One down, 300,000 to go. Last week, I installed the software fixes that the 300,000 Ford and Lincoln vehicle owners will soon receive to improve the control system in their Focuses, Explorers, Edges and MKXs.

Actually, I had coffee, interviewed a source, took a few phone calls and worked on another column while the software updates installed themselves in a 2012 Focus. Like an Apple iPhone, updating MyFordTouch and MyLincolnTouch is about 10% activity and 90% keeping out of the way while the device fixes itself.

“This is a really significant change,” Rebecca Lindland of IHS Automotive said. “You can fix the electronics in your own car. It’s the first step to a totally new kind of vehicle maintenance.”

There’s a video of the process on Freep.com, including an explanation by Ford user interface engineer Jennifer Brace.

After years building a reputation for high quality and dependability, Ford’s taken a beating recently, largely because of MyFordTouch. It plummeted from near the top to far down in influential studies by Consumer Reports and J.D. Power. The studies — and many Ford owners and shoppers — found the system inconsistent, unreliable and generally annoying.

The software update Ford and Lincoln owners will receive in the mail over the next couple of weeks addresses some, but not all, of the complaints.

The update will arrive as a USB thumb drive in the mail. Owners can install it themselves or go to their dealer.

I recommend the do-it-yourself method. It’s easy, and while it takes just over an hour, that beats waiting in line with the other 300,000 MyFord and MyLincolnTouch owners.

Here’s what the update does:

• It speeds up how quickly the voice-recognition system responds when you activate it.

• It makes the touch screen more responsive. It should no longer take multiple touches to make the control respond.

• A new typeface, bigger virtual buttons and a simpler layout improve the touch screen.

• It’s easier and faster to pair a phone for hands-free operation.

The toughest part of the process was remembering not to turn the car off before the download was complete.

Fortunately, Ford foresaw that. It’s easy to restart the download. The process begins from scratch, however. If you accidentally shut the car off 57 minutes into the one-hour download, you’re back to Square One.

You can leave the vehicle parked or drive it during the update. If you drive, make sure you’re happy with the settings for audio and climate control. You can’t change them during the download.

The update worked as advertised. Pairing my iPhone for hands-free calls and streaming audio was child’s play. The touch screen responded faster and more consistently. It’s considerably less frustrating. The voice-recognition button activates the system quickly.

Voice-control of phone and audio is good. The navigation system’s response to spoken commands is inconsistent. It needs work.

MyFordTouch just got better. The next 300,000 users — and the next round of quality surveys — will tell us whether it’s good enough.

Source:http://www.freep.com/article/20120315/BUSINESS02/203150496/Mark-Phelan-Do-it-yourself-software-upgrade-makes-MyFord-Touch-better-on-Ford-vehicles

Ford took another step on its journey toward becoming a mobile technology company on wheels with the release of a free MyFord Touch software upgrade to more than 300,000 existing customers. The upgrade is being mailed to MyFord Touch users in the form of a USB flash drive that contains the new software, detailed instructions for the 60-minute download, and an updated user guide. Customers who don’t want to perform the upgrade at home can have it done at their local dealership.

The upgrade is meant in part to appease customer complaints about MyFord Touch, which replaces the traditional knobs and buttons on the dashboard with a touch screen. According the April issue of Consumer Reports, Ford fell from fifth to tenth in last year’s scorecards—the largest drop of any automaker—thanks largely to the MyFord Touch system’s tendency to crash and distract drivers.

Jennifer Brace, a user interface engineer for Ford, says the upgrade enhances the touch-screen interface by cleaning up the graphics and enlarging the fonts, making the response time on the touch screen two to five times faster, adding capabilities that support tablet computers and audio books, and enhancing the navigational system with 3-D photo realistic views. “Basically, it’s faster, simpler, and overall easier to use,” she adds.

Brace says Ford and the Microsoft engineers who created the interface incorporated feedback from employees who are MyFord Touch users, market research from entities like JD Powers, and customer and dealer surveys into the upgraded software. They also convened a series of clinics with 100 customers at a time to see where they could make the biggest improvements. MyFord Touch technology is currently available in the Edge, Explorer, Focus, and Lincoln MKX models.

Sure, all these features are cool, but are they influencing what customers purchase? Ford says yes, claiming that 56 percent of buyers said in owner surveys that MyFord Touch and SYNC technology was a key factor in their purchase decision, so the customer-satisfaction stakes are high.

