They're Delusional
Car makers are delusional, software platforms are hard, and the Cingular of car companies will win.
Podcast: Accidental Tech Podcast
Episode: 530: You Are Not Nintendo
JOHN: So if these car makers kick software platforms out of the car, which is what they’re doing if they don’t allow CarPlay, you don’t android those are ways for those existing software platforms to allow applications developed for those platforms to get into the car.
If car makers kick them out, if they think hey, we’ll just write all the applications ourselves, no, you won’t you suck at this and even if you didn’t nobody can write all their own applications. Even Nintendo can’t get by only with first-party games and Nintendo is Nintendo. You are not Nintendo, right?
If you have none of those applications, you will just have a lesser platform. You say, okay, well, everybody does that, then just everyone will have crap applications. Ah, but if everyone has crap applications, someone, the Cingular of the car company, Cingular with a c, the Cingular of the car world will say, you know what, everybody else kicked all the other software platforms out, but you know what, Apple, Android, we’re gonna invite you back in.
And suddenly, it’s their unique selling proposition for whatever brand of car this is that decides to do this, like the last place competitor, Cingular, right? Says, iPhone, you can come on our platform and suddenly people are looking at Cingular again. No one was looking at Cingular before, but hey, you know what, if you want the iPhone, the literal only place to get it is on Cingular, which will eventually be called AT&T, and i was never a fan of Cingular/at&t before, but they have the iPhone, so I’m going over there.
That’s what’ll happen, and it’ll just reverse and ripple back through, because there is absolutely no way that any of these car makers are going to make a successful software platform, and they’re delusional If they think that you can either make one of their own, which will never, never, never work, or we don’t need a software platform, we’ll just write all the applications in-house.
Go ahead, do that, you’ll get Cingular. That’s what’ll happen. And it may take two decades of pain and suffering, to Marco’s point, it’ll suck for us the whole time if this reverses and goes through the whole industry and we gotta wait for a whole other decade long cycle for these idiots to get their heads out of their butts.
But inevitably it will happen because there is no fighting against software platforms. That’s where the innovation happens. Wherever the platforms are popular, where developers are making software, that’s where it happens.
And look at Waze, it’s like, well, that’s software innovation for like cell phones. We want software innovation for cars. That also happened on the phone. Phones aren’t cars, but that’s where all the good applications for cars came from. On the, because people can bring their phones into their cars.
So there’s just, there’s literally, it’s like the worst decision ever to decide, I don’t want any of the world’s most popular software application platforms to be able to use their software integrated into my car.
