Re: QNX is Blackberry by name only
"I don't really understand why MS's automotive offering has gone so badly wrong."
Well I think I do know...
I spent a few years developing Windows CE systems from the ground up (writing the drivers etc). This was back in 2000 or so. At the time, WinCE was being pushed for multiple different roles including hand held, automotive, industrial etc.
The actual WinCE development and marketing team was tiny (it got that I knew a lot of them by email) and many of the offerings (eg. WinCE for automotive) were really little more than a two sided glossy pamphlet.
In the first 10 years or so, WinCE was never profitable for MS. Nor did they really invest enough in it to build it into anything useful. They just kept it alive.
On top of that they were not painting a clear road map for potential customers. They pushed PowerPC and SH3 support in their first release, but excluded ARM. x86 was for simulation only.
Then they dropped PPC and SH3 support, allowed x86 and ported to ARM. This road map confusion and erratic behaviour was very worrying for many potential customers.
Many of the products that they did get were highly subsidised "design wins" to try to promote WinCE. These tend to be driven by MS wanting to showcase themselves, rather than by the customers wanting to deploy their features. Net result is product that just does not really do what it should.
As a consultant, I still have some customers using WinCE but many of those are worried and are looking for exit strategies to Linux. They have little confidence that MS will support WinCE into the future and most of them want out.