On a personal note, it was in October 1957 that the world awoke to the beep-beep sounds of the Russian launched Sputnik satellite. And the race was on.

I was a first semester freshman EE student at Washington University (St. Louis) – and we were abuzz with the implications. I was too young to understand my good fortune in choosing EE over Chemical Engineering – but it was an exciting time.

In April 1961 The Russians launched Yuri Gagarin and his Vostok 1 spacecraft into orbit making him the first human in space (Alan Shepard was to fly in March 1961 but his flight was put off until May 5, 1961).

Jack Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election in a close finish over Richard Nixon (thanks to a 120% voter turn out in Chicago – and Nixon refusing to challenge that vote). President Kennedy challenged us to “put a man on the moon within the decade”. The technologies to make this happen hadn’t been invented yet, and the collateral off shoots of the space program made possible microprocessors, advance medical devices, enhanced communication systems. For the billions the government invested in the Program, the payback was measured in the trillions of dollars that accrued to our economy not to mention the giant leap in our life styles that this technology afforded us.

So how did Kennedy, the supposed liberal, pay for this? He lowered taxes and encouraged and supported private businesses which resulted in enhanced revenues for the US Treasury. This will probably come as a shock to most progressives today – particularly those that loved Jack Kennedy (maybe they got confused with the actions of his brother Teddy). Lower taxes and eliminating unreasonable restrictions on small business resulted in a large increase in US revenues.

Compare those halcyon days to what we have today – an administration that has cancelled NASA space ventures in order to force us into failed “Green Technologies” while reducing our scientific endeavors to that of a second-world country.

I was graduating with a BSEE in May 1961 – that was a time in which we as seniors were introduced to transistors, digital systems and analog computers. We had spent 3 years learning to bias diode and pentode tubes, so this was heady stuff. My first job was with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratories (APL) where I was handed the job of building their Transit Satellite Base Station (which allowed us to update and secure the Polaris based satellite system). As a rookie, I was given this assignment since I was the only one at the lab that had actually built a digital based system of any kind (my Batchelor Thesis).

While at Cape Canaveral (later named the Kennedy Space Center) they took us out on the Abe Lincoln nuclear sub where we would experience a mock firing of a Polaris missile. We also had the chance to watch from a bunker, astronauts in a space capsule going through testing protocols. I remember watching the ECG of one astronaut. I asked the MD sitting at the console what he would do if the astronaut fibrillated. He said “I’d watch him die – we haven’t reached that level of intersession yet.”

This was the most interesting and compelling aspects of this huge undertaking – astronauts understood the risks they were taking since the program couldn’t be unnecessarily delayed. For those of you old enough to remember – or have watched enough historical documentation – as the capsule sat on top of the launch rocket, it had a rocket system that would propel it away from the launch rocket in case of a catastrophic failure and collapse of the main rocket. For a very long time, when the capsule safety launch system was tested, it landed in the launch rocket fireball. That didn’t stop the launching of the Mercury capsules. The second phase of the space program (initially called Mercury II but later changed to Apollo since the Mercury 7 astronauts were the sole beneficiaries of anything named Mercury) prepared us for the moon launch – and created a host of new problems that needed to be solved.

Think of this for a moment. 64k of RAM was considered to be advanced state-of-the-art in digital technology. Later Bill Gates was quoted to say “I don’t understand why anyone would need more than 640k of memory.”

What we needed was a challenge – and it resulted in students rushing to qualify for careers in engineering, physics and math – and we didn’t nee to import better qualified students from foreign countries to fill our university slots. Think about the medical and communications systems and capabilities that we have today. To put it in perspective, some 42+ years ago man set foot on the moon – with technology that was primitive compare with what we have today.

So it is now 2012 and we are seeing amazing advances in avionics, hand held communications and the ability of very average people to use the World Wide Web. We have developed amazing simulation-modeling tools that have the potential to reduce the cost of new systems, and to maintain and make upgrades to deployed systems much easier and less expensive.

By integrating modeling tools with requirements management and testing tools, we can reduce “in the field failures” and the enormous costs of recalls.

What I believe would enhance the growth of embedded systems and stimulate the economy and the jobs associated with such growth would be another “call to arms” for a national undertaking. Don’t expect anything from the current administration. Their management failures, the wasted trillion dollars that could have been directed to some achievable goal that would have stimulated job development and economic growth, having a Nobel Laureate academic that had wet dreams about diving the cost of gas to $8/gallon so we would be forced into unproven solar technologies (are we supposed to assume that every gas station in America would change over to becoming a battery recharging station?) have displaced the support of innovative, market-vetted technologies. These and other efforts to make us into a social democracy like Greece are not a likely source of innovation, job growth and enhanced life styles.

