Metrowerks

» see metrowerks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Greg Galanos started Metropolis Computer Networks in 1985 in Hudson, Quebec, a town of a few thousand people west of Montreal, and Jean Belanger came in as chairman and chief executive. The early business was tools and libraries for other people's compilers. The name became Metrowerks, the first compiler shipped at the end of the eighties, and the product that made the company arrived on 23 December 1993 as CodeWarrior.

The Mac story is the one that gets told, and it is told on the CodeWarrior stone here rather than this one. Short version: Apple was moving the Macintosh from 68k to PowerPC, Apple's own tools were late, Metrowerks was not, and a small Canadian company ended up holding most of a platform's developer base for the better part of a decade.

This stone is about everything else Metrowerks compiled, because that is where the company actually lived. By the end of the nineties CodeWarrior existed for BeOS, for Palm OS, for Java, for Symbian, for Motorola's embedded processors and for game consoles. The Mac product was the famous one and the embedded and licensed work was the profitable one, and Motorola bought the company in August 1999 for 95 million dollars specifically for the second half.

Motorola spun its semiconductor business out as Freescale in 2004 and Metrowerks went with it. In July 2005 Freescale ended the Mac product, and in October 2005 it retired the Metrowerks name entirely, folding what was left into a Freescale developer tools organization. NXP acquired Freescale in 2015 and still ships CodeWarrior for microcontroller work in 2026.

~ the record ~

~ the console decade ~

Metrowerks held the official toolchain on a remarkable amount of hardware. CodeWarrior was the development system for the Nintendo 64, then for the GameCube, then for the Nintendo DS and the Wii, and it also shipped for Sony hardware from the original PlayStation through to the PSP. On the GameCube it was not merely one option among several. Nintendo licensed it as the platform's development environment and built the console's own operating software with it, which means the boot sequence on that machine came out of a compiler written in Quebec and Texas.

None of this was purchasable. A console SDK came with a signed agreement, a hardware development kit costing thousands of dollars and a publisher relationship behind it, and it went to licensed studios only. Turkey in that period was a PC country with consoles arriving through importers rather than through a manufacturer's local operation, and there was no licensed console studio here to hold a seat. The tools that built the games in the shop window were, structurally, unavailable to anyone who walked past it.

~ be and palm ~

Two other platforms handed Metrowerks the same job Apple had. Be Inc. did not build its own development environment for BeOS and licensed CodeWarrior as the official one, so writing anything for that operating system meant using a Metrowerks product. Palm did the same, and CodeWarrior for Palm OS was the sanctioned way to build a Pilot application through the years when the Pilot was the only handheld that mattered. Both platforms are buried on this site and both of them shipped their developer story through a company in Texas that most of their users never heard of.

~ the austin turn ~

The company opened a small sales and engineering office in Austin, Texas in 1994 and by the end of the decade the headquarters had moved there. On paper this is a standard relocation toward customers and engineers. In practice it is the moment Metrowerks stopped being a Montreal-area software house and became a supplier positioned next to the American semiconductor industry, which is the industry that eventually bought it.

The acquisitions ran the same direction. In November 2002 Metrowerks paid 40 million dollars for Embedix and Applied Microsystems, and Embedix is what was left of Lineo, which is what was left of Caldera's DOS and embedded arm. The company that had been built to sue Microsoft over DR-DOS ended up, by that route, as a line in the asset register of a compiler vendor owned by Motorola. In late 2004 Nokia bought the Symbian tools business for 30 million dollars, and the catalog narrowed to Freescale's own silicon.

~ the name comes off ~

The July 2005 announcement that CodeWarrior Pro 10 would be the last Mac release is the death everyone noticed, and it had an obvious cause in Apple giving Xcode away with every machine. The October 2005 retirement of the Metrowerks name is the quieter one and it says more. A tools company inside a chip company has no reason to carry its own brand, because nobody buys a compiler from a semiconductor vendor on the strength of the compiler's logo. They buy the chip and the compiler comes with it.

What Metrowerks actually built was a reputation among developers that a tool could be fast and could respect the person using it, in an era when the alternative was usually neither. That reputation had commercial value for about twelve years and then belonged to a parent company that had no way to spend it. The engineers scattered into Apple and the compiler projects, and the name came off the door in a month nobody wrote down.

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