( DAC 99 Item 2 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]
The Numbers
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This year's DAC had a 30 percent drop in attendance. DAC'98 in San
Francisco had 21,800, DAC'99 in New Orleans had 15,000. In a nutshell,
DAC is an EDA shopping trip and this year none of the cashless students
came (because it cost too much) yet most of the serious sellers and buyers
still came. ( Student/University numbers -- mostly attendees signing up
for Free Monday was 6,000. This year it was 1,600 -- the same as the last
time DAC was in Las Vegas. Also, the number of exhibitor badges was down
significantly -- 6,700 this year compared to 8,000 in San Francisco.)
As a buyer, DAC'99 was a *better* place to do some serious comparision EDA
shopping. Those reduced crowds made it easier in those 4 short days to
quickly sort out what was 'hot', what was not, and you had a few thousand
other serious fellow buyers around to compare informal notes with. ( Try
doing that same amount of EDA shopping at home and it's wasted man-months
in meetings and a momba line of glad-handing, smiling, sleazy EDA
salesdroids parading through your company's conference rooms. Ugh.)
As a EDA seller, this year's DAC was either GREAT or it sucked big time;
all depending of if you had a 'hot' tool or not.
"The amount of money spent by the EDA companies to prepare for and
staff the show was outrageous. The customers would have been much
better off if all the vendors had merely written $1K checks to each
customer who attended and said, "have a good time on us." It would
have been much cheaper and the savings could have been used to
provide better tools and support."
- from an EDA vendor who didn't have a 'hot' tool.
"One aspect I liked this year was less people crowding out the booths.
I work at a medium sized company that buys a few licences so I usually
don't get as much attention as I see those Intel and SGI badges get.
This year I didn't have to fight for demo time like I did last year."
- from an EDA buyer
"What's Not So Hot: Aspec
Hate to say it but these guys are the most unenthusiastic bunch of
people. But I guess you can't blame them. They are trying to sell
libraries which no one cares about these days."
- an anon engineer
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