carolyn, thanks for the reply. no, i didn't listen to or read wind's conference call. it is seldom that useful of a tool, as management will not say anything unexpected (and if they do, it'll be immediately reflected in the stock price). i have ordered the investor kit from wind, though, so i'll pore thru their reports and stuff.
about tornado taking 40,000 work years to launch, that number sounds kind of suspect, but of course there are many ways to draw a border around what "producing" a piece of software means. if we use a lowball figure of $50,000 as the cost of a work year (salary plus employee costs plus capital costs plus incidentals), that means that tornado cost 2,000,000,000 (two billion) dollars to produce. no matter what cost we use for a work year, we are talking about something on the order of 10^9 dollars... that's a thousand million dollars... i hope for wind's sake that it didn't really cost them that much to launch a product. what if microsoft can do it for a piddling hundred million dollars (twenty times cheaper)?
another way to scrutinize your figure. wind currently has 382 employees. assume that it has always had 382 employees (it has actually had fewer in the past). assume that every single one of them, from the ceo to the phone receptionist to the tech support, is putting 100% of their time into launching tornado. then it would have taken the entire corporation over 100 years to develop the product. use a more realistic figure of 10% of the staff developing software, and it would have taken wind river a full millenium to launch the product. gotta watch that time-to-market...
> WIND does not make bets on winning technology -
> they play all sides
even the microsoft side?
careful investing-
kas1 |
