Wind really hasn't had any major product announcements in a long time, while INTS has released PRISM and MWAR has announced wins in the high visibility set-top box and java phone areas.
This statement is a little too loose and therefore misleading. MWAR's announced set-top box wins and the re-announcement of the Java phone win with Nortel are not product announcements. INTS first announced pRISM as a show-stopper at the September 1996 ESC, and has re-announced it periodically ever since.
WIND has announced major product advances with Tornado for EID, Tornado for DSP and Tornado for I2O. Obviously WIND is undertaking lots of product development consistent with the Navio technology purchase and its announced strategic relationship with Emultek.
I suspect the main point of your comment has to do with the relative number of announced design wins, not product announcements. A recent post from Mitch on the WIND TA thread reflects this same theme:
Thanks,mac. The MWAR release may be old news but the question remains--what does the Nortel/WIND alliance mean to WIND if OS9 has already been selected for Nortel handsets?
The real revenue (as far as royalties are concerned) lies in the handset,not the infrastructure. This causes me to question my "barrier to entry" understanding regarding RTOS's. Will Nortel use OS9 for handsets and VxWorks for infrastructure? Why would they do that?
I have more questions than answers and that makes me uncomfortable.
Mitch
All these statements reflect a misreading of the market dynamics being played out at Nortel, and what is going on with design win announcements. Nortel has not split its RTOS outsourcing along the lines of infrastructure and handsets. Indeed, WIND has handset wins at Nortel as well as, no doubt, many infrastructure wins. Obviously MWAR has had, and probably maintains, a perfectly fine relationship with at least one product development manager at Nortel. Since Nortel is a $15 billion company with tens of thousands of employees, this is not surprising. Over the years I would expect Nortel to outsource many design wins to the likes MWAR, INTS and other RTOS vendors.
However, Nortel will outsource a growing number of design wins to WIND because of their strategic relationship in which the skids for using VxWorks in products are greased. Most, but not all managers, in a large organization realize that staying in the mainstream of their company's chosen path for development is best for a long list of reasons.
WIND announced a strategic relationship with Nortel, having already banked a number of Nortel design wins, including handsets. MWAR re-announces a Nortel Java phone. How can the latter be seen as a weakening of the former, especially when the intent of MWAR's announcement is transparent?
If you are thinking that an announced design win in the hand is worth two in the strategic relationship bush, then we need to talk about press releases. WIND has Nortel design wins, but as a rule they are not announced unless they are considered material. As a $100 million company, a Java phone design win simply is not material in and of itself. A strategic relationship with a giant in telephony equipment is, and deserves a press release and positive acknowledgement by the market.
Remember when I reported last spring that WIND had over 100 design wins in over 30 divisions at HP? How many of these design wins were announced through press releases? Just one or two. I wonder how many additional, unannounced HP design wins WIND has today? Probably lots.
I suspect that most design wins fail in getting to market, and the ones that do have relatively short production lives. Individual design wins sound neat, but they rarely are worth nearly as much as perceived by impressionable investors. While this statement is true generally, it is true absolutely in the high-profile set-top box arena. No one yet has made enough money mucking around there to cover expenses, nor are they likely to anytime soon. Let Microsoft and Sun, and myriad other players duke it out trying to define and prove out what we mean by a set-top box and services to be provided through infrastructure. So far, WIND's genius has been in side-stepping this circus, while becoming the juggernaut of embedded systems by making money and dominating market segments that are viable today. By the time interactive/digital TV becomes a reality, the chances are excellent that WIND will be pulled into the fray through its strong customer base.
Allen |
