RE: CE is starting slow like NT did but before long it will be everywhere.
I will not say that CE will not be everywhere before long, but the odds are stacked against it. There is certainly a market for CE. Howeger, the hand held market is tough, and US robotics is the only truly successful player ever. The major selling point of the Palm Pilot is not what it does but what it does not do. All previous attempts (and Windows CE) are too complex and cumbersome for simple the job that they are supposed to do.
NT was a given with the enterprise PC OS hole. OS/2 could have filled that hole, but it was too little too late, and IBM marketed it very poorly. NT provided a low-cost robust operating system that provided excellent backwards compatibility with Windows and DOS. Hence, with MSFT's $$ NT was certain to reach critical mass. Windows CE does not have such an open market. And history has shown that even MSFT has limits in how much it can drive certain markets, and they have not shown great vision in the hand held market (unlike US Robotics).
CE faces stiff competition from the Pilot, and from the up and coming Java based hand helds. I bet it gets relegated to a niche market of business based handhelds (i.e. UPS, Fed Ex, etc.).
As a side, BORL already compiles for NT. There is no market for CE yet. I think that they are rightly focusing on the enterprise. Spending precious development $$ (and precious engineering talent) on CE when there is not a big demand from the enterprise would be foolish. |
