Locked Up in Chains?

by Lindsey Vereen

Whether you're talking about hardware or software, a system's openness and configurability can often spell the difference between success and failure. The original IBM PC was an open system that was incomplete in many respects. It was left up to third party developers, such as Hercules, to round out the system. The original Apple Macintosh, on the other hand, was a prototypical example of a closed, proprietary system. While the Mac found a niche in desktop publishing, it has continued to struggle to compete in an increasingly PC-centric world. In boom times, Apple has been manufacturing limited. In bust times, the Mac suffered from an unfavorable pricing structure. It's not surprising to see Apple move toward an open system strategy in recent years.

To be sure, open systems have their share of pitfalls. To introduce an open system is to ask for competition. Early on, competitors arose who could build PCs and undercut IBM on prices. Today, profits on PCs are paper thin.

Vendors of software tool chains face similar issues of standards compliance vs. closed, proprietary systems. Some people say that the embedded development tool business is approximately at the same level of maturity as the electronic design automation industry was a decade ago. At that time interoperability among tools from different vendors was the last thing that EDA vendors wanted, because they feared that by making their tools interoperable, their customer base would ebb away. EDA vendors wanted their customers locked into their entire tool chain. They only accommodated third party tools that were complementary to their own tools. Standards efforts underway at that time were often political struggles controlled by the larger companies intent on maintaining the status quo.

A look around the show floor at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this past March was enough to see that the same kind of tool proliferation that has been occurring in the EDA industry is going on in the world of embedded systems. Given the evolution in the tool market, there are some lessons we can learn from the EDA industry. The embedded software development community already has a better track record in pursuing standards and implementing tool interoperability. As the embedded software market matures, it will no doubt continue to go through a series of expansions and contractions much like the EDA industry has done, with large companies gobbling up smaller ones and new technologies and tools springing forth as if by spontaneous generation.

Over the course of the '80s, when hardware design methodologies were changing rapidly, the EDA companies with a vested interest in keeping all of their customers all of the time were not able to evolve their tools and technologies to meet the challenges of the next generation. By adopting a strategy of locking customers into a single tool chain, these companies lost focus, forgetting that the way to keep customers is to meet their needs with the best tools available. As a result, two of the top three EDA companies of the '80s don't even exist today. Suppliers of embedded software development tools claim that they want to provide open systems and allow their customers to choose the tools they prefer. The ones who really mean it are the ones you can expect to see at Embedded Systems Conferences a decade from now.