News About An Embedded OS Evaluation Survey

C

curt wuollet

No surprises there, except that Microsoft still has a market share. Eventually, this will begin to impact our backwater industry. If the Big Automation folks have any clue or acumen, I'm sure their MS licenses are free after spiffs at this point. When they begin to realize how much money and grief they could save on the workstation side by stepping off the MS hamster wheel, things will begin to change rapidly. The last few gyrations have had to be extremely costly in a down market and that will overcome a lot of golf outings and FUD spreading. It seems to be, that some had the prescience to skip the whole Vista thing and are not racing towards W7. And even the vast MS marketing war chest has to be showing signs of depletion. Who knows, people buying new automation gear could be running Linux and never even know it.

Regards,
cww
 
Yes, MS still sells CE in the "embedded market", although they seem (according to the survey) to be at the bottom so far as market share is concerned. It was never really that popular to begin with though.

The thing to keep in mind about this is that that MS Win CE really a secondary product, and the mainline version of it is MS Windows Mobile which is used on some mobile phones. However, their market share there has been collapsing in recent years and they were never very secure in that market to begin with. A lot of people seem to think that unless Microsoft can pull a rabbit out of the hat with MS Windows Mobile version 7 (due some time late this year or early next), then Windows Mobile may end up completely dead. Their existing major OEM customers have all be falling over themselves to announce lots of new Android devices, but very little in the way of new WM stuff.

If Windows Mobile dies, then there doesn't seem to be much likelihood that Microsoft will continue to support WinCE. They might keep it on life support for the duration of their existing OEM contracts, but there just wouldn't be enough market share to support further development.

The other embedded OS that is looking like it's on shaky ground is VxWorks. It is pretty popular at the moment, but a lot of OEM users are very nervous about it having been bought by Intel. Not everyone has swallowed the Intel marketing about the Atom, and a lot of ARM and MIPS users are more than a little concerned that Intel will strangle VxWorks support on anything except Atom (for policy reasons, or simply due to lack of incentive).

So I'm won't at all be surprised if the embedded OS market shakes down into fewer choices.

What I found really interesting about the survey was the answer to what business factors OEMs found important when evaluating embedded OSes. "Backing by a major vendor" came in dead last in importance. It wasn't what I expected, but it no doubt makes sense in the context of the overall market where vendors come and go and change business strategies with the fashions of the stock market.
 
C

curt wuollet

The vendor support is far more important when everyone is running the same application. Especially shrinkwrap stuff where you can't possibly know the answers.

In embedded, I'm sure that questions the vendor can answer are a small fraction of the issues with _your_ application and _your_ code. Just explaining it and getting the vendor to understand your code would probably take longer than just fixing it. That is to say, a good OS is seldom the cause of problems, because you write to it. That, and if you have to hang on the phone to the vendors, you probably won't be in embedded development very long.

Regards,
cww
 
D

Dave Ferguson

Ah welcome to another year of Microsoft bashing. Yet I still seam to
be "plodding" along with too much to do, automating more and more on
these horrible evil machines. Happy 2010 to all, maybe the world will
end in 2012 I will wait to switch until then.

Dave Ferguson
Control Systems Engineer
 
In reply to Bill Sturm: QNX is mentioned in the third paragraph. "Unsurprising perhaps is the dominance of Linux in this space. (...) Second in line are commercial operating systems such as VxWorks, Microware OS9 and QNX, followed by other open source operating systems and (finally) Windows Embedded." (The other data by the way makes clear that Windows Embedded also includes WinCE.)

Usually when market share data is published in the news you only get summaries. If you want detailed market share information you typically have to pay a hefty sum for a full report. In this case they've simply lumped the different choices into four major categories, so VxWorks, QNX, and OS9 when taken together hold second place.

If you are interested in market share then you particularly want to pay attention to the first stacked bar graph. There are two different things being ranked here which is why the graph origin is in the middle. The bars off to the right of the origin are for satisfied users, the bars off to the left are for dissatisfied ones. The graph is a bit confusing until you figure out what he's trying to show. However, it does manage to show what proportion of OEMs had significant problems with a particular choice versus what proportion had success. It's very enlightening in that respect.
 
C

curt wuollet

They have a much narrower class of applications due to cost and old school licensing. There is also the single source issue. The choice between a good encumbered product and a good unencumbered product is only difficult in the most critical applications. And there are simply a lot more people who are interested in developing with Linux. Wind River saw this coming.

Regards,
cww
 
C

curt wuollet

Happy new year, Dave!

It looks to me like they are doing a pretty good job of bashing themselves, and their "partners". Keep up the good work!

Regards,
cww
 
Top