commbasics

Dan Nenni wrote this week that Wall Street Hates EDA .  He's not far wrong.  His post demonstrates the investment community's utter ignorance of what EDA actually does.  For example, Dan quotes a Deutches Bank AG report that says Synopsys "tests semiconductors."   Now those in the engineering world know that was an ignorant statement.  Synopsys does a lot more than test.  But we have to consider that Wall Street is not an engineering audience.  They don't make things.  They make money off of companies that make things.  They are interested in what the financial upside is of any business, and EDA marketing does nothing to explain that.  Here's why. Ask any EDA executive, from engineering to sales to the C office who they sell to and they will all say the same thing.  "We sell to engineers."  Every bit of communication created is designed to convince engineers to use their products....

Reading a story in the SF Chron about the ongoing battle over Gay rights I saw a phrase from the late Harvey Milk that really caught my imagination.   Uncomfortable conversations. My dust-up over the fate of DATE last week is finally petering out, but what I ended up getting out of it is that we are still trying to avoid the truly uncomfortable conversation in the semiconductor industry.  We still want to pursue a philosophical discussion about how important our technologies are but we don't want to talk about what our fiscal responsibility is to expand that discussion beyond our little coffee klatch.  10 years ago we didn't want to discuss the fact that our media was dying from lack of proper investment from the industry.  Now we don't want to discuss the fact that lack of investment will probably kill the last form of industry forum (trade shows and technical conferences) for the same reason.  We are still holding on to the false belief that...

Part three of paradigm shifts in mass communication Last week, I stopped talking about the development and control of mass  with a cryptic reference to Ireland.  To explain that, I need to back up a bit and talk about the Fall of the Roman Empire. By the time the Roman expansion had reached the British Isles, Christianity had not yet become the state religion but was pretty much the norm.  Christian priests accompanied  the Roman legions to the farthest reaches of the Empire and were busily converting pagan natives.  While Rome did not get as far as Ireland, Irish pirates made regular raids of Roman settlements and one of those raids to the Strathclyde area resulted in the capture of a young boy from a priest's family who had just begun his education in his family's religion.  That boy escaped from Irish slavery about a dozen years later and went home to complete his education ... and immediately went back to Ireland to begin converting the na...

Yesterday and today this blog has had several thoughtful responses/comments to the past two posts from Grant Martin and Paula Jones of Tensilica .  Because this blog generally has a lot of my bitching about how bad marketing is in technology niches I thought it would be worth making a mention of just how good Tensilica's is. The most public face of Tensilica is Grant.  He writes a lot of stuff and not necessarily about Tensilica.  He's involved in scads of technical committees, speaks, presents, sits on panels and is pretty much an industry advocate.  Paula develops and implements marketing and communication strategies.  The company overall is dedicated to marketing in an industry that is almost wholly focused on sales.  Their efforts have been so good that Tensilica is almost an industry niched in itself.  It is both vendor, customer and researcher to the general public. Grant and Paula find great value in technical conferences, advert...

I've received a bunch of angry and a few cordial emails about my supposition that DATE was either dead or not long for the world.  Grant Martin of Tensilica even made a comment on my post yesterday pointing out how valuable the content and meetings were for him at DATE.  Some people pointed me to Peggy Aycinena's rambling review of DATE (that I had begun to read but stopped after I saw the first comment complaining that she hadn't really talked about the content.)  So, for the record, I know that the content in technical conferences like DATE, DAC, Semicon, etc. are all outstanding stuff.  I know that the chance to meet with colleagues face to face is important. That's not the point. Back in 1995 I started writing a State of the Media report for clients to let them know where editors had moved to, what they were promoted to and what new publications they should be looking at.  In 1998 I started noticing that magazines were starting to strugg...

This week, John Cooley published an email I sent him regarding DATE on Deep Chip and stirred up a load.   The bottom line is I said I heard that the Design Automation and Test Exposition (DATE)  was not long for this world.  This is based on what I was told a couple of years ago when EDA Ltd. was bought by TechInsights.  TechInsights decided they did not want DATE, so they allowed EDA Ltd employees to take it over, including the binding contracts with Munich and Nice in 08 and 09, and see if they could make a go of it.  Well the report from Nice was that DATE had a 47 percent drop in attendance from 2008.  This was the second straight year of decline. My statement was a response to Cooley's previous report outlining the decline.  Before I wrote to John, I visited the DATE website where it had a headline. DATE'09 conference was a huge success I thought it was a weird headline considering what John had reported on the attendance, so I thre...

Part two on paradigm shifts in mass communication Last week, I stopped on our history tour of mass communication at the introduction of the written word six millennia ago calling the paradigm shift from oral tradition to writing as incredibly significant.  Let's put that into context. When we think of mass communications today, it used to be controlled by the mass media industry.  You could buy an ad, or hire a publicist and get a bunch of information out to a large number of people, most of whom you did not know.  With social media, you control not only the content, but largely the audience.  The impact of social media to our society today, is comparable to the development of writing in the ancient world. With the oral tradition, you could pass information on to individuals or groups, but the interpretation of that information was in constant flux, depending on the memory of the communicators.  Writing made it possible to have a record of that informat...

