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

To: Daniel E. Willert who wrote (5993)	8/3/1999 9:33:00 PM
From: Benjamin Ostrom	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

MOT is a late comer to embedded aps IMO, and RTLINUX is a perceived quick fix for them. I think they are taking the existing LINUX RTOS base, which is FAR from complete in a Vxworks sense, and trying to make it theirs - not a bad idea. Basically, I think MOT is going after consulting and servicing of the low end embedded designers, newly out of college and startup companies. They'll get PR - LINUX is trendy, even if it doesn't mean much now. And RTLINUX is even a smaller subset of the buzz. TODAY, LINUX is created by and for the "roll your own" set engineers or students, both with a lot of time to kill and not a lot of QC concerns. I think that MOT hopes the freebie LINUX hobbiests work out the bugs and add some toolsets. TOMARROW, What I see LINUX becoming is kind of like what UNIX became when it was coopted by SUN, HP, MSFT, RedHat etc each having its own flavor. WIND is countering Linux and CE by seeding VxWorks with the new pricing and its grad program. For students, knowledge of VxWorks means a real job tomarrow (given WIND's predominate market share). And there is no reason why WIND couldn't coopt LINUX like MOT is trying to. It can port its VxWorks program to it, for instance, and set up its own consulting running VxWorks on LINUX. VxWorks engineers are NOT going to jump ship to increase time spent and product risk even for a "free" product (use cost benefit analysis). In fact, the whole open concept of LINUX runs counter to design specific, unique RTOS, whatever RTOS. Reliable toolsets are the key. Remember, WIND has lived its whole life in a market where I think I read on this board that 60 % is roll your own- in other words competing against a FREE product. You can't say that for the corporate networking market, which was not free per se. LINUX is more a threat to MSFT, HP and SUN. JMHO. What is WIND anyway? It's a collective of the leading minds in embedded software engineering, plus longstanding customer relationships. Their Wind River Direct announcement was spot on today. Sincerely, Ben