Mark Fields is out! Jim Hackett is in!
If we were wondering the impact of innovation on the auto industry its clear we found it.
The company that took pride in not taking bailout money, now has to swallow some pride as the innovation team has to look at the total company.
This should be interesting, before Jim Hackett was around Ford had been aligned with Microsoft and the Sync products and other interesting strategies.
Ford has done a number of things, right, They have used their connections to the colleges and universities in Michigan to enable third party development.
However, the community around them has never truly taken to the adaption, and Microsoft has been absent.
The reality of transforming the car industry is more than an app platform. Tesla runs its vehicles on 40K lines of code including the autonomous vehicles. Traditional automakers have over 1M lines of code and over 100 sensors.
For success to come to the traditional players. The legacy systems need to be ignored not abandoned but isolated.
New requirements require new systems. Old systems can be evaluated on revision when feature interaction causes a problem, or costs can be significantly reduced.
I look forward to seeing what Jim Hackett focus will be.