elon threat & royalties: kumar, if I may chip in my $0.02
imo your concerns get to the practical heart of companies promoting open, proprietary technology.
Many of Echelon's key patents that are licensed without fees or royalties, are those covering the ANSI adopted LonTalk Protocol, which is an open Std. Echelon's family of LonWorks products implement the Lontalk protocol, contain patented technology, and are not available freely. Earlier I raised a question re: qcom and their IPR wrt cdma. The point being that while cdma is an open std, qcom's patents over implementing the cdma protocol are so strong such that they prevent others from being able to implement cdma without stepping on qcom's IPR. These thoughts were echoed yesterday by Ruffian on the qcom thread....all the flavors of cdma, including this one still need the essential Qualcomm IP to turn it on... Message 13713933
I hope that no-one get's upset at my comparing the two. I understand that the two co's are in vastly different spaces wrt simian evolution , but consider for a second the following.
One aspect of gorilla power is their ability to control the technology's architecture. I believe they do this through their patented implementations of the Std, which is open. As cdma is synonymous with qcom, I think LonWorks will be synonymous with elon. In the absence of any legal claims so far, my thoughts/ hopes are that elon's IPR are so strong that it will be required to turn Lontalk on.They developed the std and the architecture to implement the std. They are years ahead in "Lon" product development and appear to have a huge lead over others in this respect. Whilst there is no guarantee that OEM's will use any of Echelon's LonWorks products, I believe that in implementing the LonTalk protocol, Echelon's products are without peer, as are qcom's asics in implementing cdma. Moore points out many reasons why companies like to buy from sector leaders, and these I believe will be applicable to Echelon should there be a tornado in LonWorld. This I imagine would prevent elon from becoming just a royalty play.
It may be interesting to watch developments wrt the LonMark Organization...since this may be where challenges to Elons proprietary control first come to light. I have not yet done extensive research on the Organization and the Certification process for new products. I understand from earlier posts, I think from Konabound that this is a source of some "power struggles" in the "Lon" community of developers. I've no doubt that as the company with the most to lose, that elon will endeavor to maintain control and will use whatever means necessary to do so.
As you say, time will tell..... if elon can maintain it's proprietary grip on the open LonTalk protocol through its family of LonWorks products. I imagine that qcom longs expect revenues from qcom's asics to be strong for yrs, since their products are the one's that will maximize the benefits of cdma in the forseeable future. It's true that qcom does earn ?royalties only? from some chipmakers, has tons of cash to pour into R&D, and elon is not yet profitable. Never-the-less, I believe that for the reasons outlined above, ie product development lead, that at least in the foreseeable future, as far as I can tell, Echelon?s proprietary products are in no danger of being made redundant.
I'm not sure that the parallels I've drawn are entirely appropriate, but I thought it may be interesting to look at another company in with open proprietary technology that's a little further down the road. Any comments on this analogy would be sincerely appreciated.
PS: does anyone know how to get rid of those pesky question marks which show up insead of apostrophe's or quotation marks. Never used to happen, but now it does? |
