commbasics

Osama bin Laden. Just about fell out of my chair this morning when I read a story in the SF Chron about how Osama bin Laden in his later days was concerned that al Qaida had an image problem .  Apparently their actions against the West, that include taking a lot of Muslim lives as collateral damage, has hampered their success. So what did he want to do? Change the name of the organization. Not research what his demographic wants to accomplish.  Not question the viability fo the product. Not review methodology. Change the name. Wow.  He could have qualified as a high-tech marketing exec with that kind of thinking.

The term “return on investment” (ROI) gets bandied about a lot in my business, as in “what’s the ROI of you service?”  We all know what that questions is supposed to mean: how much money can I make back from what I pay you?  But no matter how many statistics and case studies you throw at the questioner, the real question is: “How little can I actually pay you for your service?” I’ve started answering that question with another question: What is your content worth?  If the customer can answer that question, I can better answer their original question. Every company, especially engineering-driven companies, says their content has immense “value.”  They believe that their customers have an absolute need to hear what they have to say.  It is so vital that the customers very existence depends on purchasing a particular product or service.  At least, that’s generally how they answer the question.  But they can’t put a monetary value on that content....

The annual spin on the attendance numbers at the Design Automation Conference has been made, expressing, once again, exuberant optimism that the marketing cornerstone of the Electronic Design Automation industry has returned with full strength.  As usual, the optimism is misplaced. Here are the numbers based on information from the organizers. Total attendees 2011 in San Diego - 6,350 2010 in Anaheim - 6,001 2009 in San Francisco- 5,299 (Seems to be going up...) Full conference 2011- 1,746 2010 - 1,554 2009 - 1,888 (Flat, but nothing to worry about...)  Exhibit only 2011 - 2,006  2010 - 1,554 2009 - 3247 (Wild swing there, but it’s essentially flat.)  Number of companies exhibiting 2011- 204 2010 - 193 2009 - 202 (Again essentially flat) What can we learn from this?  Well, for one thing, there is nothing to really celebrate here. These numbers follow several years of absolute declines and the conference is still no where near the numbers of the industry hei...

News of the plummeting value of Chinese net company stocks  are throwing potential US IPOs into the "toilet of FUD" this morning, but the reality of the situation is probably good news for US companies without strong ties to China. Case in point is the tenuous, though deep investment of Yahoo into Alibaba (the Chinese Google).  Yahoo owns 43 percent of Alibaba and there was joy in Yahoo land over the success of AliPay (the Chinese PayPal), until the service was sold outright to the Alibaba CEO giving Yahoo 0 percent investment in AliPay. Seems the Chinese government, heavily invested in almost all Chinese corporations, are happy to sell shares of worthless companies to outside investors, but not so much when those companies actually make money.  The problem is that unless a Chinese company start making money pretty quick, the government pipeline gets cut off.  Hence the dropping value of a lot of internet companies in China. Since US companies get somet...

I didn’t go to the 2011 Design Automation Conference in San Diego because this year I decided to stay home and see what I could pick up virtually from video, audio and news coverage day to day.  It was much more cost effective and focused, despite the usual bandwidth problems with the convention center. My apologies for mixing metaphors but this is how I wrap up the issues arising out of DAC.  It is said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, but when your customers are up to their asses in alligators, vermin are not their critical problem.  Gary Smith gave his usual glowing report of the future for the industry (he thinks it’s well on the way to being a $6.6 Billion industry by 2015, and once again he claims that this year Electronic system level design (ESL) is going to be really big this year (just like it has every year for the past decade, according to Gary.)  But this year he added a big caveat. He said that the indus...

Just got the latest newsletter from Gabe Moretti. He opens with an overview of #DAC and gives a pretty good critique of the weak attempt to bring attention to embedded software at the conference, but about midway through he blames the media's lack of attention to the industry on parochialism.  He specifically calls out United Business Media's scheduling of ESC Chicago at the same time as DAC. "Finally, has anyone noticed that ESC20 is taking place in Chicago during DAC?  Once again the EDA industry falls victim of parochialism, and the greed to make money at the expense of both users and vendors.  People at UBM certainly knew the DAC schedule.  So couldn't they schedule ESC20 around DAC?" Let's call a spade a spade here. #EDA doesn't get attention from the media because they make no effort to explain themselves or their reason for being.  The attitude that "a good product sells itself" is stupid marketing, especially...

Regular readers of this blog know I'm a very big proponentn of the communication benefit of social media, especially it's innate ability to raise the level of communication above that of typical marketing bullshit.  You just can't control the message in social media. Or so I thought. In a recent tweet, Tom Foremski, the Silicon Valley Watcher, he dug out a 4-year-old Tech Crunch post from a Stanford engineering puke about how to get videos to go viral.  The author stated, quite frankly, that his methods violate the intent of sites like YouTube and provide several layers of misdirection to get views in seven figures for his clients.  In other words, he lies about the content to force viewers to see things that they really don't care about and wouldn't normally download. In the past few months I've come into contact with services to guarantee app downloads of 100,000 or more; payment for forwarding tweets (I tried it to see what they were talking...