I am happy to give you my interpretation of WIND's release announcement of Tornado 1.0.1.
Remember David's barrage of anecdotal examples of bugs in Tornado, with the suggestion that it was of questionable quality? My retort at the time was that bugs were a natural consequence of developing sophisticated systems. Neither WIND nor their customers like them, but bugs are a fact of life, and usually get fixed in later releases. Well welcome to the bug fixes.
Usually, RTOS vendors announce a release, but are unprepared to ship it immediately for more than one or two processors, and maybe for only one development environment. Even then a customer may have to wait for other add-ons to be upgraded. Over time the list of supported platforms and products gradually increases. Not so with Tornado 1.0.1. Tornado 1.0.1 is a full release, encompassing all development hosts (Windows NT, 95 and Unix), all supported processors (too many to list), and all products (Xsim, WindView, VxWorks, etc, support libraries, and probably most 3rd party add-ons).
Actually, there is much more to the statement that everything is shipping at once than what first meets the eye. The subtle message is that WIND engineers have abstracted their products sufficiently to enable them to deliver immediately across all platforms. This is extremely suggestive that WIND engineers are taking software development to a higher level, and bodes well for future product development. One would expect that ordinary developers would eventually get at least somewhat bogged down by all the platforms and products needed to be supported in the embedded systems space. Whether or not this is understood fully by all WIND investors, you can believe that WIND's competitors interpret it precisely this way, and shiver at the thought.
I'm sure you noticed the quote: "The embedded systems market is growing very rapidly and we are taking market share."
Translated, this says: (1) the embedded systems market is not hitting any kind of hiatus, or pause, for WIND, and (2) WIND is increasing its share of this increasing market - at the expense of INTS, MWAR and others. Simple arithmetic dictates that an increasing share of an increasing market makes for wonderful revenue and earnings growth.
Just in case the import of compound growth escaped you, there is the non-so-subtle quote: ".WIND.to sail through the $100 million revenue mark". WIND has no intention of merely reaching the $100 million mark, a reasonable goal for most $65 million companies. WIND is going to blow past $100 en route to much loftier heights.
Allen |
