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Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register)Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register)Posted Jul 17, 2003 18:04 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register)
With embedded systems, the designer has to worry about two sets of costs: the nonrecurring engineering cost, and the per-unit cost. A WinCE license for every unit, versus no cost for a Linux kernel, means that the per-unit cost will always be less. Even if it were true that the NRE cost is higher, per-unit cost matters more in any high-volume product. It often pays to spend more upfront, trying out a variety of architectures to find the cheapest-to-manufacture implementation, to get the unit cost down. Given Linux's greater flexibility, I expect that many developers will do just that.
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Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register) Posted Jul 17, 2003 19:02 UTC (Thu) by taruntius (guest, #1140) [Link] You're right that an additional per-unit license fee does mean that the Linux solution becomes cheaper at high volumes. But that's the kicker: the volumes required are often in the _millions_. The reality in the embedded market is that very few devices actually sell millions of units. Far more designs only sell, if they're lucky, in the 100s of thousands of units, which isn't enough to make Linux pay off.The reality is that it's very hard to drive a consumer electronic device to wild success. Market windows of opportunity are short, consumers are fickle, and the failure rate (in terms of commercial success) for new gizmos is very high. Under those conditions, manufacturers are strongly motivated to pick the platform that will let them try out more different designs at lower development cost and faster time to market, in order to increase their odds of having one of those designs turn out to be a hit. But let's say that company X tries out 20 different products, and one of them becomes a hit. Yes, _if_ they had picked Linux for that product, their margin would have been higher and they'd have made more money. But there's no way for them to know ahead of time which one of the 20 was going to be the winner. So they opted for the option with the lower up-front investment for all 20 designs, and who can blame them? Linux is undeniably cool, but from a business perspective, in the real world's market conditions where 99+ percent of consumers don't care one bit what OS their cool gizmo is running, Microsoft's offerings start to look pretty good.
Windows device development faster, cheaper than Linux? (Register) Posted Jul 17, 2003 19:36 UTC (Thu) by conz (subscriber, #4784) [Link] If you read the analysis in this story, you will note that they take exception to thestatistical raw data and results as perpertrated by this Microsoft-funded research. I think there is cause for concern that the researcher may have had, in much the same way that the flawed Microsoft-funded IDC report writers had, his research hands tied by Microsoft. Please read the following in relation to this: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_09/b3822610_tc102.htm "One of the study's authors accuses Microsoft of stacking the deck. IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky says the company selected scenarios that would inevitably be more costly using Linux. Also, he believes Windows should be cheaper to operate, since it has been around longer, giving Microsoft more time to develop software to manage the operating system. "Microsoft has had a lot more time to work on this. I wonder why the win wasn't bigger," Kusnetzky says. Microsoft insists that it didn't rig the contest and chose the most popular uses for the software. But its assertions about Linux' hidden costs don't always pan out in the real world. "Our experience is different," says Jeffrey R. Davis, the global technical lead at Amerada Hess Exploration & Production (AHC ), who manages 400 Linux servers by himself."
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