On the MSFT/WinCE question:
I'd agree with David L. and others that WinCE is not now a serious threat to WIND in the (truly) embedded systems market, i.e. those systems without user interface. However, MSFT clearly envisions a burgeoning market for low-end devices of many kinds and in a variety of applications which will use some UI (e.g. Pilot, Sharp Wizards, etc.). And there are also the hybrid applications, sort of embedded, of which I can imagine a few, and I'm sure MSFT can imagine more, such as the car computer, providing anything from navigation to fuel efficiency info; vending machines (to put a new spin on that example) which may in the future find themselves with UI panels for user selection/advertising; and manufacturing applications for human monitoring of factory floor automation.
To play devil's advocate, with the hopes of getting my thoughts put in proper perspective by responses from others on this thread (I'm heavily long on WIND, long-term) Windows UI had very substantial visibility at the Embedded Systems East Conference, and while unit numbers are likely to be orders of magnitude lower than for truly embedded systems, (not truly) "embedded Windows" is still a significant, growing market.
MSFT may have decided to bypass the truly embedded market for now because their leverage, especially the ubiquitousness of the Windows interface, is not great in that market, and because Windows technology is not optimized for the small-code, high-reliability criteria which that market segment requires. If they were to get into the truly embedded market, I'd expect them to do so by buying some company or technology that provides realtime extensions to Windows, maybe along the lines of the VenturCom product. They'd then probably offer those extensions along with a very stripped down Windows, probably a new flavor of WinCE. They'd still be up against strong competition, especially WIND's VxWorks (with a better reputation in deterministic RTOS) and WIND's Windows offerings, such as WillowsRT.
To summarize, it seems that we've got to talk about the market in smaller segments, namely truly-embedded vs embedded-with-UI. Doing so points to the strong position WIND has in the larger volume truly-embedded segment, and the competition it faces in the embedded-with-UI segment, from MSFT and others. Though WIND is not without some strong cards to play in that area as well.
David Schoenbach |
