commbasics

From the depths of EDA comes a common cry. Innovation!   John Cooley posted a kudo to an East Coast company from "West Coast EDA," praising it for an advertisement that was stolen directly from a four-year old, and very tired, insurance company campaign.  They even stole the face of the spokesperson for the company.  And "West Coast" called in an innovative concept.  Unbelievable.

I finished, John Cooley's latest reports about an hour ago and have been cogitating on his comments on engineers and Twitter (EE Times reported June 21 that 85 percent of semi design engineers don't like it). John said: "I thought this article was interesting because it also pointed to the  key reason WHY I don't like Twitter    -- my work requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration or I'll mess up what I'm doing." My initial reaction to this point was, "That's valid.  After all you need to learn how to be disciplined enough to know when to and not to pay attention to the conversation, and when to respond, before you can find value in social media." But then he said: "With Twitter you get endlessly pelted every few minutes with random, mostly useless tweets and retweets. "Running IE8 on my netbook is way too sloooow. Chrome is much fasssssster." "Go Red Sox!" "Getting on the plan...

I've learned a lot this past week in the people I ran across at the Design Automation conference.  I mentioned a few of those encounters earlier this week.  Things like the impending collapse of the Japanese media due to the same pressures facing media in the US and Europe.  But it wasn't the journalists that surprised me but the conference attendees, industry watchers and the investment community. John Cooley himself made the comment that EDA companies, particularly the larger companies, are no longer interested in making good technology.  "They're interested in business... in making money."  Investment banker after banker told me the same thing: the financial model is broken and there's nothing worth investing in or even buying. Yet, all the analysts said EDA is a crucial technology industry.  "They just can't seem to tell their story," one explained on condition of anonymity. And all the story tellers are go...