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

To: James Connolly who wrote (7814)	5/24/2000 10:25:00 PM
From: Anthony Ettipio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Another post from Ning on gratis-wind . . . Peter, There is nothing wrong with using VxWorks for cable modems, switches and many of today's common networking equipment. The advantages of QNX will not be apparent until you start building carrier-class equipment with high scalability, fault tolerance, hot-pluggable interfaces and many other features unnecessary for today's typical network equipment. Anyone who have managed today's typical network equipment knows the routine: When you have problems with the box, you turn off the power, wait for a few seconds and turn the power back on. When you need to make changes to the configurations, such as adding a new interface, you enter the new configuration parameters and write them to the flash memory and reboot (power off, wait for a few seconds and turn the power back on). When something is wrong and you don't know the reason, you reboot... Most of today's RTOS are designed with this kind of use in mind. There is no provision for graceful shutdown of drivers or applications. This kind of behavior is unacceptable for carrier-class equipment. With the convergence of voice and data network, you need equipment that is as reliable and manageable as today's telephone equipment and as rich and efficient as today's network equipment. We are still in the early development phase of this new class of network equipment. It takes a company with long-term vision and resources, like Cisco, to start a parallel development of next generation products while continuing the development of current generation products to meet today's needs. So it's not a contradiction for Cisco to quietly work on the next generation IOS while shipping the current products with IOS and VxWorks. It's also necessary for Cisco to hire engineers with VxWorks skills. It is against the nature of venture-funded startups to work on projects without short-term payoffs. There is nothing wrong with short-sightedness. Perhaps I should have used the words that have the same meaning as short-sightedness but without negative connotations. How about "near-term focused", or as Peter suggested "time-to-market oriented?" A side note: I am not bearish on WIND. I have over 10% of my portfolio in WIND. As you all know, the next version will have some of the advanced features I mentioned. Furthermore, having better products doesn't always translate into a commercial success. WIND has been competing with QNX for years and have been doing well. WIND should do well even without being the standard OS for Cisco. Ning