For MWAR to be successful in the future, they must focus upon the areas of the RTOS market where they have had past success and attempt to build upon it. MWAR had a stronghold in the RTOS for the interactive TV "Set Top Box" market.
This seems like a reasonable suggestion, but perhaps not if you look deeper. MWAR made a big play to dominate the high-end set-top box a few years ago, and succeeded. After the market failed to materialize, however, they were left with rusting product licensing deals, and lots of sunk costs.
Meanwhile, as set-top box technology has evolved and now appears to be on the near-term horizon, prodded on my Bill Gates and gradual technology improvements, the big deals are being awarded (read: taken) to big players. Microsoft literally pushed itself on TCI in January, to force Windows CE into at least 5 million set-top boxes within a few years. Worse for MWAR, NCI/Navio won the even bigger deal with Cable and Wireless in the UK, with delivery starting this year or next. Ironically, the NCI set-top box probably is based on VxWorks, since we know Navio has been working away on products for some time using VxWorks.
Sun of course has plans to push Microsoft out of the half of the TCI deal Sun doesn't own. If it does, one suspects that OpenTV would get a chance at providing software for TCI's set-top boxes. Like lots of newcomers to the set-top box dance, like SpyGlass, OpenTV is agnostic about the underlying RTOS. VxWorks, pSOS and OS-9 have all been ported to OpenTV. This implies that MWAR's leverage for getting design wins through OpenTV would be proportional, at best, to its comparative revenues with the RTOS leaders.
Finally, over the last year or so, INTS claims a number of set-top box design wins, while fresh set-top box wins for MWAR seemed to have dried up.
No, I don't think I would recommend that MWAR focus their remaining resources on the set-top box market.
If MWAR can't make a living in their traditional niche, they should probably clean the company up and sell it before the IDE development pile-drives them into the ground.
That is exactly what Microtec Research did after being public for about six months. However, selling the company is a last resort. Any other thoughts about what they might do?
Allen |
