keeping simple » handset

Wind River purchased by Intel

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:19:15 +0000

If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.

In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple killers by providing more differentiated OEM-in-a-Box offerings, ala what Google is now trying to do with Android, they would not be staring at a $900M market cap and relatively flat revenues, margins and stock price.

Well, that’s an argument. Embedded is a tough beat, but Wind did not exactly set the world on fire developing new concepts and software. Intel’s history in software is not glorious either – so it’s going to be an interesting challenge for the new entity.

The cell phone market in brief

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:10:40 +0000

Although the payoff of a small niche may be less than that of a large, growing market, the competion may often also be less intense. The majority-fallacy concept states that appraisals of fast growingÂ segments overlook of minimize the likelihood that many competitors will be attracted. This explains why growth areas often stimulate destructive overcapacity and why a more modest product-market scope may be a preferable choice.

From Aaker, Strategic Market Management.

clouds versus pcs

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:54:38 +0000

George Gilder had an article in Wired on data centers as clouds. My instinct is to dismiss anything Gilder writes because of his track record of wacky ideas (e.g. feminism is destroying civilization and supply side economics makes sense). But, in this article, Gilder reports on some smart people. The sheer massive use of electrical power in data centers comes up clearly. I remember 10 years ago looking at a room full of server racks in Sandia Labs and starting the obvious calculation of 300 watts times 2000 boxes and adjusting my whole view of PCs as small replacements for those huge dinosaur mainframes we used to have.

Discussing Sun’s efforts to build super dense systems, Gilder writes:

And with 1-terabyte drives, available next year, Bechtolsheim will be able to pack the Net into three cabinets, consuming 200 kilowatts and occupying perhaps a tenth of a row at Ask.com. Replicating Google’s 200 petabytes of hard drive capacity would take less than one data center row and consume less than 10 megawatts, about the typical annual usage of a US household.

(To me, the 10 megawatt/hours as the average consumption of a US household is an incredible number, but it turns out to be true. Also there is the, only an supply side economist would do this silly comparison to annual household use – really it’s more like 9000 times the annual use of a household.) The obvious flaw in the logic is the assumption that the size of the contents of the online network will remain about the same as storage costs drop – and Google is working hard to put more and more “stuff” online.

Nonetheless, one key question is the balance between centralized storage/compute centers and the edge and relative power efficiencies will make a big difference. If the dominant paradigm of computing becomes one of connecting your lightweight mobile device to a network and invoking operations somewhere in the cloud, the industry landscape will look very different from what it looks like today and computing will much more look like todays electrical system. Perhaps we will even see an ironic situation where computing becomes a centralized utility just when electrical power decentralizes or perhaps the decentralization of electric power generation will force decentralization of computing.

Locality has always been key to performance. But there are all kinds of locality. The data center cloud makes sense if high speed local networks are so much faster than the internet that it makes sense to centralize data centers, but the internet is fast enough that it makes sense to use remote data centers. That may be a durable balance or it may not.

end to end design versus BOM design

admin — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:29:52 +0000

Grossly simplifying, some products are Bill of Materials (BOM) products and some are Designed products. BOM products come to market via a process of generating a parts list and then integrating. In place of designers, BOM products have buyers and integrators. In place of innovation, BOM products have standards. The standards are preferably “industry standards” produced by consortia of companies that manufacture or distribute the product. Vendors compete on price and “alliance” to be allowed to sell parts to the integrators. Buyers work in a bureaucratic system in which specialists oversee acquisition of parts and the product as a whole is viewed primarily in terms of the sum of parts costs. Usually there are a small number of large integrators who act as the gateway to the market.

All the recent progress in cell phone handsets has come from companies that defied the BOM process. Instead of trying to sell items into the “stack”, RIM and Apple both have been able to imagine the handset as a complete product and innovate. Google is also changing the game by bearing down on what services can be delivered over a mobile device. These companies are in the business of creating products for end users and not in the business of selling parts to buyers of components. If you create products, BOM issues don’t go away, but they do not dominate.

The BOM process can dominate even in what appear to be more open markets. In a previous note, I discussed Dell’s efforts to sell against Apple to the people and businesses found at SXSW. Even though, as Jay Pinkert points out, Dell has improved design for cases, it labors under a disadvantage against Apple, because Apple can do end-to-end product design and Dell is forced to live at least in part in the BOM process world. Apple is not only designing the case, they control the operating system, the windowing environment, the middleware, and they can strongly influence and package application software. So Apple can look at what a conference organizer or musician wants or maybe what they will want once someone shows it to them, and try to design a product that will be compelling in totality. A company like Dell is constrained to delivering what is ultimately just a vehicle for vanilla Windows (or Linux) – a component of a stack. While the packaging can be improved, they cannot reach the customer in the same way that Apple can. Musicians and conference organizers and marketing agents want to have an aesthetically pleasing communications/graphics design machine or email/composing system or presentation device or some combination of these. None of them demand Vista or OS/10 or an intel processor or any of the technical parts. Of course, the traditional downfall of companies like Apple is that they grow an internal BOM process that transforms their own engineering staff into integrators and parts vendors.

