Once the embedded computer came on the scene, however, the game changed rapidly. Because most product-specific features could now be implemented in hardware, the physical difference between products began to diminish. Block diagrams of almost every type of product from mobile phones to GPS receivers to digital cameras to high-end washing machines started to look surprisingly similar. In today’s typical system, there’s a processor or two, a few peripherals, the least memory we can get away with, and a bus or switch fabric stitching it all together. The secret sauce is no longer contained in the physical part of the system, but instead, in the embedded device software that makes it all go.
This is not to say that hardware-based differentiation has completely left the scene in our products. It has not. Almost every new, competitive electronic product has some magic hardware – usually in the peripheral area, that gives it its claimed advantage over the field. Increasingly, however, hardware-based battles are fought and won at the subsystem level, where companies like ARM and MIPS fight it out for the processor core honors, Xilinx and Altera wrestle for the programmable hardware component, and various vendors tilt for technology advantage in their own respective arenas. These victories show up, not in the final product, but in the socket selection. The consumer doesn’t choose a particular digital music player because of the embedded processor that was designed in. That competition was over before the manufacturing line started rolling.
This leveling of the hardware-platform playing field and subsequent shift of functional competitive advantage to embedded software has shortened design cycles dramatically and has eliminated traditional barriers to competitive entry. Today, a fast-following competitor can see a feature in a newly introduced product, virtually clone it, and have their own offering on the market practically before the first commercial ends. The venerable patent system offers little protection either, as most features of interest have become widely copied, integrated, and even forgotten by the market before the engineers have finished explaining to the lawyers what exactly has been stolen.
As software development productivity also increases and more pre-fab software IP becomes available, even the already speedy embedded software development process approaches triviality. Taken to the extreme, picture a situation where almost any feature you can conceive of delivering to the customer can be instantly implemented and even made available in previously-fielded hardware by a downloaded upgrade. In the open market, this creates a “swarm” every time a new feature idea is conceived. With the product development part of the cycle reduced to noise, marketing becomes the critical path. Someone says, “Hey, consumers want to get e-mail on their digital cameras,” and almost immediately ten companies can deliver the capability.
With such a commoditization of features, the fight for customer affection shifts to other considerations. As in any commodity battle, cost optimization is paramount on the engineering side, but more often, consumer choices will be driven not by features but by aesthetic design considerations and by brand recognition and perception. Perhaps the most visible example of this trend already in action is the digital music player market. Feature differentiation in these devices has almost fallen by the wayside, and consumer demand is driven much more by style and brand preference than by technical performance or feature set.
What does this mean for us as engineers? Let’s assume that the very concepts of product features and performance become less important over time – not because they don’t matter, but because almost every product will have all the features and performance required to make the customer happy. Visualize the electronics market behaving like the athletic footwear market – engineers are still behind the scenes trying to make their products better, faster, and cheaper, but those efforts are no longer the key to market success. Instead, aesthetic design, product packaging, and marketing become the driving factors in success.
Go have a visit with that guy in the other building that leads the project to design the case. If he’s not already, he’ll be on your pay scale soon enough. Just as we can never be content to stand still in our engineering knowledge with the rapid advance of technology, neither can we put our heads in the sand and ignore the other important disciplines and skills that make our products land and work in our customers’ hands. These people worked hard to get on top of their games in their respective domains, and the sooner and better we learn to work with them as peers and equals the more successful we’ll be.
