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

To: Mike Milde who wrote (4809)	4/8/1999 4:40:00 PM
From: stan s.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

They did mention the number of people working to finish in time for the April 22 shipment? Was it 80 or 90? It could take time away from other projects...BUT in the deal they are getting some Xact employees. That should help them catch up. My feeling was that WIND wanted to say that the succeeding qtr. would be better by the amount lost in this qtr. but their conservative nature kept them from going out on a limb. Apparently rightly so, look at the lesson just learned. Did anyone else notice the failure to slam the door shut on the question as to why MSFT doesn't just buy them outright? They chuckled a little but...I found the response interesting.

To: Mike Milde who wrote (4809)	4/12/1999 2:05:00 PM
From: Ronald Paul	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

Mike, You are right. Mine was a somewhat oversimplication of the problem. I don't explain myself very well sometimes. I was thinking of two things that lead me to believe business is lost. In this case where the bottleneck occurred with a 3rd party being late, whether this product rollout will be incremental to the expected next quarter earnings is a valid question, however. The way I was thinking was in the first case, one real risk that WIND may suffer with shipping late to customers would be reduced revenue, or lose business because WIND signs per-product-sold-by-the-customer royalty agreements. When the customer must delay, the customer may experience reduced overall sales - reducing WIND's royalties. The other part of my thoughts was simply my experience. I work in embedded systems where efforts implemented to streamline development, always run into the irritating issue of fixed employee bandwidth. I can't start the next project until the current one is done. We do what we can both collectively in the organization and individually to mitigate this issue. We have experience working with RTOS vendors, WIND being one of them. When we codevelop with these RTOS vendors, it has also been our experience that they suffer the same "fixed bandwidth" schedule conflicts that we do, sometimes putting our product intros at risk. In our case, it is recognized that everyday our products slips intro, a quantifiable and ascertainable amount of $$$s are simply lost. Many companies, like mine, deals in products with a ever-narrowing "shelflife." A small season-based intro window is often necessary to make sure the product makes $$$ for the company. Like in a supermarket, the goods can start to get stale or rot. Internally, our own vintage chart of product-offerings usually eclispes older products. Managing the vintage chart is scary sometimes. The schedule of the various product-mixes to fill all the market gaps without creating inventory nightmares, product availability, supply chain, advertising, and obscelescence issues, to mention a few, is a very tricky job. Anyway, I hope I didn't confuse readers and I hope this helped a bit Mike. Cheers, Ronald