Wind certainly has a niche, but this biz is drawing a crowd
Allen:
As always I continue to enjoy reading your take on this business.
Let me respond to several of the points you've made.
You are probably right - there will not be a single direct hit on the Wind River franchise. It might be that Wind faces a fight with the possibility of bleeding to death from a thousand small cuts. You must agree that this *embedded* business is certainly getting more crowded.
The key question might be how do we define the business that Wind River is in. Is Wind River competing in the embedded software business or in the realtime operating system business? If you define their business as the RTOS business - then no question they have a solid position. However, when you look at it in terms of competing in the embedded business we now see several large companies selling embedded tools that are based on *industry standards* Sun/Motorolo with JavaOS and Microsoft with Win32 based solutions. Wind River looks like it is getting surrounded.
Regarding standards you said:
>Finally, it (VxWorks) is the defacto standard for embedded systems, so anyone you hire will be familiar with it, ready immediately to be productive.
I suggest anyone who wants to see what the software industry standards are go to the large online bookstore at Amazon Books (http://www.amazon.com) and do a subject or title search on Java, Win32 and (VxWorks, or Tornado, or WindRiver).
If you are a young smart programmer just comming out of college and you decide to hack(write) some embedded code. What tools will you use? You can get (from a thousand different resellers) the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler with Integrated Development Environment plus the Windows CE kit all for under $700.
If you want to work with Java you can get Microsoft Visual 32-bit J++ for $89 or Symantec Cafe for $75 (again from several thousand different resellers).
The price and availablity for the Wind River/Tornado/VxWorks Starter Kit is ?
What tools and programming standards will young software engineers and programmers be using? What operating system and API will they be using on their desktop? I think it will be Windows & Win32. Where will young, eager, and experienced Tornado/VxWorks programmers come from? I do not know.
When you start developing embedded systems "time to market" is now a major consideration. If you can get a proto-type up and running in a few days with Windows and/or Windows CE this is another reason to jump on the bandwagon. Fooling around and building proto-types with VxWorks/Tornado doesn't seem to be something your average undergraduate is doing.
Regarding Java you said:
>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.
If you look at Sun's strategy they are using a shotgun approach to selling Java. They are licensing it to everyone. Even Wind bought in and licensed it to run on top of VxWorks. So I guess even Wind wanted to hedge their bets with regard to Java. If you review the history of Java you'll see that it was first developed at Sun as an embedded only tool. It then came out of the lab and caught on as a networking tool. I guess you could say its going back to its roots. Sun and several other companies are also working on "Realtime"
Java. I'm sure they'll have a bit of a problem living up to that designation. But talk about momentum.
Regarding Microsoft at ESC you said:
>David, please find something that really knocks us over. I went to the ESC in Boston, and Microsoft was a real disappointment.
You're right. They were pretty lame at this show. Their keynote speaker was not very dynamic either. But I did note that he had worked at Ready Systems (VRTX) now part of Mentor back in the early days. So he's a RTOS/embedded guy from way back.
As always it was a pleasure getting your views on this business.
Cheers,
Dave |
