What happens in mobile doesn't stay in mobile; how mobile tech quietly blew up the Embedded board business and my 3 predictions for how Embedded/IoT will play out

We have been Exploring the world of ARM based Embedded Computing Boards (ECB) here on the ARM Community for 2 months now and its been a real eye opener for me.  I've been in the Embedded business for a long time and thought I knew the board ecosystem well but when we dug a little deeper the growth and innovation was astonishing.  Just 2 years ago there were less than 20 vendors selling ARM based boards but that's grown to over 120 today and new ones appear all the time.  So its time for a little reflection on what I see happening in the market and what I think is coming next. So if we pause and ask ourselves what happened to change the dynamics of the embedded computing board market then here are my answers and some fun conjecture (feel free to berate me in the comments).  For 30 years the Embedded market was a "walled garden" with proprietary software, expensive power hungry processors and very few connections to the outside world, then this happened:

• The mobile revolution brought us ubiquitous connectivity, low power processors, cloud computing and a new computing paradigm that users expect to see when they interact with machines such as touch, graphics, video and real time intelligence.  The Embedded market had to adapt but change is hard for incumbents (and risky) so the universal lesson of the technology business kicked in and innovation came from outsiders (see the Innovator's dilemma).

• Software is now free.  Linux, Android, Apache, Ubuntu, FreeRTOS and the list goes on.  A barrier to entry removed.

• Some rebels started producing inexpensive boards for the technology curious (thanks to Massimo Banzi for the Arduino and TI for the Beagleboard).  The open source hardware movement was born, it sparked the Maker movement and broke down the hardware design wall.

• Crowdfunding changed the way technology can be financed (see Is the Maker movement changing Embedded design?) so new boards appeared at price points we had never seen before and these were embraced not just by hobbyists but professional designers on their own time.  At $35 a Raspberry Pi board is a heck of a lot of processing power for the money but just a few weeks ago on Kickstarter we saw a $9 board called CHIP using an Allwinner part which has already raised $1.8m from over 35,000 backers.

• Multicore processors went mainstream in mobile then climbed the fence into the Raspberry Pi 2 (quad core Cortex-A7 for $35) for example.  Multicore processors allow designers to run multiple operating systems which adds performance, security and power saving to systems which wasn't possible before.

• • Last but certainly not least was the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon which has its skeptics but the very possibility of connecting billions of devices means that the economics of the old Embedded market has to be turned upside down, the "walled garden" is gone forever.