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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Erwin Sanders who wrote (1407)	11/10/1997 1:54:00 AM
From: Mike Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Hi Erwin, Regarding Window CE versus Wind River OS: I usually hop from job to job, and a couple years ago when I work for a medical instrumentation company, I have used Wind River OS. The OS was already selected when I got there, so I was not involved in the evaluation of different OS. I am not too picky about which OS to use as long it's robust, efficient, and provide good documentation, good library, and good debugging capability. I also need a good real time OS (RTOS), because of the nature of the product. A good RTOS will dispatch my tasks on time, is deterministic (i.e. timing doesn't vary from time to time or under heavy workload), does not crash, handle faults properly, blah blah blah, I don't recall all the criteria. Wind River RTOS meets all of my requirements and I am happy. Then comes Bill with his Windows CE. Microsoft is well known for thriving on mediocrity at the beginning of every product life cycle and slowly improving the product. Since Windows CE is an offspring of the not-so-robust Windows 95, I don't consider it as a reliable RTOS. But Windows CE has its strength derived from Windows 95: it got all those applications to run on it. If you buy a palmtop running Windows CE, you can run smaller versions of Word, Excel, etc. Home systems such as Web TV, security systems, digital cameras, etc. probably doesn't need a very robust RTOS. In fact, it doesn't need any OS at all, but Microsoft will make them dependent on Windows CE because then you would have all the development tools such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ to develop application. So I think Windows CE will succeed in the long run. Wind River will also co-survive because it serves different types of application. Wind's OS also works on more processors than just the Intel's ones. How can Wind's OS work with Sandisk's flash? Actually, it doesn't need anything to work with any flash, you just write a driver to interface with the flash you use. But to make it compatible with Windows, then you create an interface that makes the flash look like a disk drive such that you can store the data in files just like you do on a PC. In another word, you will make the flash "transparent" to the user. That's how Windows CE supports Sandisk's flash. Then if you keep the internal of Wind's OS but build a shell outside that makes it look like Windows CE desktop interface, then you have a robust RTOS that is compatible with Windows CE. If Wind River does that, it can beat Microsoft in the home electronics market. Windows NT is actually built from DEC VMS OS. The story was Microsoft stole the original designers of VMS from DEC to build Windows NT, and that's why Windows NT is more robust than Windows 95. The external interface of the next Windows'98 will look like Windows 95, but the internal code is Windows NT (or VMS). That's why the next Windows'98 will be also more robust than Windows'95. Hope this answers your questions. Mike.