Government doesn’t create wealth, private industry does. There is nothing wrong with government supporting a challenging national effort that would give entrepreneurs the opportunities to crate more national wealth. We are a country of entrepreneurs – not a nanny state that has imposed exhausting rules and regulations on small businesses. The giants like GE love this administration – why you ask? Because by de-incentivizing small and growing businesses from investing in new technologies, companies like GE don’t have to worry about competition.

What we need in America is more competition – it will enhance our life styles while reducing costs. It will create real wealth, good jobs and a more optimistic population. The elections in November 2012 will let us know what path we will be taking.

For the record, even with a change in administration and Congress we will have an uphill path to take and there will be consequences to the debit we have accrued. Having made my financial bed and now spoiling my grandkids instead of raising their parents, I have moved most of my investments into gold stocks. If Obama wins in November so will I.

The Chinese are quietly investing internally to eventually overcome the USA as a leader in space technology (and ultimately in commercially). I wish they would do something dramatic so that we the people of the USA would recognize the threat and pick up the challenge.

I really miss Sputnik

A special link was sent to our Blog readers asking them to take the 2012 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers so that we could compare their responses with respondents from the embedded industry to questions regarding where developers get their most trusted information and other factors in their decision making process.

This is a brief summary – a more detailed paper will be developed later.

First we asked the following important question: Which of the following resources do you find to be the most useful for researching the purchase of RTOSes or compilers, simulation tools, requirements management tools, product management and program management tools for your designs?

The responses were:

Not surprisingly, online forums, white papers, industry pubs and co-workers were the leading source of information for our Blog readers, while vendor’s websites replaced online forums among industry respondents.

Second, we asked the following important question: In general, what characteristics are the most important to you in buying embedded products and tools?

The responses were:

The responses were similar with our Blog readers’ emphasizing technical support and the quality and reliability of products.

The third question was: As Cloud Computing and Machine to Machine computing become prevalent, how important is cloud enabled to your future embedded products purchases?

EMF believes that in the future Cloud computing will usher in a new and large market for embedded designs and technologies, it seems that our readers are far ahead of the industry in recognizing its importance.

The fourth question was: How important is brand awareness (prior knowledge of the reputation and quality of the brand or company) in your selection of an embedded product or tool?

The responses were basically the same – brand awareness is important.

In a paper to be developed later, we will look at branding issues in which we compare responses from developers that are aware of a vendor with those of developers that aren’t familiar with a vendor (such considerations as ranking on search engine, geographic location, and accessibility to a sales person and references from current customers).

These data can be crucial to vendor’s sales efforts.

For those of you that have sales or marketing responsibilities and would like to gain such insight, please contact me at jerry@embeddedforecast.com  (508-881-1850) and I’ll be glad to chat with you.

Thousands of business travelers took advantage of the offer and sales soared. Leave it to some marketing moron to contact the traveling “wives” and ask them how they enjoyed their trip. Seems that many of the “take me alongers” were not the wives but someone else.

Hundreds of divorces ensued and the airline was sued by many and sales took a turn for the worse.

Fast forward to 2011 and it seems that the grandsons/granddaughters of those hapless AA marketing mavens might now be working for Freescale.

Freescale is giving away free the MQX operating system – but is Freescale helping or handicapping their customers?

In a recent EMF survey of 660 embedded developers, we were able to compare design outcomes among all of the major operating systems (using our unique Dashboard tool – see video).

Citing just a few highlights,

So we are left wondering whether Freescale realizes what they are doing to their customers – and whether the grandsons/granddaughters of American Airlines marketers can find a place where their efforts can’t do any more harm. The Obama administration comes to mind.

Considerable attention and speculation has been given to the use of COTS hardware across different vertical markets, and whether this trend is expanding, remaining stable or declining. If the use of COTS is expanding, one would expect to see an economic benefit to its use – hence, a more important measure of COTS utilization would be reflected in the budgeted amount of COTS hardware as a percentage of total hardware cost.

In a recent 2011 survey of embedded developers (653 respondents), EMF asked respondents to report the percent of their total hardware budget that was devoted to COTS hardware.

Table I presents their responses according to vertical market. Whereas Aerospace/Avionics and Military had the highest response (these data reflect the percent of the COTS hardware budget compared with total hardware budget) Datacom and Electronic Instrumentation had a better than average response.

