commbasics

Over the weekend, a surprise announcement in GigaOm.com provided a great example of what we've been talking about. The VON conference and it parent sponsor, Pulver Media (publisher of VON magazine) got the financial rug pulled out from under it as the conference was going on. The investors seized all the accounts and assets after the founder, Jeff Pulver, admitted earlier that the revenue forecasts for his venture were not good at all. Let's break this down. When Pulver says revenue, that means sponsorship for the publication and conference, which had quickly become the leading conversation point for the Voice over Network/Voice over IP industry. Think about it. VON/VOIP is supposed to be one of the killer apps of the internet. It's not just about making international phone calls. It also includes video, conference calling, virtual trade shows and seminars. And it didn't pull enough sponsorship to make the effort to report on this industry a profitable exercise...

Pete Singer has left Semiconductor International and is being replaced by his right hand lady. Laura Peters. That's some good news for the EDA world. Laura is the Reed expert on DFM. Even writes a column on yield management. Pete was less interested in the EDA side but Laura gets the back end pretty well. There's no news if this was part of the downsizing at Reed publications, but there has been no replacement named for Laura's role as lead tech editor. It is noteworthy that in an industry dominated by men, most of the press left to cover semis, from design to manufacturing, are women.

Here's some historical perspective. Late 1700s. England was draining the American colonies to finance wars with France and Spain destroying the colonies' economy. Result? The colonies rebelled and formed their own country, allied with the French. Shortly after that, a similar revolution occurred in France for essentially the same reason: the wealthy depriving the poor and killing growth. Fast forward to the early 1900s. The Romanov family sucked the very life out of the people to fund their dynasty, destroying the economy in the process. Same story, same result. The Bolsheviks didn't learn the lesson though and by the late 1900s, with some prodding from Reagan's economic boom, the little people rose up again and took down the elite. There is something to be learned in all this. Big Business (referring to companies with more than $100 million in revenue) has always subsidized B2B press. Small Business benefited from the free press supported by Big Business but die...

I meant to mention this in the last post, because it is a great example of what I was saying. Brian Fuller reported Mike Santarini has taken a position within Xilinx to edit the in house publication there. It's a great move for Xilinx to get a solid journalist to run their company pub because it gives credence to what is written in it. Mentor Graphics did the same with EDA Tech Forum under Paul Dempsey and Autodesk has Dylan McGrath. But the journalists I talk to that have gone "to the dark side" are wistful for the old days when they knew they had real autonomy. And the longer they are under the corporate umbrella the more they feel the weight. It is not journalism as they were taught journalism was to be, but it is the only way to ply their trade now. Or is it?

Last week we concluded our observations on leadership with a statement on relationship. To restate it: The only way to really know where you really stand in the market is to have an independent third party analyze the discussion. For years, that role has been filled by industry analysts and the media. Now I know that a lot of marketing executives, especially in larger companies, will disagree with that statement. There is a basic belief within many companies that their knowledge of the market is better than anyone else. My answer to that is: See the previous post. No one likes to believe they are wrong, but history shows us that smart people always have someone to provide a different perspective. When you think you have all the answers, life jumps up and bites your head off. For example, look at the Iraq war. For eight years, the Clinton administration had intelligence reports that Iraq was building up an arsenal of illegal weapons. It was common "conventional wisdom...

In the last post I talked about how just about every company, in particular startups, believes they are truly leaders in their field, even though, in reality, they do business in the same way as everyone else; they create products and services that have little differentiation from the rest of the field; and ignore the majority of customers in the market to go after the same 5 to 10 customers everyone else goes after. There was a book that a lot of people quote, as the basis for marketing practices, called "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. In it, he rightly states that you need to find a need that no one else is meeting and take leadership in it, but there are two issues that the book's adherents miss. First, Moore's premise only works for disruptive innovation and most startups and even established companies make small advances in standard technology (make it smaller, faster or cheaper). Second, Moore's definition of leadership means the innovation actua...

I have about 30 years as a communications consultant. I've worked with hundreds of companies massive and miniscule. I have pitched business to or researched thousands. In all that time and research I've learned pretty much every B2B company believes… • … they are doing business different than everyone else, • … they are doing business better than everyone else, • … they are a, or the leader in their field, • … there are only 5-10 potential customers for their product. There are some basic problems with those beliefs, because, with rare exception, every company waits to see what some other company is doing before going in a particular direction. And before the other companies move in that same direction they wait to see if the first mover is actually successful. Until they are successful they first mover is widely derided as being delusional. Case in point: Apple and the iPod. When the iPod first came out, there were all kinds of critics. "Apple is a computer compa...

