Art,
My two cents.... WARNING: Everything below is speculation on my part derived
from watching the company and its product evolution for quite some
time.
The Metrowerks "story" is quite intriguing and (IMHO) very strong.
Metrowerks is looking to domainate the compiled language market. They
hope to accomplish this by having a highly flexible product architecture
that allows them to mix-and-match languages and platforms easily.
Code Warrior is a highly modular product. There is an IDE and API-based
code that talks to the IDE. This API allows Metrowerks (and potentially
other companies) to plug in capabilities to the base IDE. Wrapping
this IDE are various language front-ends and platform-backends. This
allows Metrowerks to build compiler for different languages and code
generator for different platforms independently of each other. Adding
a new language requires writing a compiler that can compile
the language. Adding a new platform requires writing a code generator
that can take some intermediate output and generate assembly code for
a given platform.
This highly flexibly architecture has allowed Metrowerks to quickly
support a number of front-ends (C, C++, Pascal, etc...) and a number
of backends (68K, PowerPC, Intel, etc...). Future products will
extend this to include JAVA, and MIPS. The potential impact of the
product could be huge. Assuming my architecture assumptions are
correct, the JAVA front-end would not only be usable on the MAC
(where most of the attention has been) but also on the Intel
platform (Windows95 and NT). Once the MIPS-backend is completed,
they will be able to bring all along all their languages to the
MIPS platform as well!
The move in the embedded controller market also has huge potential. Embedded
controllers are used in many electronic devices ranging from cars to
VCRs. I have done only a little embedded controller work but from that
experience I believe Metrowerks could dominate the market in a big way.
The reason for this is that the tools used by engineers in that market
are quite poor when compared to the software market. If Metrowerks
can bring the power and flexiblity of Code Warrior to these engineers,
I strongly believe that the product will spread like wildfire. The
rate and scope of adoption could potentially dwarf the Mac market which
would bode quite well for the company.
As I said before, this is just speculation on my part based on a
technical analysis of their product. I have not had any discussions
with Metrowerks about any of this and is not based on any inside
information. Good trading!
Heeren
|
