Comment Re:Here's my speculation (Score 2) 82
Car companies have trouble with tech. There is something about their management or culture that's hostile to tech workers Maybe they hire the wrong people Maybe they treat the people badly Maybe something else
There is nothing wrong with a car that primarily just provides the functionality to safely drive from A to B, maybe with some air-conditioning builtin for comfort. Everything on top, like "entertainment" or navigation systems do not need to be built or sold by the car manufacturer, having a standardized slot for where to temporarily keep or mount them would be entirely sufficient. I see no reason why a car company needs to become a software or entertainment company, but apparently many investors think otherwise, because they expect the bigger profits from the latter.
The problem is, that's basically the way it works now, albeit in a badly degraded state. Car companies mostly bolt in entertainment systems from one of a small number of vendors. At some point, the entertainment system started needing to know stuff about the car itself, and without adequate standards, that meant that the systems became mostly non-swappable, but the car companies are still buying them from the same few vendors.
What this means is that you don't have competition, because it isn't readily customer-swappable, so there's limited incentive for the infotainment system vendors to improve, because they only have a few potential customers (Ford, GM, etc.), not a few hundred million, and to keep those customers, the products only have to be just slightly better or less hassle to integrate.
When the car companies build it themselves, at least the quality is the responsibility of the same company that is gaining or losing sales because of that quality, so there's some incentive to make things better.