"Device Software Optimization" - a marketing invention?

I'm sure it will soon be a magic phrase for PowerPoint presentations, metrics-obsessed managers, and annual reviews.

Manager: "So, Jones, how are you using DSO in your projects this year?"

Jones: (DSO? WTF? Oh yeah, Digital Storage O'scope!) "Well, sir, it's got great bandwidth and it's very sensitive. Working out really well."

Manager: (WTF?) "Hrumph, well good, good, glad to hear it."

Rule of thumb: Whenever the explanations of "What is [buzzword]?" come from "market forecasters," Gartner, and the Yankee Group then you can pretty much bet that its purpose to help consultants rake in fees and not to help out the guys in the trenches.

They had to come up with something since "design pattern" and "problem space" were already taken. Some middle manager probaly discovered it on this site:

When you read words such as 'success', 'intelligent devices', 'succeed', 'highly competitive', 'global', 'fast paced', you get a hint that this crap is not for knowledgeable people. This is meant to scare clueless managers who fear for their job.

It should be possible to write a program that discards automatically papers containing such words, and then create a search engine producing results based on the audience;)

They won't dare, will they ?

under!

RTOSes

Nice one Rich, best laugh this week. (Is there a law that says every company must have at least one such manager ?)

Michael Kellett

Alex, Jus now I went and attended their conference here in bangalore India.It seems these windriver guys have been threatened by the linux dominance growing up and what this device optimization talks about it is,jus they are providing some tools which will help to develop linux applications and debug them using their workbench product.So single product can help vxworks or linux apps.These windriver guys have now brought all the tools they have got into one single package and named it workbench or DSO!As you figured out its a marketing technique,but fact to be appreciated is these tools are good to crack some problems and I personally was benefitted by those tools to great extent!By the way I am not with Windriver,Gartner or their marketing partners.

But only diff is support for linux and bundling all the previously existing windriver softwares into a single product. When asked why linux support,as you might have guessed,their popular reply "CUSTOMERS NEED IT!" Regards, s.subbarayan

I think it's great that all the RTOS vendors are moving away from their own proprietary IDEs to IDEs based on a Eclipse. I bet they're happy too to be able to concentrate on their own value-add rather than trying to write Yet Another IDE.

It's funny though, because QNX wrote the CDT C/C++ development plugin for Eclipse, and now you've got other RTOS vendors all using it. Hey, you know what... the user wins. Hooray.

Responding to customer needs is great. A common IDE for Linux and RTOS development is great. I'm a little more skeptical about the ability to develop code simulataneously for Linux and VxWorks.

I guess "DSO!" sounds sexier than "we use open source tools that don't suck!" when it comes to marketing.

-Alex

I haven't kept up reading industry rags in a while, but the next time I need an embedded compiler I'll know what to look for.

There was a pre-Y2k semi-joke that the biggest problem of The New Millenium was that we would run out of TLA's. Perhaps that's why we have so many FLA's or FPLA's or whatever noawdays. Anyway, I remember when DSO meant Digital Storage Oscilloscope.

Quoting from that

This definitely looks like a marketing innovation: You pay for upgrades regardless of whether you actually decide to get and use them.

Looks like you hit the nail on the head.

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Hi, Funniest thing here is actually the way Windriver means "Middleware!".These guys in their middle ware provide jus support for plugins and its not a actual abstraction layer like many people would have thought,So this middle ware is jus another layer which will help you to plugin components in your application IDE!

Many people questioned here for the reason they call it Middleware,Windriver gives a different meaning to it!

Regards, s.subbarayan

The brief history of DSO is very interesting indeed.

It all starts with Ken Klein, the CEO of Wind River. Klein took the helm at Wind River at the beginning of 2004 to turn the company around after three years of flagging revenues.

In his previous gig at Mercury Interactive, from which he drew the current Wind River executive team, Klein transformed an undistinguished maker of IT management apps into "the global leader in Business Technology Optimization (BTO)," boasting a 55.6% market share in automated software quality assurance testing. (You'll really want to hear about how they can "optimize your business value.")

In February 2004, Wind River announced that they were "the global leader in device software optimization (DSO)," in the press release where they introduced the term. But until recently, nobody else in the industry seemed interested in DSO.

Here the story takes a sinister turn with the entrance of Gartner analyst Theresa Lanowitz. In June, a Wind River press conference at the Paris Air Show included "comments on the market trends around DSO" from Lanowitz. Now you'll find her touting the virtues of device software optimization at DSO.com. A quick Google for Lanowitz tells us she's a Research Director who "specializes in mobile and wireless application development and software quality assurance." Google also reveals an intimate connection between Lanowitz and Mercury Interactive, with no fewer than 59 hits for her name on Mercury's websites. It's also worth noting that her official bio on Gartner's site

It was also in June that Green Hills took up the DSO banner, in a press release where they announced the settlement of a lawsuit with Wind River. Since Klein took over, Wind River had refused to supply Green Hills with copies of VxWorks for integration with their MULTI IDE, breaking an agreement the two companies had made previously. Though the settlement agreement doesn't mention it, it appears that Green Hills agreed to adopt the DSO terminology in return for their shipments of VxWorks.

I'm posting anonymously because I work for a competing vendor, and I don't want my company to become known as the global leader in embedded industry mudslinging (EIM). But these DSO shenanigans are just too good to keep to myself.

Agreed with your assessment. See

The embedded tool biz has been lackluster at best for many years. It's tiny and barely growing, so now the MBAs have ousted the technologists... to, I suspect, everyone's loss.

The irony is that embedded^H^H^H^H^H^H DSO systems are getting so complex and big and schdules so compressed that we desperately need novel new technologies, not novel new buzzwords.

Jack

That is really interesting.

I am reassured that whenever anyone uses Google Groups now to search , this thread pops up first...

Alex

Responding to my own post, here's a neat article.

-- Today's device project managers are empowered to pick and choose among OS, tools, hardware, and other variables; how eager will they be to relinquish that freedom of choice? And will top execs have the strength of will to impose top-down tech choices on these same project managers and engineers?