Holy crap!  Richard Goering just reported today that Gartner-Dataquest is
getting out of the EDA stats business!  For as long as I can remember,
there's always been some sort of Dataquest analyst covering EDA.  I called
Richard up to see how he got the story.  "I got an email from Daya saying
I should talk to Gary Smith.  They're closing down their entire Design &
Engineering group at Gartner -- which is 5 people and not just EDA but
embedded software, mechanical CAD, and architectural CAD, too.  Gary seemed
disappointed but hopes to keep the group together.  He wants to find a new
home for it," said Richard.  "Gary was the one independent voice we had
providing market analysis in EDA.  I only hope that every EDA vendor doesn't
try to claim 90% market share in everything now.  I'm frustrated.  Who do
you call now to get an independent view?"

Richard also reported that the Gartner Design & Engineering group consisted
of Gary Smith, Daya Nadamuni, Laurie Balch, Sharon Tan, and Nancy Wu.  And
it's scheduled to close on (Halloween Night) Oct. 31st.

It turns out that Mike Santarini also got the same story and wrote it up
on his blog.  I called Mike up and got a guy with a very sniffly head cold
telling me: "We're screwed.  The whole industry.  Anyone can now stand up
and say 'blah, blah, blah, we have 99.99% market share' and there's no
objective person we can call to check it," said Mike.  "Gary's been a 
fixture for my entire 11 year career of covering EDA.  He pushed EDA in
directions it needed at the time.  ESL, DFM, Silicon Virtual Prototypes,
ESDA were all themes he saw and promoted.  Some have proven out; some
didn't; some are still in the works.  But at least there was someone doing
that.  It's kind of sad.  Even though the FPGA and EDA industries are
around the same size, FPGA has around 1/2 a dozen market analysts and
now EDA has 0.  I'm not talking about Wall Street types, but independant
market research analysts like Instat, Semico, iSuppli, and even Gartner."

My own reaction?  Richard and Mike are right.  This sucks to lose Gary.  :(