Once upon a time, there was a market segment called Embedded Systems, which was all about creating real-time operating systems for the 'headless,' often invisible, computers resident in networking equipment, industrial controls, set-top boxes, printers, automobiles, rocket ships and medical devices.
It was a fiercely competitive market with two aspiring market leaders, Integrated Systems (ISI), and Wind River (now part of Intel).
For a time, ISI was the market leader, until Wind River started touting their more deeply integrated, solutions-oriented approach -- relative to ISI.
So focused was Wind River's positioning and messaging, that Wind River employees would pointedly and repeatedly call their competition ‘DIS-Integrated Systems,’ any time ISI's name came up in customer meetings, media events, analyst calls and industry tradeshows. Wind River even created 'DIS-Integrated Systems' t-shirts to belittle their competitor.
Long story, short, the message stuck, and from this point forward, Wind River began to whip ISI in the market.
Just a few years later, it was game-over for ISI when they were swallowed up by...wait for it...Wind River!
The moral of the story is that customers don't want to buy a bag of components (if they know better). They want real, integrated solutions where the piece parts work together in a mostly caveat free fashion.
Next time you wonder why Apple is winning, and why Google's Android, despire impressive unit counts, feels wobbly (platform fragmentation, no success in tablets, no real economic model, few developer success stories, Android OEM financial struggles), think about the story of DIS-Integrated Systems.
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- Apple vs. Google: Lessons from Bill Gates' Playbook
- Holy Shit! Apple's Halo Effect
- Google Android: Inevitability, the Rise of Mobile, and the Missing Leg