“As far as the technology goes, customers see the value,” Brace says. “And we’re excited to give our customers the ability to upgrade software at a rate that’s similar to consumer electronics.”

Another major Ford connectivity initiative got a push last month when the automaker announced that beta test kits of its open-source software research platform, OpenXC, was shipped out to developers and universities across across the world, including the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, MIT, and Stanford.

Developed with New York City-based Bug Labs, OpenXC enables developers to read data from the vehicle’s internal communications network and create plug and play hardware modules as well as software apps. T.J. Giuli, a Ford technical expert, says the goal is to provide an environment for developers to play and invent apps that Ford’s engineers wouldn’t think of—particularly those apps that are designed for niche markets or with a hyperlocal focus.

In September, when the OpenXC platform was first announced, Bug Labs’ founder and CEO Peter Semmelhack told Xconomy that the idea behind it is a crowd-sourced, bottom-up approach—and one that Ford hopes not only accelerates innovation, but caters to every nook and cranny of customer satisfaction.

Source: http://www.xconomy.com/detroit/2012/03/07/ford-software-upgrade-doubles-down-on-connectivity-customer-satisfaction/

The New York Times has a story focused on how complaints about Ford’s touchscreen software led to a dip in the carmaker’s quality rankings. Ford this week mailed out more than 300,000 USB sticks with a significant upgrade to that software aimed at addressing those complaints, in part by simplifying the interface to make the most used controls more prominent.

The Times story notes that Consumer Reports last week dropped Ford to 10th place on its Automaker Report Card, from fifth in 2011, and that Ford sunk to 23rd place, from fifth, in the initial quality survey by J. D. Power & Associates. The problems with MyFord Touch played a part in both those demotions. Quotes the Times:

“We expect that these improvements will put us back on track in the quality ratings,” said Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s group vice president for global product development. “It’s more than just an update. This is a substantial upgrade.”

But the MyFord Touch upgrade is only one example of how Ford, more than any other automaker, has staked its future on its ability to develop great software. (See our past coverage, Why Ford Just Became A Software Company.)

Three other areas that the Times didn’t address go well beyond this MyFord Touch upgrade, and show how Ford is pushing its software agenda:
1. Ford’s opening of a Silicon Valley software development center.

Ford plans to hire about 15 employees over the next couple of years for its new software development center in Palo Alto, a center that’s similar in concept to one GE is creating. The idea is that having people in the Valley will let Ford tap into the thinking of established software companies as well as startups. “This is where it’s at” for software development, says T.J. Giuli, a technologist in Ford’s R&D engineering group who is employee no. 1 for the center, relocating from Ford’s Dearborn, Mich., headquarters to open the center last month. Ford already has technology partnerships with MIT and the University of Michigan, and Giuli will use the center to build closer university ties on the West Coast.

2. Open source development platform to create app ecosystem around Ford cars.

Ford has created a software development kit for Android apps that gives developers read-only access to information coming from vehicles’ internal network and sensors, so that developers can use automotive data like GPS, speed, and vehicle sensors in their apps.

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The development platform, called OpenXC, is only for research today, with the first toolkit distributions going to researchers at MIT, Stanford, and the University of Michigan, plus select development partners, including HCL in India and Weather Underground in the U.S. A demo app from HCL lets a driver share a car’s GPS location with select contacts and send email automatically to those contacts if the driver’s running late. In a few months, Ford expects to release the toolkit more broadly.
“Our intention is to let this be as open as possible,” Giuli says.

It’s a recognition that Ford itself can’t come up with all the software innovations drivers will want, so it wants to make it easy and profitable for third parties.
3. A pledge to continually update software.

This is the most dramatic change to the carmaker’s mindset. In the past, when a car rolled off the assembly line, Ford was done improving the vehicle except for making any changes deemed necessary (or mandated) in recalls for safety or quality. Now it says it plans to enhance the software over the life of each vehicle. Ford mailed USB sticks for the MyFord Touch upgrade–rather than relying on customers to download those upgrades–because the idea of upgrading vehicle software is still new, and because it wants to make sure as many customers as possible make this change, given the complaints. In the future, Ford will issue smaller upgrades only via its website, where drivers can download to their own USB and make the change. (Or they can have their dealers do it for them.)

Ford is breaking new ground with its in-vehicle software, and learning a lot about the software development cycle along the way. But the MyFord Touch experience shows something that Ford knew well going into the software business: Car owners will–understandably–be very unforgiving of sub-par software in their cars.

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232602132