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When a system is well designed you can use it without even realizing the complexity of the technology behind it. This is true of the Zipcar car sharing service.

For those of you who are not familiar with the service, Zipcar allows you to rent cars by the hour or the day. In the cities where Zipcar operates, their cars are strategically located around the area, especially around public transportation hubs. You can search for available cars on the Zipcar web site then reserve the car you want. If you need to extend your reservation at the last minute you can do so using your cell phone.

Cars are accessed using a membership card that uses an RFID technology to unlock the car. When the car has been returned and your reservation is over, Zipcar automatically bills your credit card.

Zipcar employs a range of technologies that must be integrated seamlessly in order to provide an easy-to-use service. First there is the RFID technology employed in the membership card. The car must communicate with the back office to determine if you have a reservation. I assume that Zipcar uses satellite communications for that purpose. The back office must track which cars are available and which cars have need reserved. They also track when the cars have been picked up and returned. Finally the back office operation has to take car of the billing to your credit card.

The Zipcar website does an excellent job of presenting the member with all of the information that they need. You can see where available cars are located and the cost of using them. The web site also displays your future reservations and billing history.

All of these technologies spanning from the RFID on the membership card to the communications with the back office and the web site have been expertly woven together. The most impressive part is that the user never experiences the complexity of these technologies interacting. I use the service often without even thinking about it. This is the best indication of a well designed system.

Nerds like us don’t get much love but obviously someone loves nerds.  If you have a special friend that likes Hello Kitty she might like this.

I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now that Intel has purchased WindRiver, one of the largest providers of Real Time Operating Systems and embedded systems development tools.

Intel’s purchase of WindRiver for 884 million dollars is the end of VxWorks as a viable embedded RTOS.  Actually VxWorks has been losing ground in the embedded systems market for years.  Back in the late ’90s they changed their sales strategy to focus on selling to upper management rather than engineers.  They had to talk to upper management at their price.  As my manager quipped, “Merger?  I thought that the $884 million was for a developer’s license and that’s only valid in the state of California.”  WindRiver’s prices and license policies limited their appeal to everyone except large corporations that develop high quantity devices or companies in very high margin markets such as defense or heavy industrial machinery.  Admittedly, that’s where the money is.  The smaller players in the embedded systems market are not a lucrative customer based even though they employ the largest number of developers.

Intel’s motive is to penetrate the portable consumer device market.  This market is growing much faster than the desktop PC, laptop PC and server markets that Intel dominates.  These markets have all matured and will never experience the explosive growth of a new portable gadget.  Intel’s processors have not been as successful in the portable market and Intel has abandoned its embedded processor products more than once.  Their hope is that by providing the whole package, processor and operating system, they can capture this growth market that has slipped away from them.

Ironically, Intel had one of the first RTOS’s on the market and it was reasonably successful in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Intel’s RMX operating system was the first RTOS that I ever used on a microprocessor.  But by 2000, Intel was so focused on WinTel products that they no longer wanted the cost of supporting RMX86.

Technically, VxWorks is a good product and WindRiver has a history of innovation.  VxWorks was one of the first RTOS’s to provide Internet Protocol support and remote debugging.  They were also an early adopter of the GNU tool chain though they bent the rules quite a bit in redistributing the GNU development tools.  But their corporate policies alienated a lot of engineers.  In the late 1990’s WindRiver went on a shopping spree, purchasing several companies in the embedded systems developer’s market.  They purchased and marginalized pSOS.  They bought a couple of cross compiler companies and then jacked up the prices on their products. Finally there was the new sales model which tried to bypass the engineers that had to use their products.

So, why do I think this is then end of VxWorks as an embedded systems platform?  Intel will focus on portable consumer devices because they want to sell large quantities of processors into that market.  The rest of the embedded developer’s community, those of us who build communications, industrial and other embedded systems products, will become second class citizens.  VxWorks is also a popular OS for Freescale’s embedded PowerPC processors.  Will an Intel subsidiary continue to support a competitor’s products?  But the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last ten years and now we have plenty of alternatives for embedded real time operating systems.