2009 a Year of Changes: Wind River & Intel

In January, I posted a short entry titled “Welcome 2009: A Year of Change”, well last week clearly showed us some changes in the embedded world when Intel announced that they would acquire Wind River. This was a major news for the embedded market on the software which had been asleep at best over the past year.

The questions on everybody’s mind are now: Why did Intel do it? Who will benefit? How will this change the semiconductor landscape, the embedded software landscape? What about ARM vs. Intel? and so on. Well, I will not try to answer these questions. This would most likely be a presumptuous task. All these companies affected directly or indirectly have a lot of brain power that obviously have thought about their strategy and how this announcement will impact them and be reflected in the future. Several companies are also probably adapting their strategies to respond and adapt. Some will see it as an opportunity, some will see it as a threat, some will take a technology view, some will take a financial view, some will not care (although I doubt it to be the case for this last one).

So rather than give an extended opinion that may be short sighted or incorrect given that I am not involved in these companies strategy directly, I thought I would point to some articles and blogs on the topic.and let anyone forge their own opinion.

Here is an Information Week posting, asking the question Will Intel be Successful and is Wind River the right company to help?

In an EEtime blog entry, the question is raised about the why of this acquisition and parallels to other semiconductor companies acquiring embedded software companies.

Other entry include: eWeek posting, Internet News posting, Razor Edge blog post, ..

There are obviously several blogs and articles that have been published last week on the topics and a Yahoo, Bing or Google search will lead you to them … The conclusion most of the time is the future will tell what will happen and if this was a right acquisition. The fact is that it will change the way the embedded market is operating. Let me add some question to the huge lists of existing ones:

• Should Wind River traditional competitor (Monta Vista, Green hills, …) worry or cease an opportunity with this announcement?
• How will semiconductor competitors of Intel adapt? ARM?
• How does it affect the Microsoft/Intel relationship?
• Apple acquired PA Semi, will Microsoft also move in this direction? Will Intel provide a more complete Chipset/software stack solution?
• Is this the start of an acquisition and merger wave including semiconductor, IP, embedded software and even electronics companies?
• Is this an indication of the operating systems being commoditized into the chip itself?

There are more questions than real concrete answers right now. I would be happy to add more questions to the list, so feel free to comment and provide your feedback.

To conclude, the financial world also does not believe this may be a done deal … looking at the post “Wind River: A Hope for More Money“. … Welcome to 2009, a year of changes.