Chris McKillop: There are lots of cool features coming up in the next release. The Photon microGUI, for instance, is getting an internal face lift to make it scale even smaller than it does today. Beyond that, I’m not at liberty to say - though I will point out that we’re about to release a new power management framework for mobile devices. Existing power-management models tend to impose rigid power policies on your system. In comparison, our framework offers a lot of fine-grained control over exactly when peripherals are powered up or down. This is something that our in-car telematics customers are particularly excited about.
As to your second question, demands on RTOSs are definitely changing. Today, customers want RTOSs to be more and more like general-purpose OSs but without sacrificing real-time behavior. We’ve got customers using QNX Neutrino on 4-way Xeon boxes with 6G of memory doing massive amounts of network data processing. That isn't something your dad's RTOS - or most RTOSs today! - could do. :)
5. What can you tell us about the future of QNX Momentics? There has been only a small update over 6.2.0 in 1.5 years, and we have heard nothing regarding any future plans for this desktop version of QNX. Has the 'trick' of marketing QNX Momentics as the development platform of QNX Neutrino RTOS paid off?
Chris McKillop: Actually, the commercial release of QNX Momentics Professional Edition 6.2.0, our Eclipse-based development environment, began shipping just over a year ago, in June 2002. Since then, we’ve added many enhancements. For instance, version v6.2.1, which shipped in February, introduced the system profiler, a very slick visualization tool that lets you pinpoint subtle errors or performance bottlenecks in your application. We’ve also added a lot of other things to make day-to-day development work easier: faster incremental compiles, better tool integration, human factors improvements, and, importantly, a large number of board support packages - these are critical to giving embedded projects a jump start.
There are really two versions of QNX Momentics: 1) the Eclipse-based Professional Edition, or PE, which provides a graphical IDE and runs on Windows, Solaris, or QNX Neutrino development hosts; and 2) the Noncommercial Edition, or NC, which provides GNU tools and runs on an QNX Neutrino host. The important thing to remember is that QNX Momentics is the development environment, and QNX Neutrino is the OS. So, when you download QNX Momentics NC 6.2.1, you are actually installing QNX Neutrino on your computer and then installing the QNX Momentics environment under Neutrino.
If you go to the Product Evaluation section of www.qnx.com, the difference between PE and NC is nicely spelled out. As for improving the development environment, yes, there is work going forward in this area all the time. A good percentage of our customers use the self-hosted environment for their QNX development. Since it is built using the same components that our customers embed in their systems, anything we do to make their systems better also makes the self-hosted environment better. There has also been a lot of work done to enhance SWT on the QNX Photon microGUI to make the Eclipse IDE run faster and more smoothly.
6. I remember when the QNX RTP (Momentics' old name) was marketed as a development platform for your Internet Appliance initiative. Today we know that the IA market never took off. Why was that, in your opinion?
Chris McKillop: The RTP, the precursor of today’s QNX Momentics NC, was never intended for the IA market only. Like NC, it was for anyone who wanted to either learn about QNX technology, use it at home or school, or prototype systems without having to get a purchase order signed by their boss. Mind you, QNX was doing a lot of IA marketing at the same time; in fact, we were built into a number of IA devices - 3Com’s Audrey, for instance. That would account for some of the confusion.
As to why the IA market didn't take off, a number of reasons came into play. Price was a huge factor: PC prices were dropping like a rock and PCs offered more functionality. It’s also very hard to sell benefits like lower energy costs and taking up less space to people who drive fuel-guzzling cars and live in huge houses. :-)
Interestingly, many of the same features that made us popular in the IA market also make us popular for automotive. In fact, one reason QNX Software Systems has done so well in the tech downturn is that we never made the mistake of focusing on just one market segment. Some of our competitors put most of their eggs in telecom, for instance, and are still trying to recover.
7. We talked about the Linux competition in the embedded field, but what do you think about the Windows competition? Microsoft offers already 2-3 micro versions of its Windows OS for devices and they try to gear their OS mostly for PDAs, writstwatches, and phones. Does QNX Software feel any danger from Microsoft's presence in the field?
Chris McKillop: Anyone who fails to respect Microsoft's power and position does so to their own detriment. But unlike the PC space, Microsoft isn't selling to consumers anymore. So marketing alone isn't enough, you need solid technology. And that's where QNX Neutrino excels, hands down. Of course, Microsoft has good tools (leveraging their experience from Visual Studio) and lots of ties to hardware vendors from their years in the PC market. But even there, we are catching up very quickly with QNX Momentics. Because it is based on Eclipse, our customers are beginning to leverage the many third-party tools being developed for the Eclipse platform, such as Rational’s ClearCase Eclipse plug-in.
One of the nicest things about the embedded space is diversity. I seriously doubt that any one company will ever achieve the >90% market share that Microsoft currently enjoys in the PC space. And, in my opinion, that’s a good thing for everyone. Competition breeds innovation. Imagine how much better a certain large company’s web browser would be today if Netscape still had 30-40% of the browser market...
- "Interview with Chris McKillop, Page 1"
- "Interview with Chris McKillop, Page 2"
