Hi Dig,
This is important enough that someone with access to the king's ear will find out wassup.
I agree with you that dropping ETS before Win8 makes no sense from a Dell perspective. And there's certainly an argument for keeping it thereafter as well. Some folks are arguing it is there but unacknowledged within Dell's Control Point software - which leads to your point about branding.
So I am not alarmed by what's going on with Dell, but I am a little surprised and a little curious. Obviously if there is a break in the cashflow, that is a problem. If so, maybe Dell has decided that perhaps it is Samsung's turn to promote innovation in the trust zone. Or that it is time Wave supports itself.
Even so, there are clearly enough TPMs in the market for Wave to have a rich target environment for ERAS sales. And as Wave will support MS' efforts with Win8, ERAS will continue to be saleable whether the client software is embedded or not.
And the DoD opportunity is immediately ahead and it is one Dell will surely be interested in. Opportunity is very large, which will draw in the big fish on the services side. It is also multi-platform, so a number of incumbents whose scope is defined by legacy criteria (eg OS or processor competition) may also be excluded from the market.
So how much of the ocean can Wave swallow?
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