Microsoft Says No Special Manufacturing OS
Last week the Microsoft Manufacturing User Group (MsMUG) held a three day event with about 150 people in attendence. I was unable to attend because of S4, but I did get some highlights from Jim Bauhs of Cargill.
There was a rumor in the community that Microsoft might come up with a limited, hardened version of the OS for the control systems / manufacturing environment. This rumor likely started because Microsoft created a limited, hardened version for point of sales terminals a year or so ago, and Microsoft was looking at where else this might make sense.
At MsMUG Microsoft made it clear there will not be a special version of a Microsoft OS for the control systems environment. Call me a Microsoft apologist, but this makes complete business sense. The market for this special OS is tiny in Microsoft numbers, and Microsoft is a for-profit business. It highlights one of the challenges the community faces. That is the size of the market is very small in IT software or hardware terms. So a vendor needs to either charge a sizable premium or find a way to leverage general purpose IT software or hardware for the control systems market.
MsMUG surveyed their participants on what factors were most important in the control system software. Not surprisingly Reliability scored the highest and was rated as either the #1 or #2 factor on 61% of the responses.
One of the biggest benefit to this event is a chance for cross education with the Manufacturers educating Microsoft on their needs and Microsoft updating the Manufacturers on their plans. This is important because Microsoft is dominating the control center and embedded XP is making inroads in the controller market.
Author: Dale Peterson
Posted: January 30th, 2007 under Microsoft.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Ron Southworth
Time: January 30, 2007, 9:37 pm
Hi Dale
That is interesting news and much apreciated feedback.
Unfortunately it does little to addressing the concerns raised by the community and I suspect that MS feel comfortable with the decision.
Perhaps this is something we need to raise a bit more formally thru the community in a “united voice” to see if the concerns can be addressed or effectively mitigated before being “forced” on the upgrade path to problems.
I have already heard that there are plans to drop support of “XP” very quickly to “actively encourage customers” to uptake VISTA here in AU.
Two years ago Microsoft’s representative in AU gave a much more firm indication that such a controls systems flavour was to materialise.
This is somewhat dissapointing but expected. This is evident by some of the legal words on the new software licenses we have seen discussion on so far from the various on line sources.
Perhaps some early targeted research work on this will help to address the concerns and move this matter in a positive direction. “SCADA purchaser configuration specification” ala the Common Procurement Language with a bit more detail may be our saviour.
Many thanks for posting this Dale and have a great day.
Comment from Sponge Bob Square Pants
Time: January 31, 2007, 3:40 pm
When you look at what applications are really used by the manufacturing world, it is a really limited subset. Most operation and maintenance people don’t need word processing, power point presentations, media players, etc. Using Microsoft is easy to do because it is so pervasive but it also comes with a price, like not being able to have things that are important for control or SCADA systems.
This might be a good opportunity for the control and SCADA suppliers to come together to develop a release package of Linux applications. They could package up a stable release of the kernel and the applications that are important and then this release could be updated at their pace.
With the scalability of Linux you could have a 50Mb installation that does all that you need or it could scale up to do more. And since Linux applications are available for almost any task that both operator and maintenance personnel need, the only real need is to package these together and test the system (sounds like a good business opportunity).
Microsoft should go after these higher volume applications but that doesn’t mean that there are not options for filling the niche needed by a specialized group.
Pingback from OPC Exchange Blog, Featuring Eric Murphy » Blog Archive » News from the MUG
Time: February 1, 2007, 1:53 pm
[...] included the results from a recent on-line survey, and some disappointing, but not unexpected, news on Vista that Dale over at Digital Bond has more details [...]
Comment from Nathan Boeger
Time: March 20, 2007, 8:38 am
I agree with the author that the move makes total business sense. I don’t see how Vista could positively affect the industrial controls market – practically every industrial software application is written for/works perfectly on Windows 2000, let alone XP. Of the integrators and end users that I’ve spoken with, only one is even beginning to test Vista, and that’s because most new PCs ship with it. “Aero Glass” is hardly a necessity for manufacturing.
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Nathan Boeger
Inductive Automation – Total SCADA Freedom
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