Cars used to be places of sanctity and peace, especially for those of us who like to escape the domestic scene, the television, the wife and neighbours. The radio and the stereo offered easy music or conversational entertainment. But now this idyll is under threat. Bill Gates is getting into the car, writes Andrew Hamilton.
The great man made it clear some time back that, having conquered your workplace, your home and your wallet, your car was next. Just recently Microsoft owned up to its first conquest in this field and quite a conquest too - BMW and its new 7-Series, the very high-profile flagship of its fleet.
What's more, it said that, BMW aside, Windows CE for automotive software was in another 13 car lines and would be in 22 by the end of the year. Microsoft is not saying which, but you can reasonably add Ford and all its luxury brands, General Motors and its lot - plus Jeep, Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Citroën, Mini and even Rolls-Royce.
Electronically speaking, it goes almost without saying that cars are getting more complex. Savvy manufacturers know that extra electronic functionality is the most cost-effective way to add value to a car. Writing a few lines of code - all it takes for instance to turn anti-lock braking hardware into an effective way of controlling a Range Rover or a BMW X5's speed down a slope - is always going to be cheaper than designing and manufacturing a better hinge that makes putting the shopping in the boot a whole lot easier.
Cars are getting more complex at an alarming rate. Soon even relatively humble cars on the Irish market will come, for a few hundred extra euro, with satellite navigation systems.
In the past few months we have driven two cars - the family and fleet Nissan Primera and the luxurious 7-Series - which have completely rethought the design of the dashboard to incorporate multifunction screens and their associated controls.
All cars will be like this inside a generation or less. A few years back, the big talking point at the Detroit auto show was a Ford concept car. The design of the car called 24/7 - for 24 hours and seven days a week - was completely subordinated to its communications technology. We and other journalists wrote depressingly about it: we hoped this wasn't the way forward! That system used voice controls and a simple, elegant graphical interface which owed little to the Windows protocols but offered all the range of functionality of the BMW system and more. It used Sun Microsystems' Java software to drive the display.
Right now, Sun is the only rival Microsoft has in the automotive area. Let's hope it stays that way. Either way it isn't going to be easy keeping both out of the car.