If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.

In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple killers by providing more differentiated OEM-in-a-Box offerings, ala what Google is now trying to do with Android, they would not be staring at a $900M market cap and relatively flat revenues, margins and stock price.

In fairness to them, it’s not like anyone else stands out as knocking the ball out of the park in the embedded domain, so this is perhaps just the last chapter (for now) in a book that began when Wind River and Integrated Systems merged back in 1999.

But to be clear, there is very little software systems DNA within Intel, despite the fact that there are many thousands of software engineers within the company.

Hence, barring a pretty serious religious conversion, software will always be the conduit to sell more silicon, which gates the likelihood of truly innovative solutions coming out of the combined entity.

(Disclosure: I sold a company – Rapid Logic – to Wind River, and had two portfolio companies that Intel was an investor in, so based on 12+ years of direct experience).

Cheers,

Mark
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READ: Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/06/innovation-inev.html

There is an extensive history and back story leading up to this acquisition. Android is still a small part of Wind business, but the acquisition covers a lot of other ground.

See my blog at
http://linuxpundit.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/

Bill Weinberg