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Interview with an XPe customer considering a switch to Linux

David Berlind is an editor at ZDNET (links to his blog) and he’s posted a podcast interview of one of our XPe customers as part of David’s ‘IT Matters’ series. The podcast is a 20+ minute Q&A with Miles Wade and it’s provided me with a perspective of some of the pain points of our customers experience.

Miles is an XPe systems designer and delivers mission critical devices like this one for the oil exploration industry. So these devices are exposed to some serious environmental conditions like temperature ranges of -20 deg to +120 deg.

Though Miles is delivering an XPe solution today, in this interview he says he’s considering moving the device to Linux. In this case licensing isn’t the issue (the prices for these particular machine are in the tens of thousands of dollars) it’s basically because he wants access to the source in place of relying upon Microsoft support when he has a question or issue.

He has a few comments for steveb and billg, Miles claims we don’t care, we don’t listen and we don’t have a clue about expanding the “Windows universe” into the embedded realm.

Miles, we do listen, we do understand the domain we’ve moved into, we do heed constructive feedback and stuff like this gets us motivated even more. The alias to communicate directly with the embedded product team is ‘wecrt at Microsoft.com’ . When you file a bug or provide feedback through that alias, someone on my team enters it into our bug tracking database with the contents of your mail. That carries just as much weight for consideration among the team as any other bug or product suggestion. If possible, we'll also provide direct feedback through the alias if it's not an issue that can be easily looked up in the newsgroup.

We look forward to hearing from you and hope you'll put our team to the test. It's not the insensitive Borg Cube you may think it is <grin>, give the Product Team and our Product Support Services team a chance to prove our passion and commitment to the embedded space.

- Andy Allred

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