Part three of my series on marketing and media will come out Monday, but I wanted to take a moment to clarify something and Paul Miller yesterday got a good start on it when he said " It's not just about EDA." I no longer consider myself an EDA specialist. My agency's clientele is very diverse (from solar energy to enterprise software) We only have one on-going client currrently that intersects with the EDA world but is more at home in the fabless semiconductor arena. Any work we do in EDA is strictly on a one-off project basis and only on a referral or previous relationship-basis. A big reason we don't do much work in EDA is for the very reasons I've been discussing. But this series is not about EDA. It's about the marketing decisions technology companies are making that shrink the markets when they could be expanding. EDA is an example, not the focus. I use it as the example only because I've watched this very important industry self-destruct ...

( This is part two of a multi-part post on conventional wisdom, which is just a nice word for herd mentality. The opinions expressed are my own, but the are based on the insights of dozens of journalists, analysts, investors, entrepreneurs and even qualified marketers, some of whom have been quoted and interviewed on this blog. I don't expect a lot of agreement here, but I ask that before you react, just consider for a moment, that I might be right. ) The last post was aboutt how most companies, even when they know their industry is in trouble, also believe their company is doing just fine. That belief is becoming more prevalent as independent media and analyst coverage of their industry disappears. But rather than be concerned about the lack of third-party endorsement of their market offering, most companies believe that they don't need the media to help them get market attention or validation. They believe their product, technology or service is so outstanding and innova...

( Here we go. I've been thinking on stuff for several weeks now and have mapped out a multi-part post on conventional wisdom, which is just a nice word for herd mentality. The opinions expressed are my own, but the are based on the insights of dozens of journalists, analysts, investors, entrepreneurs and even qualified marketers, some of whom have been quoted and interviewed on this blog. I don't expect a lot of agreement here, but I ask that before you react, just consider for a moment, that I might be right. ) I was at a tradeshow recently and listened to a panel of experts talk about the state of their industry. What was entirely remarkable was that in the midst of an economic downturn; when their industry as a whole is growing slower than the rest of the economy; when Wall Street it self was calling the industry an horrible investment opportunity, these experts believed all is well in their own little section of the world. This was not an isolated instance. Whenever I ...

Over my career I've heard people decry the preponderance of "bad news" in the media, but no where is that complaint heard loudest but in the technology industries. What is interesting, however, is no one can actually give a definition of bad news other than there was once a story that portrayed their company or technology in a bad light. In other words, it didn't exactly line up with what the CEO want the article to say. Last week, we had a long conversation on the blog with Ry Schwark of Mentor Graphics who complained that start ups in his industry got the lion's share of the coverage in trade publications (which isn't true except in his own perception) but that too can be considered "bad news" in some circles. This weekend, while standing in line at Safeway I picked up an issue of Newsweek with the subhead "The real media bias." The article inside stated that what the media is really biased toward is not political, but in favor of conf...

Newsweek just published an article predicting the death of user-generated content. It points out that the reading public is getting leery of the amateur content on the net and is looking for third-party validation. In the tech world, we've gotten used to being able to throw up contributed articles at little or no cost on what remains of our media. The DesignLine sites at TechInsights were created for exactly that as were IB Systems, SoC Central and Extension Media. Objective journalism is the loss leader in this model. But the ability to differentiate between data and information has always been the hallmark of real journalism. Which was also the subject of an interview on DACzine this week. In that interview by Ed Sperling, the engineers at first were saying they can get whatever information they need from tradeshows and contributed articles, but at the end they had to admit they they no longer have the time or ability to actually filter the information for truth. The onl...

I got a few emails today asking to confirm the possibility that Reed is hiring a replacement to Mike Santarini. At the basis of this rumor is the belief that Santarini was let go because he pissed off too many mucky mucks in EDA and Reed, in an act of contrition, fired the journalist. If that was true, then why let go of Maury Wright, Alan Robinson and Barbara Couchois? Here's the scoop: Print advertising revenues are dropping, even though readership is climbing. Readers don't pay for the magazine. Advertising does. Even though online revenues are climbing, they are still only a fraction of the whole. You remember the writers' strike? Guess what is the cash cow for Reed? Variety magazine, which gets a whole bunch of money from advertising for the Golden Globes, Peoples Choice and Oscar awards season. That didn't happen this year because of the writers' strike. Add to that the declining revenue in tech advertising and you have a perfect financial storm. Ri...

Chris Edwards does a pretty good analysis in his blog of the financial history of CMP up to the recent reorganization announce last week. He also gets into some predictions regarding the future of the electronics industry as it faces the prospect of not having a free press to help promote itself and act as an objective observer. This is a good introduction to what I'm going to be writing and talking about this month here in State of the Media. We are at a crucial moment in history and whether industry as we know it survives is in the balance. We can't rely on someone else to get us out of this mess. We're all going to have to pull together. Get ready.