Windows CE faces embedded challenge
news.com
By Stephanie Miles
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 12, 1999, 12:15 p.m. PT
Microsoft's Windows CE faces considerable hurdles in the operating system market
for consumer and industrial appliances, a new study has found, but Microsoft says
many of the findings of the study are already being addressed.
Co-sponsored by Microsoft, the new study covers the embedded operating system (OS)
market, an increasingly important market as computing devices such as digital TV set-top
boxes, dedicated home appliances, and industrial devices proliferate.
Unlike the desktop PC world, Microsoft is a challenger in the embedded operating system
market. Moreover, the market is a different creature compared to the high-profile
Windows-Intel personal computer OS market which Microsoft dominates: Embedded
software is often invisible to the user and, as a result, is relegated to a lesser status.
Thus far, Windows CE has made its mark mostly in the handheld and set-top box areas,
and is emerging as a player in point-of-sale and credit card systems and manufacturing
equipment. Microsoft competes in these markets with WinRiver's VxWorks and Integrated
Systems' pSOS.
But the absence of many of the factors that have led to Microsoft's overwhelming popularity
in the desktop world will create obstacles for Microsoft in the embedded operating system
market, according to the survey by market research firm Venture Development Corporation.
For one thing, Microsoft does not enjoy nearly the developer support it is used to in the PC
world. The study found that only 4 percent of embedded developers surveyed cited
extensive knowledge of the Win32 APIs.
"Not that many embedded developers are familiar with the APIs," said Pedro Zayas,
market analyst for embedded systems at VDC. "There's a lot of skepticism among
developers about Microsoft's ability to reduce the response time in Windows CE."
However, developers who write for the desktop version of Windows are already familiar with
the APIs used in developing for Windows CE, according to Microsoft.
"Embedded systems developers are used to whatever they've done that's proprietary, but
there aren't too many embedded developers out there," said Tony Barbagallo, group
product manager for Windows CE. Embedded systems developers currently number about
250,000, compared to 4.5 million desktop developers, according to Barbagallo, and these
developers "understand how to port Windows CE to their hardware."
Although Microsoft has benefited from the consistent Intel-based hardware platforms PC
makers have adopted, industrial manufacturers and other embedded operating system
developers favor more heterogeneous hardware, according to VDC's Zayas.
"In deeply embedded systems, such as anti-lock brake
systems or data collection terminals or military applications,
these environments do not require a tight integration between
desktop computers and embedded devices," he said.
For its part, Microsoft says it is not trying to achieve the
same dominance in the embedded market that it enjoys in
the desktop world. "There's enough technical differences in
this space that no one OS is going to have that kind of broad
reach," said Barbagallo.
But Microsoft must address technical shortcomings present in the current version of
Windows CE, such as poor real-time ability, both Zayas and Barbagallo say. "Windows
2.1 is not strictly ready for embedded development," Zayas said. Windows CE 3.0 does
address some of these shortcomings, with improved real-time performance.
Microsoft agrees that Windows CE is not necessarily a good fit for every embedded
market. "If you take the example of an antilock breaking system, they have 16-32K of
memory to work with," Barbagallo said, noting that the smallest version of Windows CE
takes up about 250K of memory. "Sheer simple physics says that we can't fit in that
application, and we're not trying to--the power of our OS is not to be that small." |
