From: Gabe Moretti <gmoretti=user domain=gabeoneda spot gone>

Hi, John,

I just attended the GSPx conference in Santa Clara Oct 30 - Nov 1 and it was
a ghost town.  I am sure there were less than 200 people overall registered.
Wally Rhines of Mentor gave the keynote speech on Tuesday night at 6:00 PM
and there were less than 100 people in the room.

It was an interesting speech, one Wally had delivered a few years back, but
updated to the new situation.  He described how he had became a success at
Texas Instruments.  The moral to his story was that the greatest component
was luck.  Yes, his team did have to build the right product at the right
time, but competitors had to fail.  TI also had to have the patience to allow
a group of perceived "failures" to build what they wanted and not what the
company wanted, and a major customer was true had to be to his word in spite
of the fact that doing so seemed the wrong business decision.  I wondered if
this is the reason that Mentor is more decentralized than the rest of the
EDA companies.

Before Wally's speech I talked to a vendor (one of the two with a large self
standing booth) and they said they only had 14 leads all day long.  This
conference used to be well attended.  Maybe it was the choice of the major
track: MobileTV.  There are not that many people in the Valley working on
this technology, the technology has not delivered a strong potential market,
not even in Japan a place obsessed with the cell phone.

All of the GSPx sessions were held upstairs in the smaller meeting rooms, so
some of the technical presentations seemed well attended.  It only takes 20
people or so to fill many of those rooms.

The press was mostly absent.  On Monday at GSPx, in fact, I saw most of the
local press people at an event ConfigCon going on next door.  I had not
heard of this conference, a workshop organized by ARC and DigiTimes, and I
ended up attending some of their presentations instead of the GSPx ones.
(The ConfigCon people even invited me to dinner, while I did not get any free
food from GSPx.  As you well know, John, this is a very determining factor
on how editors and analysts judge the viability of a conference.)  :)

So, will GSPx survive?  Does it serve any purpose not served by other better
attended conferences?  How many conferences does Silicon Valley really need?

    - Gabe Moretti
      GabeOnEDA.com                              Venice, FL


  Editor's Note: For those who don't know, Gabe has recently become of 
  the Editor-in-Chief of the new EDAdesignline.com website.  - John