Ford, Microsoft team up on new dashboard OS

And people wonder why the US auto industry is going down the tubes...

Ford Motor Company has announced that it will be offering a new digital dashboard control system on 12 of its 2008 vehicles and expanding that across their line as an option for the 2009 model year.

The system, unveiled at the North American International Auto Show on Sunday, is called "Sync" and has been developed in partnership with Microsoft.

This reminds me of a joke I love to tell. It goes like this:

Three engineers are riding in a car -- a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer and a computer engineer. Then car breaks down. The chemical engineer says, "It's the gas." The electrical engineer says, "It's the spark plugs." The computer engineer says, "Look, I don't know what it is, but here's what we do: let's all get out of the car and get back in again."

P.S. I told this joke to a roomful of lawyers. They all looked at me and one of them said, "Then what happened?"