You are correct that WIND has a tremendous opportunity helping NCI develop the NC/OS, and time is of the essence, but I am much less concerned about the possibility that the NC/OS effort will not receive adequate resources from WIND than you appear to be. Here's why:
1. WIND management is keenly aware of the importance of NC/OS. Much was made of the opportunity during the last conference call - and it had to have been no minor feat to wrest the design win away from all other competition. In other words, the effort appears to have management's full attention.
2. While you worry that other, perhaps even more important, projects may cause WIND to divert its attention from NC/OS - and in principle this certainly could occur - WIND is perfectly situated to avoid this kind of misstep by dipping into their considerable war chest.
3. WIND has a impeccable record of investing exactly at the right time: They were first with networked additions to embedded systems; first with intricate real-time debugging in software a la WINDVIEW; first with an inclusive, open development environment with Tornado. They jumped all over I2O, assigning a team under the direction of Dave Wilner to flesh out the standard and develop IxWorks. As important, they were NOT first jumping on the Interactive TV (Digital TV, VOD, set-top box, etc.) bandwagon, saving themselves buckets in the process. Some things need to be approached like fine wine, taking time to make it right - and Digital TV is one of them. As investors, it is very easy to get overly excited and want our companies to jump on each fad of the month. Wise managers jump wisely.
4. NC is probably going to be a big deal. I think so. I believe WIND managers think so. Having said that, however, I also believe the window of opportunity is much larger than you seem to think. A proper NC/OS is a complex thing that will take time and money to get right enough that it can be the start of something truly big. To convince yourself this is true, check out IBM's amorphous San Francisco project along with Oracle's Network Computing Architecture. Once complete, a proper NC/OS will have no difficulty whatsoever displacing a temporary place-holder. Remember, the reason WIND was selected by NCI is to provide a number of important capabilities needed to be built on. Those capabilities will be needed desperately at some point, but not now. It is important that when the NC/OS becomes available - three months, six months, or however long it takes - that it contains many of the needed capabilities.
Allen |
