There are no too many form factors...

Luckily for the writer, his views, being on the state of embedded systems industry or on embedded technology get published and the word gets around.
Good people publish it and again good people read it. They process published opinions, forming their own. And that is how it is supposed to be.
A very well respected and read quarterly, published by established publisher in Moscow, Russia www.mka.ru "The World of Computer Controls". Its history runs for close to 20 years and is printed in Cyrillic and partly in English. It has large follow up in the country and distribution outside Russia. Millions of people read it in Russian language and the reach is wide and deep.

Reading one of recent issues (No. 3-2009) I see an article by Mr. N. Kolsky who is calling me to dispute the need for another standard looking for an application. He meant to be a microTCA, I suppose. The said standard is still, after years, looking for its big break, a project everyone seems to be talking about.

This technology, with its origins in telecommunications, where hot swap advantage, and resources management are of paramount importance. It was developed at the time where Telecoms were flushed with revenues and everyone was looking for upgrades to satisfy the need for bandwidth of the Dot Com Bubble. After its bust on 2000, everything changed and a very nice technology began looking for another life in industry and in automation. Its derivative microTCA, was even a candidate into military applications for a while until it has decided on VPX instead.

The resources management is complex to begin with. Making smallish projects uneconomical or too complex. Larger projects involving large development teams use the resources management to their advantages, but overall costs are high making the supply chain pathologically crippled. Distributors are being pushed out of the project, as there is no margin for them. For a vendor each project becomes a Key Account.

In the same issue my dear friend is quoted in another article, titled "The invasion of the form factor" which exactly enhances my sentiment. Ray Alderman is explaining why every vendor tries to lock his End User into a closed technology.


The question Mr. Kolsky should be asking is not "are there too many form factors or not enough"? No one can decide how many standards are coming to the market. Simply it is always up to a market forces that take any standard to test them to a simple equation: "Is it cheaper to use it or is it easier to use it?" Any standard that passes the test is being used luckily for hopefully a long time. Such standards are numerous, VME, cPCI and some are in use for many years and bring fortunes to its inventors.

As to the microTCA standard it got recently a xTCA denomination, that unfortunately adds precious little to reduce its cost of ownership. The future will show and soon.

We shall see