To: Peter Church who wrote (3353 ) 6/26/1998 6:52:00 PM From: Ronald Paul Respond to of 10309
Peter - Thanx for the update on the shareholders meeting. I wish I could have attended myself. Anyway, regarding your questions about the terminology, scalability usually refers to how adaptable the software is to the target requirements. That is, can the customer include only those components of WIND's RTOS product that make sense in the customer's widget. For example, if the widget doesn't need networking functionality, when the customer integrates the RTOS, then can the customer leave out all the networking modules. If the customer only needs the very basic essential OS features, this is usually referred to as the kernal, which must be included no matter what. So, knowing the footprint of various configurations including just the kernal usually play a key role in the decision making on the part of the customer. Also, as the product evolves, how extensible is the OS? Will it grow along with the growing needs of the target product? What if the customer's product can be made cheaper with a microprocessor from XYZ rather than ABC? In other words, is WIND's OS "portable" to the XYZ processor? This is what portability usually means. Deeply embedded vs embedded is almost the same question as hard vs soft realtime, but with the twist of whether a human interface is there or not. So, an RTOS may be necessary for the OS requirements of automobile subsystems in the engine of a car that the driver never interacts with directly. Just some thoughts off the top of my head.... Your questions about the terminology go to the heart of the perceived MSFT threat, IMO. MSFT readily admits that CE is not very scalable, portable, and is not applicable to deeply embedded systems. It makes sense to put CE into a toy PC, like some palmtop, but to control fuel injection systems makes no sense at all. MSFT is partnering with INTS to add to CE what VxWorks has and CE lacks, but will that make any sense? Will CE suddenly be "scalable"? Will it suddenly be "portable" to the vast number of processors that VxWorks supports? Many of WIND's customers require proven heavy duty host development environments running UNIX. Are MSFT toolsets supported under UNIX like Tornado? Do they expect current WIND customers to convert their current development environment over to a PC in order to run MSFT's Tornado look-alikes? I could go on, but I better stop here.... Cheers, Ronald