Did you hear that big crash at Cadence last week?

According to Barron's Online, last Wednesday on the CDNS quarterly call:

  "For Q3, the company sees revenue of $235 million to $245 million,
   with a non-GAAP loss of 9-11 cents a share.  The Street had been
   expecting $413 million and a profit of 40 cents."

Oh, crap, there's $173 million in missing sales for Cadence for Q3!

  "For the full year, Cadence sees revenue of $1.12 B to $1.14 B, with a
   non-GAAP profit of 1-5 cents a share.  The Street had been expecting
   $1.51 billion and profits of $1.16 a share."

That's a fancy way of saying Cadence lost $400 million in expected sales
for the full year!  Double crap!

But what caused the biggest buzz was during the CDNS financial call's Q&A
session, Terence Whalen of Citigroup (in very polite terms) questioned the
hostile bid on Mentor and even Mike Fister's leadership of Cadence.

  "Mike, your commentary is appreciated and you do paint a positive
   picture of the company's health, but from a share price point of
   view and from a financial perspective, from an analyst perspective
   looking inward, it honestly looks like the organization has really
   deteriorated over the past several years, and is facing an uncertain
   transition period with the model and a large risky acquisition."

  "Mike, I know some investors will be asking tomorrow, what the
   management plan going forward is post acquisition.  Can you give us
   several reasons why you're the right person to continue to lead
   Cadence into the acquisition and after?  And I ask that with all
   due respect."

WTF?!!!  I've never heard a Wall Street analyst EVER question in an official
financial conference call (that's being recorded and transcribed) if an EDA
CEO was the "right person to continue to lead" a company.  Whoa!

Don't take my word for it.  Here's the actual recording of the Q&A:

         http://www.deepchip.com/downloads/cadence_whalen.mp3

Notice how Fister is somewhat shocked by the question.  His first reaction
is: "Yea, I suppose you can have whatever opinion you want to have" followed
by his usual corporate answer.  At timestamp 4:34, Kevin Palatnik (Fister's
CFO) naturally backs Fister up.  Then at timestamp 5:23 in, Whalen politely
won't let the bullshit answers fly, so he comes at Fister AGAIN with:

  "And I am sorry to chime in again, but the last facet of my question
   was with regard to management.  Mike, what are you going to do over
   the next four or six, eight quarters to really rebuild confidence
   of the investor base in management, and to really get the business
   reaccelerating again?"

There's one thing reading the transcript of a financial call.  It's a whole
other thing to actually hear the tone of the words spoken.

         ----    ----    ----    ----    ----    ----   ----

According to Yahoo, CDNS shares traded at $10.31 before their announcement
and the next day CDNS shares tumbled to a low of $6.93 -- a 33% drop!

According the proxy statement on Cadence's own web page:

   In 2006, Mike Fister received $13,737,606 in total compensation.

   In 2007, Mike Fister received $13,509,651 in total compensation.

Using the standard 2000 hour work-year (40 hours per week X 50 weeks per
year minus the typical 2 weeks off for vacation = 2000 hours) Mike Fister
earns $6,811.80 per hour.  That's $113.53 per minute, or $1.89 per second!

Which begs the question: exactly what is Cadence getting for this money?