“Software is supposed to be soft,” Field says, “and the industry has made it hard and made it match up to the physical boxes. So to me, like the biggest thing is, are you making your software soft, putting it where you need it to be, and not being at the whim of the legacy of where all the software sits?”

The tradeoff is that “softer” software requires more verification work on the receiver side because there is too much variation for the supplier to test everything like before. OEMs don’t accept that responsibility in my experience and try to outsource it back to the suppliers. It gets only superficially resolved during acquisition and later it becomes a blame game resulting in “surprise” costs. Well, not surprising to the engineers usually.