                   Table I

Table II presents developer responses according to chip architecture.

It is interesting to note that the budgeted percent of COTS hardware is consistent across all architectures, DSP and FPGA, but it is significantly larger for dual core and multi core developments. This might be due to the recent inclusion of multiple cores in embedded developments where the focus might be on software development within a mostly reusable hardware configuration. It will be interesting to see if this data is repeated in 2012.

                             Table II

Information regarding the survey and data can be found at

www.embeddedforecast.com.

Survey data and the use of the EMF Embedded Dashboard used to compute these data can be seen at:

http://www.embeddedforecast.com/emfmip_videos.php

The giggles keep coming – Atego has purchased another company (albeit a competent one – notwithstanding a questionable fit). This time it was Hi Rely, a service company that actually knows what its doing – although at a premium price.

I guess that in Jay Gambrel’s “Alice in Wonderland” dreams he believes that he’s going to match IBM’s 35,000 person service capabilities. Jay once told me that he’s a banker and that he doesn’t have to understand how the embedded world works.

I’ve known Vance Hildebrand for a long time – and I have previously recommended him and his organization. At least Hi Rely offers a useful service and has good people – good offerings and good people, however, do not necessarily create a positive and revenue producing combination. Time will tell.

Knowing Vance as a friend and colleague, I asked him why he sold to Atego – going in my mind from Upper East Side to downtown Newark. I asked if  a) he’s in trouble with his bookie, or, b) grandma needed implants to get her job back at Hooters. For the record, Vance loved my email to him and told me that he passed wine through his nose while laughing so hard. He offered to explain his willingness to be bought out by Atego after the May ESC conference. Vance has not responded to my emails since the wine-nose incident and we are on the lookout for a much too happy guy. Vance was paid in dollars (or Euros) and not in Atego stock – I told you that he is competent.

So Jay, please tell us who these more than generous VC folks are so that companies with good prospects and poor financial positions can gain access.

Jay, as a gesture of good will from this side of the puddle – and hoping that I can throw a bone to your financial backers, I’d like to introduce you to Gregg Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri.

So let me posit the following question: What differentiates the Atego acquisition strategy from Mr. Miller’s business? The answer is that neither seem to make sense – BUT Mr. Miller has made $20 million with his product he calls “Neuticles”.

Mr. Miller felt strongly that post-neutered dogs were too ashamed to show their face (or southern exposure) to other dogs, so he created fake testicles (Neuticles) that he sells for $100 a pair (not including surgery). To date he has sold over 250,000 Neuticles. Truth be told, I have a distant cousin who had Pekinese-sized Neuticles implanted in her Great Dane (we suspect nothing sinister) . The dog probably had emotional problem to begin with.

I guess that Neuticles is an easier sell than realtime Java

So Jay, don’t give up – if Mr. Miller can find gold with his “not of this planet” inspiration, so can you. Rumor has it that there is an embedded Unix company for sale.

I have recently been contacted by senior executives from RTOS companies mentioning UBM’s survey of embedded developers that placed FreeRTOS as the most used RTOS for embedded use in 2011 (14% of respondents). FreeRTOS placed 3^rd in the 2010 UBM survey. Year-over-year EMF data is at substantial odds with these findings.

EMF takes no position on how UBM conducts their survey or on their results. EMF data for the past two years have shown that FreeRTOS usage has garnered less than 1% of total developer responses. This encompasses over 1200 responding developers. This is a significantly lower response than the 14% reported by UBM. EMF has no idea of how this discrepancy came about. We stand by our data as our surveys and responses are restricted and carefully monitored. We make no judgment regarding UBM’s methods or results. We are responding to requests to report our findings.

In EMF’s 2011 Annual Survey of Embedded Developers, eleven thousand embedded developers were statistically selected and sent invitations to participate in the 2011 survey. Six hundred and fifty three developers responded to our invitation. PIN numbers were assigned to each request so that we could insure that only those invited participated in the survey – and that they could respond only once.

In 2011 developers reported using an in-house RTOS (20.1%), Android (19.3%), XPE (16.5%) and CE (15.9%). FreeRTOS was used by 0.9% of respondents. From our perspective, the suggestion that FreeRTOS use would exceed that of in-house, Android, XPE, CE, or VxWorks use is beyond any reasonable reality check.

