Motherboard designers might be flattered (and buy enough parts) to have the LTC staff scientist to their plant, but these days, the pressure on designers is so severe that they'd get chummy with a salesperson if they though it would help them solve a problem. The tendency is to bypass the sales talk and get to the issue.

It is for this reason that Texas Instruments recently inaugurated a dedicated sales force for analog. The move is designed to cultivate the image of TI as a "service organization for analog," said John Szczsponik, TI's analog vice president. He said TI has 140 account people who are knowledgeable about the special concerns of analog engineers.

But there is a business down-side to sending all this analog knowledge into the field: Do you wind up spending hours hand-holding engineers whose companies will only buy several thousand pieces from you? Do you wind up doing all the design work for a customer who ultimately gives you only a small amount of business? And do your customers stop applying their own resources to an otherwise solvable problem?

Walt Jung, op amp guru and author of The IC Op Amp Cookbook, confessed to me once that he was resistant to tour with Analog Devices' field salespeople. He would often be faced with rooms full of attentive but naive young engineers who would pose the most basic questions. "Didn't they read my book?" he'd wonder.

But this kind expectation is not peculiar to analog. Norman Doyle, then Asia-Pacific sales manager for Altera, told me how his field applications staff would frequently be called into a big customer's facility to resolve some kind "parts-don't-work" crisis, only to come out muttering "RTFM" (read the effective manual).