General Purpose Always Wins ... Why Not for the Real-Time
Market Too?
By Jim Connors 15 Oct 2007
The brief but brilliant era of computing has seen companies come
and go, many relegated to the ash heap of history because they
failed to heed this simple rule:
In the long run general purpose solutions
will always win out over specialized proprietary ones.
As a long time employee of Sun Microsystems, I've witnessed
firsthand the effects, both positive and negative, that this law
has had on my company. Sun can attribute it's initial
meteoric rise to the fact that it offered a viable alternative to
the popular minicomputer platform of the day. The first Sun
workstations were built from commercial off-the-shelf components,
and although nearly equal in performance to the minicomputer, they
were so much more affordable that they became good enough.
And of course over time, as Moore's law might dictate, those
initial deficiencies quickly dissipated, and in fact surpassed
traditional minicomputer capabilities.
Somewhere along the line Sun lost sight of this ideal and began
incorporating more proprietary technology into their
products. At first the strategy appeared to be successful as
Sun was well positioned to reap huge benefits during the Internet
bubble. Meanwhile, low-cost general purpose servers were
continuously improving. When the bubble burst they in turn
became good enough alternatives to the powerful but costly Sun
servers. The resulting decline of Sun was rapid, and it's
taken the better part of a decade for us to recover.
This story has been told -- and will continue to be again and
again -- for those refusing to learn this lesson. A
professor of mine once told me, "If there's anything we've learned
from history, it's that we haven't learned anything from history".
When markets mature, even those where technology is paramount, economic considerations dominate. General purpose systems scale on every dimension (unit, management, training and integration costs) whereas proprietary systems do not. A switch to more standard components should in no way be construed as stifling innovation. Rather, general purpose systems help create new innovation by building from common elements economically appealing in their own right, and presumably even more economically beneficial once combined.1
[1] The above paragraph was taken in bits and pieces from an email exchange with Dave Hofert, Java Embedded and Real-Time Marketing Manager. His points were so compelling I couldn't help myself.
Real-time industrial controllers could be the next market ripe
for disruption. Admittedly this is an entrenched and
conservative lot. But the economics of general purpose
computing cannot be denied. As organizations strive to
further eliminate cost out of their system, revisiting usage and
deployment of industrial controllers, typically via custom
proprietary PLCs,
is falling under review. Consequently, at the behest of one
of the world's largest industrial corporations, Sun has partnered
with iGoLogic,
a systems integrator, and Axiomtek, an industrial PC
board manufacturer, to create the real-time controller platform
pictured below.
Among others, here are some of the compelling benefits of this
platform: