Thank you very much for keeping us informed about Windows CE and JavaOS developments.
I often wonder how the market can be so stupid as to not fully appreciate the economic value of a growth stock of WIND's caliber. And then along comes the answer thanks to you. The market obviously believes that Windows CE and/or JavaOS and/or AT&T's Inferno/Limbo will torpedo the embedded RTOS vendors.
The trick to making big money in the market is to not follow the herd, but in so doing you must be absolutely certain you are right. If the market is dumb enough to think, even for one second, that any of the above-mentioned operating systems can significantly impact the embedded RTOS space, then I can safely take the counter position and win big.
Understand this. Windows CE probably will succeed wonderfully for Bill Gates, and probably make PDA's successful when no one else has ever been able to establish the product category. There will be many ancillary devices that will be developed using Windows CE. So many, in fact, that if I could get a dollar for each one, I would be a rich man. Bill Gates will get about $10 for each one, and for him the paltry amount will make him wonder if it was worth the effort.
You say, "Let's face it many embedded systems have pretty simple requirements: is it on or off, is it stale or fresh, is it early or late, is it hot or cold, is it done or not done, is it high or low, fast or slow, is it full or empty? Does the smart code machine at the local corner store need a hard realtime operating system?..."
If you are right, then why in the world would you want to screw around with Windows CE rather than VxWorks for these applications? Why would you want to be restricted to custom boards, a relatively huge kernel, and have to deal with Microsoft about outrageous license fees, when you could travel with the nice folks at WIND? VxWorks is first and foremost an embedded OS, it works with embedded systems, on all kinds of boards, in all kinds of circumstances. It also is completely modern (threads, multi-tasking) and real-time - just in case you end up needing it. Finally, it is the defacto standard for embedded systems, so anyone you hire will be familiar with it, ready immediately to be productive.
Java is a really neat programming language. It is particularly neat for throwing rocks at Microsoft - at least it was until Microsoft assimilated it and added ActiveX. JavaOS, or something that can make a Virtual Java Machine is necessary to execute Java programs. Consequently, Sun is likely to induce lots of implementations of JavaOS directly on processor chips in addition to its own production of JavaOS chips and lots of hybrid implementations like those WIND is working on with Oracle, Netscape and most major players in the Java space. INTS and MWAR also expect huge business deploying Java applications.
As big as JavaOS is, nevertheless, the entire embedded RTOS application space is to the ocean as JavaOS chips is to a bucket of water. RTOS is the sweet spot of sophisticated embedded systems. You can only replace the majority of RTOS applications with a better RTOS, not with Windows lite, or Java anything.
Look at the NC, for example. It started out conceptually as a Java machine with a Java HTML internet browser. Now look at it. It has a zillion administrative tasks to be attended to, and has to handle data cartridges that wrap everything from COBOL to C, Fortran to Forth, Pascal to Perl. And this ignores funny little things like SQLNet because I can't think of a language that starts with the letter S (At&T's statistical language, S, doesn't quite count).
Most of the available protocol libraries and mountains of existing algorithms and routines are available in C, C++, Assembly Language and Fortran. The pressure to preserve all this code would blow mount St. Helen if not satisfied, yet JavaOS preserves nothing. In other words, if we could start all over and program everything in Java, then maybe JavaOS could be an adequate as well as a ubiquitous OS. We can't.
The recommended and popular solution for anyone toying with the notion of providing a capability of executing Java code is to superimpose JavaOS on top of a robust operating system. This solution permits the execution of Java code as well as any ordinary code that might be needed for any one of 10,000 reasons. If you were about to make a choice between a pure JavaOS and a hybrid with demonstrated satisfactory performance, which would you select, knowing that you might want to preserve your options and do the safe thing. Make a mistake and we will fire you.
David, please find something that really knocks us over. I went to the ESC in Boston, and Microsoft was a real disappointment. Win 32 Real Time never showed up - at least not according to the people manning the Microsoft booth. Sun was there talking about JavaPicaOS, or something like that, but then again everyone was talking about their Java capability.
Allen |
