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...