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

To: carolyn walder who wrote (2818)	3/1/1998 10:59:00 PM
From: kas1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

carolyn, thanks for the reply. no, i didn't listen to or read wind's conference call. it is seldom that useful of a tool, as management will not say anything unexpected (and if they do, it'll be immediately reflected in the stock price). i have ordered the investor kit from wind, though, so i'll pore thru their reports and stuff. about tornado taking 40,000 work years to launch, that number sounds kind of suspect, but of course there are many ways to draw a border around what "producing" a piece of software means. if we use a lowball figure of $50,000 as the cost of a work year (salary plus employee costs plus capital costs plus incidentals), that means that tornado cost 2,000,000,000 (two billion) dollars to produce. no matter what cost we use for a work year, we are talking about something on the order of 10^9 dollars... that's a thousand million dollars... i hope for wind's sake that it didn't really cost them that much to launch a product. what if microsoft can do it for a piddling hundred million dollars (twenty times cheaper)? another way to scrutinize your figure. wind currently has 382 employees. assume that it has always had 382 employees (it has actually had fewer in the past). assume that every single one of them, from the ceo to the phone receptionist to the tech support, is putting 100% of their time into launching tornado. then it would have taken the entire corporation over 100 years to develop the product. use a more realistic figure of 10% of the staff developing software, and it would have taken wind river a full millenium to launch the product. gotta watch that time-to-market... > WIND does not make bets on winning technology - > they play all sides even the microsoft side? careful investing- kas1

To: carolyn walder who wrote (2818)	3/1/1998 11:20:00 PM
From: mac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

>correct me if I am wrong, but didn't RON say that they put 40,000 >man years into Tornado before its launch?) 40 man years :) mac

To: carolyn walder who wrote (2818)	3/1/1998 11:21:00 PM
From: Jason Cogan	Respond to of 10309

Carolyn: Your analysis of WIND's core business and need for a hard RTOS is right on. As you indicated, I believe the recent licensing of Navio technology was done as a means of challenging Microsoft and others in the set-top space, rather than the other way around. The core needs for a hard RTOS are inumerable, but certainly include military, routing (telecom), and i2O (embedded routing). For Mark and other doubters, keep in mind that Microsoft does not currently have a hard RTOS, and from the conference call, WIND management does not regard CE as ready for that space. In addition, Microsoft has some other obvious disadvantages to WIND, many of which I indicated on an earlier post. Among them: 1. Lack of a complete tool kit, such as Tornado, that makes development of applications easy and standardized. What's more, Tornado is the industry leading standard for third-party tools and other functionality not captured under the existing framework. 2. Increasing installed base of users familiar with Tornado. 3. Widest number of processors supported, which is key to the embedded systems space. No two applications are exactly alike, and thus require a multitude of different processors. 4. Wind is not Microsoft. This presents a tremendous advantage to many of the potential customers, such as Sun, who would rather deal with ANYONE than cede the embedded space to Microsoft. Of course, there are many other manifestations of WIND's market leadership in this area. The biggest drawback to growth continues to be the insistence on "roll your own" applications in certain sectors, such as in the automotive and wireless industries. But as time to market demands constantly increase, the needs to standardize around a common tool kit become all the more powerful. Ask yourself. You could program your own operating system on a PC, rather than buy one from Microsoft. But how efficient is that? The same logic should be even more powerful in the embedded space. Regards, Jason Cogan