Craig Matsumoto and Junko Yoshida write in EE Times . . .

“Catching the scent of a vast new market with lots of elbow room for multiple players, software companies are getting serious about the Internet appliance. Boasting design wins from the likes of Compaq, Intel and Hitachi, Be Inc. this week will unveil a software platform tailored for that emerging market. Meanwhile, Wind River Systems Inc. is preparing to do battle with Windows CE as it, too, homes in on the market for Internet-savvy consumer boxes . . .”

“The new platform from Be (Menlo Park, Calif.), dubbed BeIA, is aimed squarely at Internet appliances. Those devices seemed more appropriate than PDAs or smart phones, said Lamar Potts, Be's vice president of marketing, in part because the Be operating system runs TCP/IP natively. That gives it a speed advantage over other OSes that place the TCP/IP stack atop a proprietary environment . . .”

“In some ways, the flowering of OSes aimed at the Internet appliance market testifies to the gravitational pull of Linux, which proved that a new operating system could attract users in a software universe dominated by Microsoft . . .”

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