Ok. My turn, and an alternative take on the positioning of JENE and the ability of Insignia.
Insignia has been delivering SoftWindows for 10 years, but they haven't been a raging success, the most likely reason being Microsoft. Microsoft have no interest in letting anyone other than themselves benefit from selling a Windows platform. Microsoft even own the SoftWindows trademark, and Insignia licenses it from them. They almost busted Citrix once last year, playing hard-ball during contract negotiations. Citrix went from $50 to $10 and back to $50 in two weeks. quote.yahoo.com. A wild ride. And I don't think it's over, since NT2000 or whatever they're calling it this week is going to contain most of the Citrix added value technology (anybody who remembers Stack Electronics and their Stacker product will know what that portends).
Right about that time, Insignia was in deep doo-doo, because SoftWindows just wasn't selling. quote.yahoo.com. Citrix had the cash, and purchased NTRigue at fire-sale prices (IMO NTrigue was a fantastic product, but the execution was not there on Insignia's part to cash in properly, and they weren't able to negotiate anything directly with Microsoft, since they were at the end of the Citrix food-chain).
So, Insignia decided enough with emulating the 386 (a piece of hardware) and being whacked around by Microsoft, let's emulate the Java Virtual Machine. On the face of it, a sensible idea, since most current JVM's are software. One year later, voila! The questions are: can they execute, will Sun help them, will someone else crush them?
Basically, my opinion is that their biggest threat is JVM hardware, because that would beat any speed advantage JENE has. But the leader in that area isn't doing too well either. (http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=ptsc&d=5y), and Sun appears to have given up with hardware JVM's, so maybe that threat isn't real.
The second biggest threat is HP. They already have a fully compliant JVM for embedded systems, but they cleanroom engineered it (as did Insignia apparently) so that they wouldn't have to owe Sun royalties. The question there is, can HP keep up with Sun, as Sun drives the definition of what constitutes compliant Java. Hmmm. Ever used HP-UX?
Insignia failed to keep up with Microsoft, but that's doesn't mean that Insignia will fail to keep up with Sun, indeed Sun will probably help them. It would help if Insignias JENE ran on SPARC hardware, which is how Sun makes its real money. So far it seems they are not targetting SPARC (http://www.insignia.com/embedded/white_paper.html), and are targetting Intel x86, MIPS, ARM, and Hitachi SH. So how much does Sun help them? Hmmm.
There are no hard answers, only hard questions. This is not investment advice.
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