Doug Schaefer agrees with Curt Schacker, who says that the embedded software industry is more of a services industry and isn’t served by off-the-shelf software. According to Curt, vendors have been trying to shove one giant, square peg into a giant, round hole. “It is a classic disconnect. Instead of pitching their product, companies should show off their developer workforce with expertise in this technology discipline and leverage them to solve the customer’s particular problems,” Curt says.

Doug says that he has seen such a trend in the tools area. He agrees that it is hard to sell software development tools in a box when every customer has different processes, different configuration management systems, build systems, coding standards. “It is very difficult to build a suite of tools to satisfy them all. There is nothing worse than to have a customer who bought my box, but then let it sit  on the shelf because it didn’t really meet his needs,” he says.

According to Doug, the best part about the Eclipse IDE is that it plays into the business needs of software vendors. As the development costs are shared with other companies, Eclipse platforms are cheaper to produce. With Eclipse’s extensibility and customizability, it is easier to take those products and customize them for individual customer’s needs, Doug says. Selling services, he continues, is the right approach for profitability for software vendors.