( ESNUG 451 Item 11 ) ------------------------------------------- [02/08/06]
Subject: ( ESNUG 450 #9 ) Press Releases & Print Ads vs. User Word-of-Mouth
> I've found press releases to be rah-rah propaganda sheets put out by the
> Corporate Marketing spin doctors. Press releases are purposefully cooked
> to show only the overly simplistic happy-happy, joy-joy side of the story
> with all the ugly issues & bugs conviently missing. Sometimes the people
> quoted will later acknowledge they didn't even say what they're quoted as
> saying in a press release. From the perspective of an engineer who has
> to design chips that actually work on the real world, EDA press releases
> are the single most unreliable source of info about the news, capabilties
> and true status of a specific EDA tool. It's like trusting the tobacco
> companies to tell you the truth about cigarettes. D'oh!
From: Ajay Daga <ajay=user domain=fishtail-da spot calm>
Hi, John,
As the CEO of a small EDA start-up, in my experience press releases are a
lot of work to get approved and they're ineffective sales tools. What does
work is customer word of mouth in ESNUG. The engineers who email you tend
to be fair in their write-ups plus they provide the raw data from their
evals, tapeouts, etc. Our experience is the engineering community values
this data. It allows users to get realistic expectations on what they can
and can not get out of a EDA tool.
Case in point, the recent write up in ESNUG 450 #2 from a user regarding
a tapeout using our tools. Within 48 hours, I received 5 customer phone
calls about Focus -- 3 were new contacts asking about pricing; 2 more were
prior contacts who want to now start doing an eval of Focus. In addition,
visits to our web site went up 5X. Views of our online demo went up 3X.
We're a small company. Fancy print ads in EE Times would only drill a
hole in our bottom line and aren't effective anyway. In this competitive
business all of our dollars must go into R&D and customer support. We
rely on word of mouth to make our sales. Thank you for running ESNUG so
our user's experiences can get out there.
Finally, I'd like to address one issue that was brought up in ESNUG 450 #2.
Anurag said he successfully uses our automatic false-path generation and
user-defined MCP verification tools. He also mentioned that he wasn't
using our MCP generation because he found some of the MCPs we generated
were incorrect. FYI, the way our MCP generation works is that Focus writes
out MCPs plus assertions for those MCPs. The assertions state what must
hold for the MCP to be correct. The user takes those assertions through
ModelSim/VCS/NC/0-in/Magellan and filters out MCPs whose assertion don't
pass. Typically customers find that at least 95% of the MCPs we generate
are verifiably correct.
- Ajay Daga
Fishtail DA, Inc. Lake Oswego, OR
Index
|
|
