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Windows Embedded Standard (WES) 2009 vs. Windows XP Pro for Embedded Systems and how Microsoft is protecting Vista and challenging Linux.

Legal Disclaimer: the guys that did the presentation were genuinely nice people, any inferences are my own. I took notes though if I made any mistake here I attribute it to the coffee served.

Attended a very interesting event at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading, spearheaded by one of their licensing guys, one of the 3 EMEA systems engineers and a systems integrator. XP Pro is no longer available as an OEM disc (a few resellers still have some stock but it's disappearing) and even systems builders can't offer after January, 2009 because M$ is so intent on pushing Vista. The problem lies with the devices that don't have the spec required to run Vista but aren't happy with CE (Compact Edition). So Microsoft will offer Windows XP Pro until 2016, but only if it's used for a specific function (i.e. a kiosk, ATM, etc.) and NOT a general purpose desktop (though web browsing is kosher). It can run MS Office but it's have to be a very specific function or you'd be violating your Customer Licensing Agreement.

Our take on the PC market has always been that the Wintel duopoly over serves all but the most demanding customers. Unless you're playing advanced 3d games or editing videos, you don't need a dual core CPU. Most people just want to browse the web, write documents, edit spreadsheets, and make calls on Skype. YouTube and iPlayer have raised the bar a bit but software innovation (Firefox 3.1) has helped lower it, and so XP (Microsoft's most reliable and supported) would be fine. But it would cannibalize sales of Vista.

So cleverly MS has pushed into the embedded market, offering an OS that can run thousands of apps on low-spec machines that are barred from being desktops by licensing rules. They are so keen to avoid it being viewed as a PC that you're required (not just allowed which is a first!) to replace the MS boot screen. The justification was the example of an industrial printing company whose equipment ran XPP. It couldn't figure out why a certain system was going down each night until it looked at the CCTV and saw that the janitors had figured out it had a real OS on it and could play Doom. (Janitors seem a natural enemy of IT - I remember an apocryphal story at HP of a night janitor unplugging a rack for 5 minutes to plug in their vacuum cleaner.)

The new umbrella is then Windows Embedded Enterprise, which includes Windows XP Pro for Embedded Systems (FES), Vista for Embedded, and in 2010 a hinted-at Windows 7 Embedded, and the licensing costs are the same as XPP OEM was.

This event was targeted at XP Pro-based companies terrified of having to move to Vista and so there was little need to challenge Linux, but it struck me that Windows Embedded Standard (WES) 2009 (out next month) is a radical departure for MS aimed at offering Linux-like customization and control to Linuphobes.

Whilst XP Pro FES is altered in a top-down manner (you start with XP Pro and all its drivers and then remove things like solitaire or even Internet Explorer), WES (formerly XPe or XP embedded) is hailed as a bottom-up answer. You "target the hardware" meaning you run an analysis of your components and add just those drivers to the minimal (100MB) XP OS, and then your apps. You can write-protect any partition, including the system partition, which for the first time means you can run XP in CD mode, making it extremely stable. But this is something Linux has offered for a decade at least, even the Sega Dreamcast could boot Linux (I loaded a live CD with Linux and several emulators to let me play Tetris on it). It also protects flash storage (such as CF cards) from burning through their read/write limitations by limiting writes to small things (like log files). You can even run it entirely in RAM or boot it off the network. It has a great feature called HORM or Hibernate Once, Reboot Many which, as in laptops, helps it quickly (8 seconds) reboot from standby. It takes weeks to configure all this but you can hire a systems integrator to do it (for £4000+).

And it only costs $90. And you don't even need to activate the licenses.

Right now we're repackaging our E2 hand-sized computer for the call center market by having it just run a stripped down Linux OS with only Firefox, a notepad and calculator, and Zoiper, a popular VoIP softare. This would meet Microsoft's licensing demands, and we could offer it with Windows Embedded Standard (though we'd have to hide the MS logo). We'd have to pay $1000+ for the setup software, plus several weeks of tinkering, and our client would have to pay $90 more per $300 device. Or we could offer a "internet access terminal" to consumers, with every app loaded through a web browser like Firefox. But then we could just as easily run Ubuntu with Firefox, and throw in local programs as well with less work and for free.

We may still use WES for certain clients or for certain apps. But for anything in large quantity (or small), Linux is massively simpler.