( ESNUG 339 Item 11 ) -------------------------------------------- [1/13/00]
From: John Cooley <jcooley@world.std.com>
Subject: Cooley Provides More Data On The Synopsys VERA Marketing Fiasco
What caused me to write that Industry Gadfly column publically questioning
VERA's supposed success was the Synopsys press announcement where they
promoted Gulam Nurie to a VP. Check it out. One of my "jobs" as an EDA
consumer advocate is to debunk the really outrageous claims some of these
EDA companies try to pull on users. And when I read in that press release
that Synopsys was claiming that they had 5,000 VERA users, my bullshit
detectors went off. It's like me claiming that I've been crowned the King
of the Elves and putting out a press release saying that plus the fact that
I had 5,000 elves living in my basement. Of course I can't show you the
elves because they're too shy. Honest. They're there. Just trust me, OK?
OK, given the "you can't go in my basement" restriction, a clever engineer
could at least test the veracity of the "5,000 elves living in my basement"
claim by checking all the indirect evidence. How so? Well, 5,000 elves
would eat food, drink water, (presumably) need showers & toilets, and have
occasional accidental interactions with humans. That is, they'd have a
serious impact on my water, electricty, sewer, and heating bills plus
somehow the local grocery stores would be feeding these 5,000. On trash
day, I'd see a mountain of trash set out on the curb from these 5,000 elves.
Also, there would be random police reports concerning accidental elf/human
interactions; sightings, unexpected car-hits-elf incidents, thefts,
altercations, etc. You simply can't have 5,000 elves without an impact.
You also can't have 5,000 VERA users without an impact.
Do the quantitative comparisons and you'll see what I mean. I searched in
the ESNUG archive and found only 5 VERA letters for the 1999 calendar year.
Pretty low. For Verilog, I found 110 user letters. OK. When I went to
the newsgroup archives at www.deja.com, for the 1999 calendar year in the
comp.* newsgroups I found:
Number of Min. Number Annual User
EDA Keyword Deja letters of Users Letter Rate
-------------- ------------ ----------- -------------
"Verilog" 4,300 19,207 22.4% OK...
"VHDL" 6,600 24,374 27.1% OK...
"DC" or "Design Compiler" 1,500 16,000 9.4% OK...
"Synplicity" 328 3,500 9.4% OK...
"VERA" 32 "5,000" 0.6% Huh???
Annual User Letter Rate = ( # of 1999 Deja Letters / # of Users ) x 100%
The "Min. Number of Users" are numbers I got from Dataquest or, in one case,
from my contacts at Synplicity EDA. (I researched Synplicity because
it's a VERY simple tool to use -- so it should probably have a lower than
normal User Letter Rate -- and it's a very unique word -- easy to find in
the archives.) And here's where the VERA marketing claims fall apart. From
this data, it appears that a baseline Letter Rate of ~10% is to be expected
for really easy to use EDA tools like Synplicity or for mature tools like
DC. Complicated, involved-to-use software like Verilog or VHDL has a Letter
Rate of roughly 25%. Makes sense. They're more complicated, so users
should be writing about them. And I'll wager that complicated functional
verification software like VERA is more akin to Verilog than Synplicity, so
it should have a Letter Rate of roughly 25%. Instead it had a lame 0.6%
Letter Rate!!! If VERA really did have these 5,000 users, there should have
been at least 500 (~10%) to at most 1,250 (~25%) VERA letters swiming around
on the Internet instead of those paltry 32! (And 10 of those VERA letters
were within the last 2 months of 1999!)
In the 1999 Synopsys Customer Education schedule, there were 45 VHDL and
53 Verilog oriented classes pre-scheduled for 1999. Although it does
mention a VERA class, zero VERA classes were pre-scheduled for 1999. Huh?
So, either VERA has 5,000 abnormally quiet and ultra-satisfied users who
didn't need to be trained on how to use it - OR - Synopsys VERA marketing
is trying to pull a fast one on us. And until I start seeing more actual
evidence of the supposed 5,000 VERA elves alleged to be living in Gulam
Nurie's basement, I'll keep publically yarping about fast ones.
- John Cooley
King of the Elves
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