Though Wind River Systems (WRS) is considered the most important embedded OS provided (don’t forget Microsoft’s Windows CE), the embedded OS market remains fragmented, with no clear leading company. In the future this problem must be solved as well. One of the challenges for the OS community in general is to be “far out”. In industry, start-ups are moving fast and are pushing the boundary. So one of the challenges for the system researcher is to try to think ahead of where the start-ups are and look at what the next set of problems are going to be.

For the future, things look great. Lots of interesting opportunities, lots of interesting problems, and new problems. A large number of products run Linux. The class of embedded operating systems will grow more and more important. Nevertheless, the other operating systems will be there for a while.