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To: unclewest who wrote (19139)	3/1/2000 12:27:00 PM
From: the hube	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

i would like to know more about the competition. perhaps you could illuminate that?? is wind the clear winner or should we play a basket is what i am getting at. That is exactly the reason I picked the ISI acquisition as being as much a key for WIND as the Ericsson agreement was for QCOM last year. At this point, I see no other companies in a position to challenge WIND's dominance of the embedded systems industry. ISI was their most significant competition, and now they are part of WIND. WIND had 1000 design wins last quarter. No other company comes close. WIND has over 500 development partners. No other company comes close. WIND spent $50 million in R&D last year. No othger company comes close. The closest company to WIND is QNX, a privately held Canadian company. Based on WIND's claim that they spent more on R&D than any other company had in revenues, QNX is far behind. Microware (MWAR) is tiny and no real threat to WIND. MSFT does not currently have a RTOS, and WIND does not view them as being in direct competition--YET. IMO, the most serious threat to WIND would be for MSFT to buy QNX. With their resources, they would be an extremely formidable competitior. Linux has also been mentioned often as a competitor. With Wind's EST acquisition, they will now provide tools for Linux development. Because of its size, they do not feel that Linux will be suitable for most projects. I have a feeling that we may look back and see that we are in the midst of a tornado right now. In this industry, I think the appropriate measurement may well turn out to be design wins, which precede the royalty revenues. WIND is currently designed into so many things that have explosive growth ahead, that I see no way for them not to meet their publicly stated goal of $1 Billion of revenues within three years (Last year was around $310 million). John

To: unclewest who wrote (19139)	3/1/2000 2:19:00 PM
From: BDR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Re: ELON and WIND <<virtually every electrical device seems to be headed towards being micro processor controlled>> To the thread: I have been reading the postings here about ELON and WIND and I was wondering if someone could help me to understand the relationship, if any, between the two. As I understand them WIND provides an embedded operating system for controlling electronic devices and ELON software and sensors allow control of electrical devices at some distance. Are these complementary technologies? Competitive technologies? Or totally unrelated technologies? To my mind they both seem to be addressing some of the same problems but I never see the two mentioned together as either competitors or collaborators.

To: unclewest who wrote (19139)	3/1/2000 5:07:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

I've never mentioned this before that I can remember, but I've been watching Wind for several years now. Though revenue has been growing reasonably consistently, EPS has been extremely erratic. Witness: FY '97 EPS: $.29 FY '98 EPS: $.11 FY '99 EPS: $.61 Trailing EPS: $.53 I should give myself a good slap across the cheek for not determining the EPS excluding one-time events, especially considering how often I've advised people around here to do that. But even if excluding the one-time events does smooth out the EPS trends, there's a point that if there are so darned many one-time events throughout the life of a company, they should be considered regularly recurring events in and of themselves. Either way, the EPS for Wind has been unbelievably erratic. The timing of any investment I'd make would require tornado-like growth in revenue not yet seen and/or reason to believe that revenue consistently increasing at a faster rate will indeed drop down to EPS with a comensurate degree of consistency. --Mike Buckley