>Does the new Motorola RTEK operating system kernel compete with Tornado?
Not earnestly. You need to understand the dynamics of the marketplace to appreciate Motorola actions.
Motorola has one objective in the embedded systems market: to sell hardware (chips). The company has no intention of becoming a software company and thereby compete with independent software vendors that help peddle its chips. This is the equivalent of Intel producing a special desktop OS that competes with Windows. Unthinkable today, but probably not out of the question in the mid-1980s. Note that in the same article you cited in which the RTOS is pushed, Motorola also said, "Many independent tool suppliers also support the 68HC16 family."
On the other hand, Motorola would like nothing more than for some customers to choose to develop applications not only using its chips, but also using its tailored software. How better to lock in a customer than to induce a commitment to a proprietary development environment? Customers na‹ve enough to fall into this trap may find themselves slavishly using a family of processor chips for reasons beyond performance specifications and cost, and may well become continually dependent on Motorola for both hardware and software.
For this reason, and other bureaucratic inanities, most hardware companies have a version of an RTOS. Hitachi does, IBM does, HP does, DEC does, Intel did (a short while ago Intel dumped iRMX, its internal RTOS.), Sun does, and Motorola does. All these companies are perfectly willing to sell na‹ve customers a processor-specific RTOS, even though they rarely use them on for their own embedded projects. I would even be willing to bet that the organization element responsible for developing and maintaining such an RTOS actually believes they have a reason to exist, and no doubt see themselves as being competitive with commercial vendors.
A better strategy for Motorola is to guarantee that leading software always is available on its newest chips, and pointedly not entice customers toward anything proprietary. Just as server and desktop customers have experienced the pitfalls of straying out of the mainstream, so too will embedded systems developers that loose sight of the imperative of open systems. These forces already are so momentous and universal in all aspects of technology that announcements of proprietary undertakings like Motorola's can be ignored.
Allen |
