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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Benjamin Ostrom who wrote (5456)	6/12/1999 1:31:00 PM
From: James Connolly	Respond to of 10309

"Others, like 3COM, even the telcoms/cable and perhaps Intel, will not want the wireless & network communications to small home devices to fall to MSFT . Look at is as a center point around which an alliance could be built". Benjamin, I think you have hit the nail on the head. Its looks as if MSFT could be a threat to WIND in certain area of the embedded market. Given time, persistence and the vast resources available to MSFT of course they could come up with a decent product and support for their OS. However WIND has two things in its favor. 1. Microsoft's business model. Have a read of this EE times article exchange2000.com "I don't think it [CE] has had nearly as big an effect as we thought it might," said Jerry Fiddler, chairman of Wind River Systems. "In terms of the real-time release, Microsoft has a number of weaknesses. One of them is product. They'll work to improve that; that's not surprising. But they've also got real issues with the business model: What do they sell it for? What resources does it require? "The reality is that today, if you put Windows CE in your product, you have to raise the price of your product a lot," Fiddler continued. "That's not only because of the royalties Microsoft charges, but also because of the resources that are required. You need a bigger computer and you need more memory." 2. Because of windows CE, WIND has gained many new allies (Liberate, AOL, Sun, Cisco and Oracle). For example, It's a known fact that Sun's Java has had more design wins with VxWorks than with all the competing OSes put together. This includes Sun's own Chorus-based JavaOS. MSFT's entry into the appliance and set-top market has forced MSFT's enemies to rally around an alternative. Anyone who has been following the MSFT trail will know that IBM is no friend of MSFT. Therefore IBM is also a potential ally of WIND. As far as WIND is concerned its a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". MSFT has many of enemies so it follows that WIND has many allies, both now and down the road. Were it not for CE this would not be the case. It's also worth noting that this shift toward WIND could spell bad news for WIND's tradition RTOS competitors. Regards JC. PS. Just incase I am wrong about this, there's always I2O !!! exchange2000.com