Software is the means to an end, hardware and the combination of hardware and software, the system, is the goal. Gave the example of a modern laptop as what is wrong with a proprietary design evolution. Compared the selling of music to the new world of application servers. Music industry has a ten year leap over software companies. The dominant cost of development is in software development.
Software is also where the product's value lies.
Hardware and software are the same, vendors are essentially selling content. Openness is independent of coding standards. Red Hat's Ecos is open source, was designed for testability from the beginning, and has an open source test suite. The same could be said for proprietary Unix vendors, the software is a big mish-mash. Embedded developers have an ethic for high quality software, this is a critical factor.