An archeologist was searching along the Amazon River when he stumbled onto a tribe of warriors. They were both shocked and surprised to see each other. The archeologist cried out “Lord, please save me for I am totally screwed”. A black cloud appeared and a loud voice cried out “you are not screwed – pick up the rock in front of you and kill the chief”. He picked up the rock and threw it hitting the chief in the head killing him instantly. The archeologist looked up to see 40 tribesmen coming at him with their spears aimed at him. He looked to the cloud and a loud voice said …

“OK – NOW you’re screwed”

Sometimes market advice seems to work that way.

A decade ago the merchant computer board industry was abuzz with CompactPCI (cPCI) forecast to replace the VME Bus. Market analysts were calling cPCI the two-billion dollar marketplace. Given that cPCI was controlled by three vendors (by definition a commodity marketplace), we called it the “zero-billion dollar marketplace”. Advocates told me that I was looking at the tip of the iceberg. I said that we were looking at the tip of the ice-cube!

The outcome was a no-brainer. commodity markets don’t grow as strong and as large as polyopoly markets (those that support a broad range of vendors). In addition, virtually every cPCI design was custom – not off the shelf. So who won? Not us – we were correct in our analysis, but no one bought our research. Other market research firms made a lot of money selling what vendors wanted to hear – but those vendors (Force Computer and Motorola Computer Group, among others) are long gone.

We never regretted our strategy – although we didn’t make any money in having the correct analysis. Ten years later, we are still here and doing fine.

The EMF Approach to Comprehensive and Reliable Market Intelligence

EMF’s Market Intelligence Program involves three steps

• A comprehensive and statistically accurate survey statistically derived to insure randomness
• An initial series of cross-tabs to provide an overview of the survey results
• And an interactive Dashboard that enables you to explore the data set to  determine relationships in the data that can be essential to one’s efforts

No survey is adequate unless the data can be interrogated from a multitude of perspectives to establish relationships and correlations. EMF does this using a unique tool we call the Executive Dashboard.

A well constructed survey and the use of the Dashboard can provide the following:

• Determine comparisons between your competitor’s products and yours

• Determine developer metrics: number of developers per project; number of lines of written code as well as total lines of code; cancellations; designs completed ahead of or behind schedule – and how many months behind schedule; and, comparisons between pre-design expectations and final design results – and be able to do this for any vertical market, any chip architecture used, etc.

• One can look at developers’ most pressing concerns, what design processes are used and what developers believe are best practice

• Look at product line deficiencies and needs

• Look at what developers are planning to use and do

• Degree of satisfaction of customers with products and tools

• Find market messages that resonate with potential customers, and keep products aligned with these benefits

We have put together a series of videos to illustrate how our surveys are constructed and how the dashboard is used. We encourage you the reader and embedded professional to think about how you evaluate information that is critical to your success.

You don’t want that black cloud telling you that “now you’re screwed”. The only thing worse would be if you had paid for that information.

This is not an April Fool’s joke. The fresh snow on my Massachusetts lawn and driveway was our unexpected April Fool’s joke. If you responded to our request of our reader’s to take the same survey as did our embedded industry respondents, be proud and go ahed and ask your boss for  raise.

We recently posted a Blog comparing EMF Blog readers with their industry counterparts regarding how they stay knowledgeable about embedded products and services. There was, as might be expected, a substantial difference between the two groups. Our Blog readers were far more aggressive is gaining information than their counterparts.

In that Blog we posited the question whether such professional conduct would provide better and more cost efficient design outcomes.

For the past 15 years, EMF has conducted detailed and extensive surveys of embedded developers. Using the EMF Executive Dashboard (a data analysis tool unique to the embedded market intelligence community) we have been able to relate the decisions of embedded developers to their design outcomes. This also enables us to develop ROI and total cost of development calculations to establish the most cost effective of the many possible design undertakings. Our readers and downloaders of our many white papers are familiar with our results.

In our 2011 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers, we asked our readers to take the same survey as that of the statistically accurate industry wide survey. It has been an assumption/theory of mine that embedded professionals that take the time to research and read authentic market intelligence would produce better and more cost effective design outcomes.

We have examined this comparative data and we present it in Table I.

                                                    Table I

It is clear from Table I that the EMF Blog readers (that took the time to complete the survey – congratulate yourself if you did and show this to your boss) experienced substantially lower design costs that that of their industry counterparts. One might assume that professionals that take the time to keep current with embedded information would experience better results.

Judge for yourself.

Survey respondents were asked “How close was your final design outcome to your pre-design expectation?” The choices made available were: within 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50% and not within 50%. EMF believes that design outcomes within 30% represent a good design outcome – and within 20% represent an excellent design outcome. Table II presents the comparison between the groups.

