Ergo, Audrey. Entered into eternal cancellation on Wednesday, March 21, 2001. Much-ballyhooed simplifier of modern everyday life; beloved step-sister of Kerbango, also cancelled; preceded in cancellation by Netpliance’s i-opener; survived—so far anyway—by Compaq’s iPAQ, Honeywell’s WebPAD, and parent 3Com’s “core businesses.” In lieu of flowers, the developers request that memorial contributions be made to Nasdaq:COMS.

Depressing isn’t it? Coincident with the announcement of its latest quarterly results, 3Com quietly stated that it would “discontinue its consumer Internet Appliance product lines.” In other words, no more Ergo Audrey home “nerve center” and no more Kerbango “Internet radio.” Even at a time of such opportunity for the emerging Internet Appliance market, the need to satisfy a shaky Wall Street managed to kill off two of the more promising new devices of that genre.

3Com didn’t elaborate on its rationale; perhaps initial sales of Audrey were disappointing. However, five months and four days seems hardly long enough to call any product a failure—at least not in a market poised for a “five-year growth rate of 73 percent” (words used to launch Audrey on October 17th, 2000 and attributed to research by analysts at Cahners In-Stat). The award winning, though much delayed, Kerbango 3Com spent $80 million to acquire less than eight months ago was not even offered a chance to test its market for one day.

One obstacle for such early Internet Appliances is certainly price. Whether they promise a simpler way to access e-mail; schedule and address book synchronization; wireless Web access; electronic books; thousands of channels of digital music; digital video recording; still image capture; or some combination of features from that list, the price of is invariably higher than the general-purpose computers they still very much compete with.

In a period of free-after-rebate 700MHz PCs, the entry price for Audrey (based on a 200MHz National Geode GX1 processor with 16MB of Flash, 32MB of RAM, and the QNX RTOS) was a whopping $499; and it cost $50 more to change the color of the plastic; more still to get a USB Ethernet adapter (for those with broadband connections). All that to accomplish a set of tasks any dunderhead could configure a four-year-old Pentium-90 system to do: e-mail, Web browsing, and synchronization of a PDA with an address book and calendar.

>Sure Audrey was more compact than a PC (not much larger than its 6¼” x 4¾” color touch screen, for those who haven’t seen one). She was also far easier to use and maintain. But a PC can also play games, offers word processing and personal finance software, and oh-so-much-more. It’s hard to compete.

If individual Internet Appliances are to succeed, and I believe many will, they need to find niches that aren’t being filled well right now. And they need to fill them at attractive prices. Check out Kodak’s new mc3 for a perfect example. At Audrey’s launch last October, 3Com asserted that its Internet Appliance product line would offer “the best of the Internet in a convenient and intuitive way.” They forgot to add, “for a limited time only.” That’s too bad. 

Audrey and Kerbango will both be missed; we hardly knew them.

NOTE: this article was originally published on 5/18/01.

“Does anyone know how many embedded engineers there are in the U.S.?”

That was the question posed in the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup last August. My first thought was “no, nobody really does.” But then I saw that another poster, a frequent contributor to the group, had already responded:

“There are presently over 2.4 million ‘Embedded Engineers’ in the U.S. This figure increases 21% to 35% annually.”

The author quoted an analysis he had done himself as the source of this information and linked to his website. But when I went to his website I couldn’t find any material related to this topic at all. So I posted a response stating that I felt his figure was way off the mark and asking to see his analysis.

If there were really 2.4 million “embedded heads” in the U.S. we’d account for approximately 1 out of every 110 Americans. While a figure like that is not out of the question for certain occupations—police officers and teachers are even more prevalent in our society—it seems at least an order of magnitude too big for embedded engineers. One out of every 1100—about 250,000 individuals—seems far more reasonable.

Needless to say, after some back and forth (both public and private), it became clear that the guy who seemed so confident that there were 2.4 million of us and so eager to announce this to the world, couldn’t give any actual justification for his numbers. At one point he mentioned that he “based the results on figures obtained from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” (He claimed to “have the raw data broken out somewhere”, but never did provide anything of the sort.)

Judging from two-year old statistics I found on the BLS website (stats.bls.gov), 2.4 million might be an accurate figure for the entire category of “computers/hi-tech” workers. But that group also includes every computer programmer, database analyst, sysop, network administrator, web developer, webmaster, and many others. We are certainly far outnumbered even within that subpopulation.

So what is the true number of embedded engineers? I don’t know; probably nobody does. What I can tell you is that an extrapolation of 1992 data from the National Science Foundation could put the “number of engineers [of all types] in manufacturing” at over a million, and that BLS reported about 350,000 “electronic/electrical engineers” in 1998. IEEE-USA has about 220,000 members (including students), the ACM has “over 80,000 worldwide”, and ESP has 60,000 qualified subscribers. My book aimed at embedded newbies has sold about 20,000 copies in two years—making it an all-time best-seller in the embedded category. Finally, about 10,000 of us (not counting exhibitors) are expected to attend the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco in April.

Mulling over all of these numbers and considering the likely weight of each to the calculation, my mind keeps coming back to the figure of 250,000. Though by no means scientific and probably off by as much as 20% one way or the other, that’s about the best estimate I can give you today.

I’m not even going to discuss the ludicrous annual growth rate suggested by the same poster. By no surprise, this guy is now in marketing.

NOTE: this post originally published 3/10/01.