First, as a regular lurker for years, thanks to all the thoughtful posters on this thread for your helpful contribution to my understanding of WIND.
As a long-term (5 years or so) "long", I continue to see WIND as a well-managed company willing to reinvent itself in response to the competitive landscape. From an RTOS and tools vendor, the company has rolled out an impressive array of new products and services and other initiatives which create a diversification of my investment, while still sticking to their "knitting". I'm referring to developments like formalization of the Professional Services a few years back, launching of Centers of Excellence with key chip-makers, building industry-specific vertical products (TMS, TIA, TINA...), offering board-level packages, repricing of tools to allow affordable entry into the WIND developer community while maintain high margins on other products, opening their tools for use with all (i.e. non-WIND) OS's, adding additional OS's to their stable of in-house offerings, all the while acquiring talent, customers and critical technology by acquisition, including buying out their largest competitor.
This is a company which not long ago (1997?) had about $60M in annual revenues, and now shows almost $500M in revenues over the past 12 months. It was a tiny company when I bought it, and now it's much more substantial, which I see as a further reduction of risk to my investment (along with diversified offerings). WIND is now routinely referred to as the gorilla in the embedded space, even by those critical of the company.
Now WIND announces layoffs and reduces expectations in the face of a difficult across-the-board downturn in the market. But they do it with style, throwing in reductions in executive compensation as well. This is again a healthy response to an unfortunately tough situation.
Would I like to see significantly higher revenues, earnings, and stock price? Yes; and I'll be on board til they arrive. I plan to sell a little at $65 next time I have the chance. And again at $100 and beyond....
Mac, in response to your question about competitors, I see Microsoft not likely to let go of their pursuit of at least some segments (e.g. PDA, STB, dashboard) of the embedded market, but while they have unparalleled market clout and cash hoard, I don't envision them able to monopolize these markets as with the desktop. Other players are likely to continue to maintain or gain position in various specific markets, but I don't see any other *diversified* embedded software player posing a significant threat, IMHO. Linux, up against VxWorks, maybe in some areas, but without any comparable IDE like Tornado. Packages to compete with TMS, TIA, etc? Probably in the future, if not already. But WIND is at an appropriate level of niche focus coupled with diversified offerings to do extremely, and predictably, well over time.
All the best,
-David |
