Editorial 4Q97
Microsoft enters the business!
In the previous issue of Real-Time Magazine on
Real-Time
Operating Systems (Part II), I mentioned the enormous impact of the Windows
NT Real-Time (RT) Extensions on the dedicated systems market place.
We have been conducting extensive research on the subject, with as a result
some extremely high referenced articles
published
online on our web-site. Our online reports on the Windows NT RT helped
us in boosting the
visitor numbers
of our web-site to over 5000 visitors per week. In the month of November,
we reached over 21000 user sessions (corresponding to 563000 "hits" or "file
transfers"), breaking all records today.
Our presence on the Internet has been noticed by lots of people, which did
boost also our consulting
business. Real-Time Consult, besides its publishing activities, also
delivers various consulting services including feasibility studies, debugging
interventions, seminars, etc.
The success of the Windows NT RT Extensions has been inspiring other market
players, including one of the biggest giants in the IT business …
the major news could come from Microsoft itself with the introduction of Windows CE for the embedded market!
This event could influence the whole OS market even more drastically than
the Windows NT RT Extensions today. We did recognise the massive presence
of Microsoft at the Embedded Systems West show in San Jose in September last.
Microsoft announced an even higher involvement in the next years' exhibitions
in the US AND Europe. With Microsoft's guaranteed support, Miller Freeman
Inc. decided to bring the successful Embedded Systems Conference to Europe
in September 98 (see the
calendar
of events in this magazine and on our web-site).
The major invasion of Windows CE is a fact and therefore we will present
you in the upcoming issue an evaluation of the new Microsoft product, with
an executive summary in the next magazine and the full evaluation report
available for sale.
To continue the
RTOS
Evaluation program, launched earlier this year in
2Q97,
you will find in this issue the executive summary of our product evaluation
of Tornado, the development environment from Wind River Systems.
This issue gives you an overview of the state of the art of Industrial
Automation, with more specifically answers to the trade-off between the use
of Industrial PCs and PLCs. It looks more than that both solutions are
complimentary instead of competing.
Dr Martin Timmerman