14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has joined a large group of companies to support the development of the Apollo self-driving car platform created by Baidu and supported by industry leaders like Intel and NVIDIA.
The Chinese search giant Baidu hopes that with the help of big companies like Microsoft, Apollo can become a global initiative that could compete against similar autonomous car platforms developed by giants like Google and Uber, as well as car companies such as Ford and BMW.
Qi Lu, Baidu’s chief operating officer, says Apollo is “the Android of autonomous cars,” pointing out that it was designed from the very beginning to be open.
“Apollo is an important milestone for the automotive industry,” Qi Lu explained. “It is in essence the ‘Android’ of the autonomous driving industry, but more open and more powerful. Apollo is not solely Baidu’s. It belongs to everyone in the ecosystem. And as we and our partners contribute to the platform in our areas of specialty, we all gain more, with the results far greater than just our own.”
Microsoft: We won’t be building a car
As far as self-driving cars are concerned, Microsoft has made it very clear that the company isn’t interested in building such a product, but instead it does want to be the firm powering a vehicle.
“I’m very thrilled about all the car companies using Azure today. It’s the best thing that happened to us quite honestly,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year. “That’s our strategy, it goes back to our identity,” he continued, pointing out that Microsoft is first of all a software company, and building the software to power a car makes more sense than building the car itself.
Nadella continued to explain that Microsoft was interested in joining forces with any company that’s looking for a trusted partner “who’s not going to compete with them.”
Baidu’s Apollo platform was announced in April this year and is supposed to power self-driving cars that should hit the streets as soon as 2020.