We're all dealing with the changing paradigm of mass communication forced on us by economic forces and the potential of the Internet.  No one has an answer to the question:  "What the heck to we do now."  Correction: Lots of people have answers, but none of them actually work yet. What gives me comfort is my knowledge of history.  I sit back and see what is going on and know that we have gone through it before.  To prove it, I'm going to take us on a walk over the next few weeks on the history of mass communication.  Let's look at ... Cave Drawings This might be the first form of mass media that we know.  It predates effective language and was used to record what small communities considered to be historic events and preserve some sense of progress among primitive man.  During this time, individual artists rose up within family groups, not unlike leaders that Seth Godin speaks of, who developed their skills for the be...

Just when you think that the paradigm has shifted, you find out that it has fallen flat on its face. Today, a report comes out of the Associated Press about how a Irish sociology student tested the journalistic integrity of traditional journalism, the blogosphere, and Wikipedia.  Guess what?  Journalism and blogger failed and Wikipedia passed. Shane Fitzgerald posted phony quote on Wikipedia, attributed the the recently departed French composer Maurice Jarre on March 28.  The fiction went almost directly to blogs around the world and several newspaper websites. The quote had no form of verification on Wikipedia, which is always a red flag, but the bloggers leaned on their belief that if it is on the web it must be true and lifted the "quote" directly.  In fact, it is still floating around the world as being true, even after being expunged from Wikipedia. Only The Guardian in the UK has owned up to the research error, while others are blaming Fitzg...

The news yesterday from Rupert Murdoch of News Corp about the end of free content has resulted in one of the biggest responses I've ever had for a post, with comments and (mostly emails) from readers who have never spoken up (as well as a raft of new readers and subscribers).  Apparently we are waking up. CNN came out with a report today on the subject stating, for the most part, that their audience and some analysts refute the idea that readers would be willing to pay for content.  One said.  "As long as there is internet, there will be free content. And as long as there is free content, sites trying to grow on a paid-content business model are not going to survive. It is as simple as that."  It's an interesting thought, but what that reader doesn't know is that there is NO free content on the web.  Someone paid to put it there.  And if no one is willing to sponsor real journalism, it isn't going to exist.   One of my ...

Rupert Murdoch announced this morning that News Corp will be charging readers for internet content. Now ain't that a surprise?  (That's sarcasm), BTW). News Corp is the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily Post, The Times of London, MySpace, The Fox Broadcasting Network and media outlets around the world.  It is unique in that it is pretty much the only multimedia company still making a profit, although those profits are not as big as they once were.  Mr. Murdoch doesn't like not making as much money as he was a year ago, so he's doing something about it. The Wall Street Journal has been charging for internet access for some time and they are making good money at it.  A few other publications have toyed with it, but people said bad things about them so they stopped.  Murdoch doesn't care what you think because he knows what he is producing is what people want and need. This move is what the print media world ha...

Brian McConnell at GigaO m gave a great post today on why advertising, especially online advertising, isn't working ask expected.  His position is that too many companies have given over their marketing strategy to the engineering departments, who are granularizing advertising and content to death. "Sometimes, people just like to shop," he explains simply. I'm not an advertising guy even though I understand the value of advertising in subsidizing the distribution of real information.  And I have to admit, that sometimes I forget that advertising is a form of information, no matter how biased.  What's getting me on this kick today is the realization that Twitter is turning us all into advertising copywriters. Twitter isn't much more than ad copy.  Everyone on it is selling something be it a position, an image and often a product.  They are trying to express in as few words as possible and idea that will get some traction.  Som...

Upgrades of Mobileme from Apple had the effect of breaking all the links to my podcasts, and rather than spend the time now to go back and recreate them, here's the link to the summaries.

The report this week in EE Times of the impending demise of the ultrawideband industry is an interesting case study in the importance of good marketing.   I had the dubious pleasure of advising two UWB companies in how to best make a name for themselves and the technology and had an even harder time getting them to do decent marketing than I did for any EDA company I worked with.  Like most technology companies, everything was run by engineers, including marketing.  They said they sold their product to engineers and knew how to talk the them.  They all said they had the leading technology and showed me all kinds of wonderful demonstrations to show how bullet proof their product was.  They insisted on exhibiting at CES to launch.  They insisted they only needed tactical help (setting up editor meetings).  Oh, and they didn't want an ongoing program. I was naive.  I thought the technology was cool.  I knew I could get meetings for...

Came out of by antihistamine fog just long enough to see an email from John Donovan at Portable Design.  It's the latest in the casualties of the media world restructuring.  Yep.  Portable Design is gone. The pub was purchased from Pennwell along with a few other properties by the RTC group.  Considering how broad the portable electronics market is, this is a sad state of affairs. John Donovan is on the street looking for work and I recommend considering him for video interviews.  The ones he did on the Portable Design site were quite good.