WIND
So the incentives to use vxworks are that it's robust and a lot of embedded systems designers are familiar with it, and maybe some big companies will standardize on it. I'm not sure that would qualify it to have a gorilla-like lock on its market. Maybe I've missed a key point?
I think that there is more to it than that. Take the Intel IXP communications processor. The day it was announced, WIND announced that VxWorks had been ported to it. wrs.com For that to happen, WIND and Intel had to have been working behind the scenes for quite a while. If you were a vendor, would you use the off the shelf solution, along with all of the supporting development tools from Wind and all of the other vendors that support the Tornado environment, or would you start from scratch, and adapt one of your in house systems to it while your competitors were bringing products to market? Or would you wait for one of Wind's competitors to port their system to it?
Now take IP telephony. If you are a start up, trying to get your phone to market ahead of anyone else, would you start from scratch, or would you use the ready made Lucent/Wind River/Trillium solution, where you could add a couple of features and buttons, stick your name on it, and begin selling?
Most of the new start up companies do not have a legacy of writing their own programs. For them, the choice is which commercial RTOS to use. Remember, the leader works on the largest number of processors, gets ported to the new processors first(most of the time they get paid for it), has third party developers writing for it first, has the largest talent pool that knows how to use the system, etc.
You are correct that the end users don't care which RTOS is inside the product. They are buying a digital camera, for example. They are comparing Kodak vs. Minolta vs. Canon, etc. They probably don't even know the thing has an operating system inside. If they do know, it probably means as much to them as the manufacturer of the plastic housing. So why should Kodak use VxWorks? (they do). My guess is that it makes it easier for them to develop the features that a camera buyer DOES care about. Things like being able to easily sort and discard pictures, transfer them to a usable format, easily transfer them to a printer. Since VxWorks is also the most common operating system for printers, it is logical to thing of some type of wired or wireless hookup where you could point your camera at your printer, push a button, and have the picture printed. Why would Kodak want to spend time and money on the operating system, which nobody cares about, when they could develop great new features that people do care about?
I don't think that it is just some big companies that will standardize on VxWorks; I think it will be entire industries. In fact, my feeling is that the large companies will probably be the last to standardize on it, because they have the most invested in the status quo. |
