Mark, I'm really pleased to hear that you are so knowledgeable about
software engineering and real-time systems. It's unfortunate that you
don't know WIND's products well enough to know that the "interrupt
code" for virtually every interface/controller chip in common use has
already been written by WIND and exists in libraries that customers
use, as needed. All WIND does at this point is keep up with new chips
as they are released. This is, in fact, one of the main benefits a
company enjoys by using a RTOS like VxWorks, and it is also a major
differentiating feature between VxWorks and WinCE. WIND offers
its customers "guaranteed integration", providing a single-source for
both the OS AND DEVICE DRIVERS. The OS itself, at this point, is NOT
a major portion of WIND's development costs; most development money
is spent on the Tornado toolset, and broadening that toolset to
support additional processors. WIND has refined the porting of the
VxWorks OS to the point that it is NOT a huge effort to move it to a
new target platform. So, once again, you show us that your opinion is
based on incomplete and/or inaccurate information.
You also ignore the fact that WIND was paid by Intel for a portion
of the IxWorks design effort, and WIND leveraged the existing VxWorks
code to implement it. WIND's development costs for VxWorks/IxWorks are
amortized over HUNDREDS of design wins/customers, not one, as you
imply.
You also use the Intel i960 chip volume, which is an estimate for
NEXT YEAR, as the highest volume ever to be achieved. This is both
inaccurate and misleading. The 7 million number for next year is NOT
the highest volume Intel ever expects to ship. If I2O ends up on all
PCs, and there are several reasons to believe that will happen, the
i960 volumes would easily triple in future years. This volume doesn't
even consider the non-PC applications of I2O which are being envision-
ed by companies like PLX. Even at this "modest" volume of 7M/year, we
would enjoy a per share earnings of roughly $0.33, or > 50% increase
over current-year earnings forecasts, from a single revenue source.
You can say whatever you want, but I think most WIND shareholders will
be quite happy with that.
-Dave Lehenky |
