The focus for the State of the Industry address at the Embedded Systems Conference on Tuesday was about creating a full solution for the user. As Kevin Dallas, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Embedded Business Unit explained, today customers are not buying specific devices, they're buying the user experience. In the past if you bought something like a GPS you would just want it to get you from location to location, but today the experience has increased to the point where you want constantly updated information and an easy way to interface with the system. This is a challenging goal for any company, requiring them to create a complete user experience while still looking at the total cost of ownership and the total cost of development.

To that end, Mr. Dallas announced the Sparks Will Fly 2009 Challenge (www.SPARKcontest.com). This is a five-month-long contest where hobbyists can enter their designs for the "home of the future" and have a chance to win $15K and a trip to Microsoft TechEd 2009. Microsoft brought up Nick McCarty to demonstrate his design so far, which was a media selector for his house, allowing him to access music, pictures, and his own robot from a touchscreen display. While there are products that can do this in the market, this was a self-created design. The interface was designed in about a week from start to finish using the tools that Microsoft provides with their Spark development kit.

Microsoft also announced that their next generation of the Windows Embedded Standard edition, code named "Quebec" will be out in 2010 and will be based on Windows 7.

Greg Quirk is a product manager for TechInsights and EE Times (you've probably seen him on some of Semiconductor Insights' tear down videos). Greg is covering the Embedded Systems Conference Boston this week mostly from behind the camera. When he occasionally comes out from behind the lens, he writes this blog. E-mail him at gquirk@techinsights.com.