Motorola's Metrowerks Acquires Lineo

An anonymous reader writes "It's official: Following weeks of speculation, Motorola's Metrowerks embedded tools subsidiary today has finally announced that they are acquiring the key assets of Embedix Inc. (a.k.a. Lineo), one of the earliest and most popular providers of embedded Linux software and tools."

Comments

Not good news, for now anyway...

[USC-MBA]

Sadly, this does not amount to very good news. The Metrowerks acquisition comes only eight months after Lineo was forced to recapitalize (translation: they were broke), which itself came only a month after Lineo laid off over a third of its workforce. For one of the first and best-known embedded Linux companies to go under like this does not shine a good light on the industry.

Meanwhile, a glance at Metrowerks website shows the company leaning strongly toward PDA applications, the market for which has been slumping as of late, and, as Gartner Dataquest's analysis tells it:

PDAs are entering a period in which they will be embraced by enterprises as core infrastructure, like PCs.This portends a gradual shift away from Palm and toward Microsoft. Although Palm devices remain more prevalent in enterprises, Microsoft has been adept in providing the building blocks enterprises require. Most companies Gartner talks with are moving with, or planning to move with, the Microsoft wave.

Note that the idea of Microsoft getting a leg up in "core infrastructure" integration means that the company also poses a threat to embedded applications for such "smart devices" as portable phones and videoconferencing technology.

Though the overall outlook may seem bleak for these companies, a winner is someone who can look a challenge and see an opportunity. As a libertarian, I am anti-monolpoly, and thus I hope Metrowerks' leadership can show the kind of vision needed to put Lineo's intellectual capital to good use in counteracting the Microsoft menace.