Lpc2000

It has been interesting reading the emails about this Keil purchase.

As a business owner myself I view this from the standpoint of who really
wanted the deal: (a) did ARM come up with the idea of buying Keil, or (b)
was Keil looking to get bought.  I think it was most certainly the later.

I talked to some of the guys in Keil last year and they were scrambling to
catch up to the ARM revolution.  Keil was the king of the 8051 market and
that market had nearly fallen off a cliff overnight due to the rapid rise of
ARM.  Their sales and revenue had seriously dropped very fast.  Keil was
caught with their pants down, had nothing to sell for ARM, and so they
introduced a GNU quicky clone just to stay in the game.

But the money in these types of engr products is rapidly shrinking.  The old
days of selling tools for $$$$ in the 8051 market is at an end with low cost
and/or free ARM market.  Guys like Paul, Richard, etc. and the free GNU
world are driving the price points continually lower.  CATC started a nice
business selling USB detective probes for $5K, now you can buy a USB probe
for $400.  The result: CATC was going broke and sold out to LeCroy.

My guess is that the owner(s) at Keil know where the future is headed, and
their numbers and their direction were getting scary, so they are cashing
out now before their value drops any further.  I really don't think ARM had
any need or desire to buy Keil, but I think the owners at Keil had a very
big desire to find someone to buy them now before their revenue gets worse.

More demise of other embedded tools vendors is probably coming.

Chris.