"Harping" is too strong of a term.
If anyone dominates this thread and harps on the same subject over and over, it's you. You can prove that to yourself by invoking the SI search engine and typing "ubiquitous computing", or by counting the number of posts you've made to this thread.
Contrary to the assertion in your post, voice recognition is exactly the type of application where customized ASICs is most useful. The switching speed of a mylenated neuron in the human brain is 100,000 times slower than modern logic, yet it still recognizes speech much better than a Pentium with VCS software. Even your dog will recognize your voice as well as or better than a PC! The reason is that the brain of an animal uses massively parallel neural networks, which is a radically different architecture than uniprocessor computer like a Pentium. Custom ASICs have been developed to emulate this process and you can read about them in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. A small bibliography of old issues of the journal is at eeb.ele.tue.nl. VCS uses ASICs from NEC and Oki and you can read about them at voicecontrol.com and voicecontrol.com.
VCS also uses DSP daughterboards from Dialogic and other specialized hardware, including their own boards based on industry standard TI DSP chips rather than general purpose processors. A complete list is at voicecontrol.com. Even if you use a specialized VCS Antares DSP card, it will still only recognize 50-60 words. That's probably about as dumb as your dog, but it won't lick your face! The neural networks in your canine security system will recognize your face at no extra cost, but you'll have to buy another board from another vendor to accomplish the same task with your computer.
The reason Jerry Fiddler told Fortune magazine that he doesn't count on retaining his wealth is that history is filled with tech companies that failed to meet great inflated stock price expectations, even after retaining a respectable industry position. Wind River faces a multitude of competitive threats from many different directions to their ambition to become a billion dollar company and I'm sure he's doing his best to address them, but there's plenty of uncertainty.
I previously mentioned Xionics as an example of a company in the real-time software industry combining firmware and ASIC expertise to simultaneously develop hardware and software to improve time to market, but they're not alone. Wind River is pursuing yesterday's horizontal business model precisely when the pendulum is swinging the other way and they should be expanding vertically and getting more consulting gigs. Jerry Fiddler and Wind River need to get out of the studio, go out on a road trip, and get in touch with the groupies!
A lot of attention on this thread has been lavished on Microsoft, Integrated Systems, and Microware. These are all genuine threats, but if I was Jerry Fiddler, Mentor Graphics would be my biggest concern. Mentor has 5x the revenues of Wind River and less than half the market cap. While Wind River insiders have been consistently selling shares at less than the current price, Mentor insiders have been recently buying substantial amounts of stock.
Mentor recently announced that a major European supplier of telecom equipment, Alcatel, will use Mentor as their primary supplier of soft cores and they also set up a web site where designers can customize their own parameterized automated cores without consulting Mentor engineers. EE Times described Mentor's initiatives at techweb.cmp.com. They also announced that Microtec is moving across the street from the ASIC folks at biz.yahoo.com, so you can bet that VRTX will get some telecom design wins from the soft core customers. Mentor even has a codesign business unit that develops tools so that hardware and software can be developed in parallel. One of their products was co-developed with another Eurotelecom vendor, Nokia, and the details are at mentorg.com.
Meanwhile, Wind River is essentially performing pro bono work ($500K) for the government and astronomy hobbyists as a publicity stunt. Does Jerry Fiddler also donate his own time in free concerts for charitable causes in Golden Gate Park? Management sure is generous with your money! |