                                              Table II

There is no difference between the groups. What we might deduce from Tables I and II is that although the design choices by our Blog readers were enlightened enough to produce a significant savings in design costs, their ultimate design outcomes were comparable. Of course, the pre-design expectation of the Blog readers might have been higher that that of the industry at large. This is pure speculation – the data does not support the assumption.

Nevertheless, if I was the CEO I’d go for the significant savings.

Comparing EMF Blog Reader’s Responses with Those of the Embedded Industry

There is an old Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times.” As the pace of technology change continues to accelerate (did anyone consider the ascendancy of Linux in the past or Android today?) the plight of many embedded developers and managers (not to mention cost controlling CFOs) – many facing limited windows of opportunity – makes choosing among the best alternatives very difficult.

For the past 15 years, EMF  has conducted detailed and extensive surveys of embedded developers. Using the EMF Executive Dashboard (a data analysis tool unique to the embedded market intelligence community) we have been able to relate the decisions of embedded developers to their design outcomes. This also enables us to develop ROI and total cost of development calculations to establish the most cost effective of the many possible design undertakings. Our readers and downloaders of our many white papers are familiar with our results.

In our 2011 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers, we asked our readers to take the same survey as that of the statistically accurate industry wide survey. It has been an assumption/theory of mine that embedded professionals that take the time to research and read authentic market intelligence would produce better and more cost effective design outcomes.

We are currently examining this comparative data and we will report on our analysis in a later blog or white paper. The first step, however, was to look at whether there was a difference in how our readers stay knowledgeable as compared with developers in the industry at large.

Comparative responses to the question “How do you typically first become aware of and stay knowledgeable about embedded products and services?” is presented in Table I.

EMF Blog readers are far more diligent about gaining information than the typical industry professionals with web searches and white papers being the principal sources of information. It is interesting to see that web advertisements and virtual events constitute the least sources of important information.

                                                                          Table I

In the 2011 survey, developers were asked to choose from a list and select only two sources of information that they trusted the most to provide the quality information that they need.

The overwhelming response from industry developers was from “Peers”, whereas our Blog readers equated Peers with Vendor Websites, Professional Magazine Websites and White Papers.

Frankly, the fact that so many respondents selected Vendor Websites as a leader among the most trusted sources of information came as a major surprise to me. Why embedded professional would trust that vendors “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” boggles the mind.

But statistically accurate developed information is what it is – a reliable picture of reality. Like it or not – believe it or not – it is what developers are reporting. In market intelligence, it is useful to speculate and to hold hypothesis until proven wrong. Slanting data to please a customer is doing a disservice.

The responses to the question “Which TWO sources do you trust most to give you quality information that you need?” are presented in Table II.

                                                                                Table II 

Stay tuned for more data comparing embedded professionals that are EMF Blog readers with embedded professional industry wide.

When we look at embedded developer’s issues - what they are doing, what issues are the most disconcerting to them in their embedded developments, and what we can take from changes that we have seen over the past several years - these stand out as emerging trends in an expanding embedded marketplace.

In summary:

• There has been a shift in the RTOS marketplace from the traditionally powerful RTOSes (e.g., Integrity, VxWorks and LynxOS) to the smaller, highly efficient RTOSes (e.g., ThreadX, Micrium, Nucleus and MontaVista Linux).

• Simulation-Modeling (e.g., Simulink, Rhapsody) tools are being used effectively in more designs, driven by code reuse, reporting of application software under conditions of changing of underlying hardware, and by the financial advantages that accrue.

• Communication middleware use is changing from RYO to commercially available middleware (e.g., RTI) as the difficulties (and cost of maintenance) of network expansion proved unmanageable.

• The use of testing tools is expanding in embedded applications including requirements and change management, validation and verification tools and static and dynamic testing. Companies such as LDRA are successfully integrating many of these tools into a single offering that is interoperable with DOORS and Rhapsody. EMF believes that integration with other tools sets – rather than stand alone tools – is the future.

• The use of dual core and multicore processors for embedded designs is growing rapidly – notwithstanding the lack of excellent tools (particularly for symmetric multiprocessing). This need will create a new and substantial addition to the development tools marketplace.

It will be fascinating to analyze the results from the 2011 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers to see which trends continue, what markets appear to be in decline and whether new and important market insights appear.

As always, we welcome your comments and insights (jerry@embeddedforecast.com)