Combining a Linux capable CPU and MCU is not new or that weird... I think a Cortex A9 and Cortex M4 appeared on a combined SoC on the IMX6 platform around 10 years ago.
Unfortunately not. The RP1 controls the stuff on the 40 pin connector and the firmware is locked down. That said, you do have access to the PIO block, which is a programmable state machine that can talk to (I think?) any GPIO on the connector. Pretty fun stuff, good for real time or things with really tight timing requirements.
I integrate into SAP for manufacturing and the users can certainly do every transaction they need to do to account for cost and shipping product and keep finance / supply chain happy.
But yes, to actually plan and run their manufacturing area, that's where the software I write comes in... as well as a ton of spreadsheets :)
As lng as the data in these spreadsheets goes back into SAP. If it doesnt' you can kill SAPs MRP. I saw that happen. Which is then kind of hell's hell. And then the spreadsheet-users complain about SAP.
Yeah - one of the outfits I mentioned had a bit of a catastrophe due to this - BOMs in SAP and XLS were different, they made a medical product (for children) that exceeded RoHS and REACH lead and mercury thresholds. They made millions of units before the mistake was realised. Oops.
The cost/implementation of SAP is so big that the decision to use it can only be signed off at C-Level.
Any company who is looking at SAP is likely doing business in the US - Sarbanes-Oxley means CFO and CEO have to personally sign off on the financial accounts and are criminally liable (am sure it's the same in other countries).
SAP at it's core is all about financial control. SAP sell SAP to CEOs and CFOs by telling them it will provide strict financial controls to their company and avoid them personally going to jail / paying huge fines. It's an easy sell
This is probably even worth it. Once your company has anything more than a few hundred employees, financial accountability itself at any level is a serious problem enough to warrant some kind of financial control.
If you didn't have it a lot of money disappears without a trace.
What about Amazon? It sounds to me that a large part of the drive toward better dev tools is Microsoft trying to promote its cloud. Amazon has no such relationship with developers. If that becomes a competitive advantage, wouldn't Amazon try to get in?
I've thought about this, or maybe Atlassian or GitHub doing so, or even GitLab, they're all companies that cater to developers and if they acquired JetBrains it would be a move that would keep them on top of their competitors on a new platform, especially Atlassian and GitLab since GitHub at least has Atom (though it suffers performance issues among other things).
We indeed have no plans to acquire Jetbrains. I think they are doing awesome and we probably couldn't afford them. But also we would like to have a development environment that runs online while allowing for browser based and client based editors. Currently we're looking at Koding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
This doesn't change the affordability bit, but IDEA is working on a web hosted IDE. They are rolling it out as an online code review tool first, with nice features like goto definition, but eventually going to full run tests or edit code.
JetBrains are in the middle of a daring switch to SaaS which may or may not work; they face threats from all sides; and they're not exactly a "cloud first" business.
I bet if anyone showed up with a huge bag of cash, they would sell.
As nice as it would be for Microsoft to kind of run those IDE's and toolsets, I think it would be bad for the market altogether, we can't have just one company running every developer offering out there, competition is good. I hope someone else buys them out though, just to see how that ends up.
This, in so many ways. I'd be considered a Microsoft schill, and even I don't like that idea. Microsoft needs companies like Apple, Google, and JetBrains to keep them from getting complacent.
Considering that people like to sleep on planes and the flight attendants / cabin crew will get people to close the blinds / dim the cabin lights as quickly as they can, this will never take off.
Plenty of use cases in embedded!