ford had people permanently camped out at
Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue. Interestingly our offices were less than a
15 minute drive from bSquare’s offices, yet we never talked. Slowly the system got more stable,
to be easier to use and faster. It would never be that fast, and with the
resistive touchscreen it always felt you were having to use it in slow motion, but it slowly
got to a point where it was usable. Every three months the updates were pushed
out to Ford who would install them on new vehicles, but dealers would also have the
software that they could use to update vehicles when they came in for servicing, or if the
owners simply wanted the latest update. And once the software was relatively stable,
Ford sent a USB stick and SD card to all MyFord Touch owners in spring 2012 with instructions
on how to update the device themselves. Ever since Ford designed MyFord Touch, they’d
always planned to use it as their premium in-car entertainment system around the world. Once the worst of the bugs were handled, Microsoft
worked on extending MyFord Touch to work on these new vehicles. I was working on the radio feature and was
responsible for extending MyFord Touch to work with DAB,
along with a Microsoft team in Munich. Our work went into the release of the new
Ford Mondeo. New cars meant new CD & radio modules, and
each implementation had its own “unique” way of operating,
which caused no end of headaches! Although the Microsoft Automotive team moved
off the MyFord Touch project in 2013, Ford was still providing software updates as late
as 2016, although I don’t know what team was doing the work. It’s possible it was small patches by Microsoft’s
support team that provided updates to support newer phones or media devices, as they had
done for the original SYNC product. After the mess that was MyFord Touch, Ford
wanted to quickly replace it with something better. Maybe a faster processor, no resistive screen
and something that didn’t use Flash. Microsoft Automotive had shown it could deliver
good products, and there was hope that they could supply the next generation product. However, changes in the Windows team would
scupper any hopes of that. With Windows 8, released in 2012, Microsoft
had attempted to expand Windows to both Intel x86 and ARM CPUs. They also wanted to kill off the Windows CE
operating system that Microsoft Auto was based on, as they believed it didn’t make any
sense to put resources into two different operating systems that basically did the same
thing. The problem for the Microsoft Automotive team
though was that although Windows supported ARM CPUs, it didn’t support Freescale ARM
CPUs. These were cost effective, automotive grade
chips that were perfect for in-car use, and something competitor’s products used. The other problem Microsoft Automotive had
was the minimum amount of memory Windows needed was significantly higher than Windows CE,
also adding to the hardware cost. Microsoft pitched their new product, using
one of the Windows team’s recommended CPUs, and the extra RAM that would be needed, but
it was a forlorn hope. The hardware cost was incredibly high, and it made
no sense for Ford to go with Microsoft’s solution. Ford went with a solution from BlackBerry-owned
QNX to make the follow-up to MyFord Touch, dubbed SYNC 3 that was rolled out in 2016
model cars. It was installed on new hardware and was available
to upgrade existing MyFord Touch cars. SYNC 3 of course didn’t use Adobe Flash! The Microsoft Automotive team as dissolved
shortly after, and all the staff were moved from working on the Ford Edge car to work
on Microsoft Edge. MyFord Touch is a story of how not to run
a software and hardware project. Don’t build a car that relies on one component,
especially if that component is something new and risky. Work very closely with your suppliers, and
have regular deliverables that give you confidence you’re on track. If early versions of a software product are
slow, they’re unlikely to get faster, in fact as more modules are completed it’s
likely to get slower. And have people in your team who have sufficient
technical knowledge of the component that’s being supplied, so they can ask the right
questions. Well, it’s good to get that off my chest! To round out the story, the class action lawsuit
settled in 2019 with claimants able to get up to $400 in compensation. Thanks for watching this video and I’ll
see you in the next video!
It wasn't/isn't. The only problem were the morons that didn't know how to operate it
I had Sync 2 on my FoST, that was horrible as well. Although a lot better than MFT, Sync 2 was still slow; and often times would bug out if you tried navigating quickly though the menus.
A lot of people look to do a Sync 3 conversion for the ACP/AU integration, but sadly it is not just software updates (to my knowledge). You have to replace the whole system.