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To: lkj who wrote (5063)	4/27/1999 12:18:00 PM
From: Ronald Paul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10309

IMO, Moore's Law has a lot to bear on WIND's strategy going into the Internet Appliance arena. Your question about WIND in CE space is a valid one. WIND is differentiated from CE primarily due to hard vs. soft realtime requirements. The question in my mind is what percentage of the internet appliance market will require the time critical demands on the OS going forward into the next 5 to 6 years? If we were able to freeze the price/performance of all CPU bandwidth and memory constraints to the current status quo, WIND would likely be quite successful for all internet-enabled appliances requiring hard OS's. But more importantly, does Moore's Law apply with regard to the memory and timing requirements of a hard OS? This is critical for the new CEO at WIND to determine quickly and set WIND's sights accordingly. One example of how Moore's Law put the squeeze on ironically broadsided Intel itself (Moore is co-founder of Intel) with the low-end m-processors last year. The sub-900 dollar PC of today is about 2x+ faster with 2x+ more memory than the 2000 dollar PC of 1.5 years ago (166 Mhz, 1Gig, 16Meg RAM systems sold for about 2000 bucks in the latter part of '97) The lowend is where the real growth is. This fact is not lost on other huge players such as HP. Their higher-end printer performance was always being eclipsed with its (and competitor's) lower-end printers usually about 6 to 12 months after intro. HP needed to establish Apollo in order to bring the cost infrastructure in place to go after the sub-100 dollar printer market. Again, this is where the only substantial growth is occurring in the printer arena. The caution for WIND is that Moore's Law may very well blur the differentiation that WIND needs to compete in the same arena as CE. WIND needs to identify the vertical apps that will likely need hard OS's regardless. Presumably, these apps will be more niche in nature and furthermore should be off of the MSFT-monster's radar screen. Will these market niches be enough to sustain the type of growth that WIND has always enjoyed? I don't know. Like Ron Abelman mentioned, the new CEO needs to be more internet savvy. Im my mind, this means 2 things. First, identifying the best candidates that will benefit from becoming web,or internet enabled and secondly, identifying which subset plays to WIND's strong suit. There is definitely lots of brain power on this thread at SI. Let's hear your thoughts. TIA, Ronald