Microsoft Wants To Power Self-Driving Cars With Software, Not Build One (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's Peggy Johnson said at the Converge conference (Warning: WSJ source paywalled) in Hong Kong this week that the company is not interested in manufacturing its own self-driving cars, but instead is interested in building software for cars. "We won't be building our own autonomous vehicle but we would like to enable autonomous vehicles and assisted driving as well," said Johnson, head of business development at Microsoft. "We in different ways enabled a variety of different partners and you'll see us continuing to do that." Microsoft is open to partners requesting an operating system for cars. The company has partnered with Harman to integrate Microsoft Office 365 into its infotainment systems, bringing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to cars for the first time. "You're sitting in the car for many, many minutes a day. Can that be part of your new office, can it be your new desk, a place where you actually get work done?" asked Johnson. "We believe it can." Two years ago, Microsoft unveiled their "Windows in the car" initiative to compete against Apple's CarPlay.

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Based on past experiences

[Tangential]

That's just what we want. A company that took several decades to figure out that security and stability might have some value and that has a legacy of releasing barely beta quality software as commercial ship so that its customers could find the problems building the software that controls our cars. Anyone who has been stuck with a Ford Sync (sadly I am in that group) or MyFord Touch radio running the crap software MS built knows how bad of an idea this is.