But this guy seems to postulate a market that is highly splintered, is commodity driven and requires discrete software. How does a company make $$ under these circumstances. If cost are too high most products--even if useful and innovative--will fail or will not come to market.
Your friend properly understood the conundrum facing software IP in the third wave. However, I failed to convey clearly enough the exciting solution developing. And, as your friend realizes, a solution must surface to raise the third wave to the level of its manifest destiny. Please ask him to re-read the posts looking for the "embedded" solution.
Why pay big bucks to WIND in royalty payments if you have to turn around and customize the embedded system for your specific use at great cost.
Big bucks aren't being paid to WIND, at least on a unit basis. Consider I2O for example. WIND's portion is about $1.50 per instance, cheap by any standard, especially since WIND itself added tremendous value by designing much of the I2O RTOS structure. But I2O also incorporates value added by numerous industry participants, which limits WIND's take to a nominal value. Of course, it's a nominal value of a potentially gigantic number of instances, due to the growing participation in the computer industry.
The idea in the third wave is not to make big bucks each for a few million units, but instead to make small bucks on each of billions and billions of units. Just as IP in the second wave was different than IP in the first wave, so too will be IP in the third wave. The good news is that it must exist, and it will be very, very big. This is central to my thesis.
As far as having to customize the operating system, that's not the job of most product developers. That's the job of industry groups like the I2OSIG, or partnering arrangements like the Flashpoint/WIND or NCI/WIND deals. They do the hard work so countless project development teams can get product to market in the fastest, cheapest, most reliable way possible.
This will be necessary since WIND won't have the designers to modify their products for thousands of complex and discrete uses.
Precisely the point. Neither WIND nor Microsoft has the necessary resources to support from scratch the expanding demand for all embedded systems development.
Allen |
