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To: Carpe per Diem who wrote (9576)	5/6/2001 2:52:11 PM
From: lkj	Respond to of 10309

Hi Rinks, If you follow my logic, you will see that WRS has to lower its royalty rate significantly as volume increases significantly. Otherwise, the high cost will keep its customers looking for alternatives. "and those who want to differentiate their products will not choose WRS' software." WRS is trying to be a solutions company. In its tornado products, WRS (along with the chip makers) are trying to standardize many of the products. This leads to a very short time-to-market. At the same time, it offers limited differentiation, because so much of the solution comes from WRS. This business model is very good for products with very short life cycle, and that the next generation product requires significant software change. In the case of a printer, the technology is not changing much from a software standpoint, which leads HP to choose an alternative to VxWorks. Those who want to differentiate their product also want the most control of their product, and in most cases, they have great technical strength. Take Qualcomm as an example, it has chosen to develop its own OS. For a long time, I hated the performance and the user experience of the Qulcomm OS. Year after year, instead of dumping it, Qualcomm has been making it more and more significant. Qualcomm's latest plan is to offer a wireless platform called BREW. In sticking to its own OS, Qualcomm has the total control of BREW, and more significantly, BREW doesn't cost any extra to the handset ASIC. PRICE IS A BIG DIFFERENTIATION. For a $20 chip, $0.5 is enough for someone to choose an alternative. if I'm a product manager and I want to differentiate my offering vis-a-vis my competitors'...what RTOS would you then propose to me and why? There are a lot of things to consider. The obvious ones are time to market, in house technical capability, product roadmap, pricing strategy, marketing strategy, competition evaluation, product life cycle, volume, product complexity, CPU selection, and the evaluation of the various operating systems. The sad thing is that a lot of time, egos and people's relationships determine what technologies are selected. Regards, Khan