commbasics

The announcement of Steve Jobs taking another medical leave is an unfortunate but timely bit of news to put this series wrap up in perspective.  Jobs has established Apple as the leading consumer electronics company in the world.  For all intents and purposes, what Apple does drives the rest of the industry. Apple did not introduce the media player, it just made one that most people could use.  Apple did not introduce music sharing, it just made it legally acceptable.   Apple did not introduce the smart phone, it just made the smart phone practical for the mass market.  Apple did not introduce the tablet computer, it just reintroduced it when the public actually wanted one.  Jobs was at the center of all these decisions.  Important to note: Jobs is not an engineer.  He has some technical experience but he has stated the college course that was most responsible for the creation of the Mac was a calligraphy class he audited at Reed College,...

In the past two posts I've shown that the consumer electronic industry, with few notable exceptions, has consistently failed to address and meet the need of the buying public ; that the semiconductor industry that follows that lead has delivered suspect information regarding market demand; and that the support industries to the semi industry has no solid idea what their value is to their customer, much less express that value to them.  How have we got to to this place? First off, we have a leadership in place; and a generation of engineers in marketing that were trained by that leadership, whose frame of reference rests in the 1980s markets -- back when electronics was still in the entrepreneurial phase of its life.  In the 1980s, Lockheed Missiles and Space Division was still putting together technical documents with pen, ink and typewriters.  Semiconductor-based products were just the province or technology early adopters (nerds) and were considered generally be...

So yesterday I talked about the failure of the semiconductor industry, as a whole, to accurately anticipate much of the market need.  I identified the causes of that failure as an inadequate funding of the marketing effort as well as a pervasive preference to withhold accurate data from industry analysis that is relied upon to develop new products.  How deep does this go?  I’m going to use the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Industry as an example.  They support the semi industry with the tools they need to design and analyze complex products. At the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) industry forecast meeting this month it was pointed out that while semiconductor revenues have increased by double digits in 2010 while EDA is still in single digits (although it had decreased the previous two years).   Aart DeGeus, CEO of Synopsys, repeated an observation he has had many times in the past that EDA is not “getting its fair share” of the value i...

What do these things have in common? CES AMD board firing the CEO EDAC Annual Forecast meeting Articles about engineers not liking Twitter Give up? It’s all evidence that engineers need to be removed from corporate management in the semiconductors space... that includes electronic design automation (EDA) and test. The nation is either coming out of the recession or is on the cusp of a second recessionary dip.  Revenues in semi are up, Revenues in capital equipment are up, revenues in design automation are up. everyone should be breathing a sigh of relief, but there are ominous clouds on the horizon.  There was all the hoopla at CES about tablets and 4G wireless but the real undercurrent was there was no real innovation.   Not only was there little innovation on display but there were few product that anyone would actually want.  A widely reported study from Accenture showed that 95 percent of the products that were announced at CES would be returned with no def...

Looking back over the past decade has not been easy for me.  The recession really began in 1999 and is just now coming around in my view.  It's been a rough 10 years and I'd rather not dwell on it.  There have been some very good things that have come out of it, however.  One is the satisfaction that I was pretty much right how things would go (pat on the back), even though I was unable to change the outcome (sigh of resignation).  Another has been watching my family cope with the negative changes and seeing them adapt and support me and each other.  As an only child with two dead parents and no other family ties it has been great having these remarkable people teach me what family means... even though we don't seem to be like any other family we know. But the one grand thing of the past decade has been the new relationships that have developed over the past 10 years and that have been honed by the use of social media.  At present, I...