The smart phone patent

admin — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:52:07 +0000

Coming to Marshall Texas. 33 defendents, 128 claims .

Cell phone handsets and linux and software value

yodaiken — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:14:50 +0000

Update at the end.

Two FSMLabs alumni are leading the charge for Linux handsets in two different companies. Jason Whitmire is now GM of cell phones for Wind River. Jason’s blog is here and a Linuxdevices article discusses his first post which concerns the, well, machinations of Google and the two big cell-phone consortia Limo and OHA. I’ve argued earlier that Apple has the advantage of clear mission and business model in this space. They want to create and sell handsets and handset software based on their existing user interface and operating system software. Everyone else in the game has more complicated stories or is constrained to work with bigger players that have more complicated stories. And nobody has any reason to trust anybody else in the game. Apple can just make an alluring product, for which there is undeniable customer demand, and push it through the sales channels – they control the entire process and have something that end users want. If you make a cell phone Linux platform, on the other hand, or some middleware, or something else – you have have to sell operators and/or phone makers on the value proposition. And the standard problem in the embedded market is that there is irrational resistance to paying much for weightless invisible software. The impulse for device makers is to simply treat software as a BOM component and squeeze pricing – no matter what the cost in quality, time to market, or upgrade path. An operating system or a windowing system or an entire platform is not a part like a capacitor that can be graded on one or two indicators and replaced by any other one with a similar grade. These are enormously complex engineering systems that have pervasive effects on performance, battery life, ease of use, scalability and so on. One of the things we like about the enterprise space is that, for the most part, customers make decisions about how much money an end product will make them or save them versus cost, and do not rely on their intuition about how much things should cost. And that’s another advantage for Apple: they know the value of software.

Disclaimer: I don’t even know much about WindRiver’s handset strategy beyond what I read in these articles and certainly do not speak for them on this topic.

Response to question in comments:Â Krish Kupathil.Â Actually, there are a couple more, but I am not too sure exactly what they are doing. Some of our technical folks who went to WindRiver are probably working on phone architecture – I guess. Alumni of our former offshore group in Pune are also probably working on phones and so are a couple of ex-interns.

Not me – at least on the handest.

OSIM Madrid and Value Manifolds

yodaiken — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:11:55 +0000

Spent a couple of very interesting days at the OSIM conference in Madrid as part of my consulting for WindRiver which has a very powerful market position in cellular handsets now – partly due to their acquisition of RTLinux for embedded last January. Interesting to see these companies negotiate the vast complexity of the technology being deployed in handsets and the equally complex picture of software intellectual property and the famous “value line” – which really has way too many dimensions to be reduced to a line and should be renamed the “value manifold”. Both Trolltech and Funambol touted dual-license models where the some feature of the open source product pushes possible customers to buy non-open source licenses. You could cynically characterize these models as “we get free market presence and the people who violate the license would have stolen the software anyway.” Pragmatic. People from Gnash were advocating a pure open source model on the old fashioned “sell services” plan – claiming that the embedded flash environment was so fractured and that services were needed for many projects. In both these cases: my understanding may differ from their understanding, so please don’t ascribe my opinions to anyone else.

From my point of view, a large part of the evolution in this market has been a painful and expensive process of learning that chip and device companies and operators cannot cost effectively dabble in the operating system business when the devices get to the current level of sophistication.

(painting above by Goya shows management of very large multinational who made a lot of bad decisions. This painting is in Madrid, but has little to do with the OSIM conference exactly.)

Apple’s strategic brilliance

yodaiken — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:42:52 +0000

I may be reading too much into it, but Apple looks to have come up with a strategy to pass Microsoft in the next ten years. They are linking their phone, music, and PC business together to form an unavoidable platform in a way that has not been done since Microsoft put together the office suite and windows. It’s unfortunate that this is all being done on the flawed Mach base, but it probably doesn’t matter. The killer advantages Apple brings are all centered around their ability to runover the middlemen and reach out directly to paying customers. In the cell phone market, where billions have been spent trying to win over operators and the main phone makers, Apple has ignored all the standards bodies and consortia and operator specs and produced something end-customers demand. Same with itunes and the bitterly complaining music industry. Instead of thinking like a subcontractor, Apple thinks like a market innovator.