On a recent vacation in rural Florida, I got the "joy" of watching one of those trashy talk shows (in this case "Ricki Lake") on makeover day. That is, Ricki would parade out typical guests like "Karyn"-a poorly dressed, struggling single mother trying to support three children-give her a haircut and a new dress and suddenly Karyn's life was supposedly all better now. The "before" and "after" pictures would only span the single day Karyn spent with the Ricki Lake staff, so Karyn naturally was gushing in these comparisons. Do a follow-up a month later, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that you'd find an unhappy Karyn who is still a poorly dressed, struggling single mother trying to support three children-plus a not-so-new dress.
In the EDA world, a makeover is synonymous with "the Internet." Got an old, mediocre idea? Put it on the Web and suddenly it's a hot property that everyone wants!
Take tech manuals for instance. The people who write them usually aren't the big movers and shakers within their companies. But since Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com became hot Wall Street stocks, it isn't unusual now for an EDA CEO to become directly involved with the tech manual staff because that's the meat of what the EDA company is putting on its Web site.
Has their product line significantly changed? Nope. Are they showing new information? Usually not. Usually it's just the same old, same old that's been repackaged, renamed, and had a search engine slapped in front of it.
Oh, and now you also have every piece of corporate propaganda, every rah-rah press release, and those carefully cooked "product success stories" are now mixed in with the online tech manuals. Joy!
Cadence did this by renaming its entire product line. What really changed?
Nothing. Synopsys, Mentor and Avanti also did this but retained all their old product names unless it was tactically useful. For example, Avanti's old news, no-serious-customers "Planet-RTL" physical synthesis tool was renamed "Jupiter" at DAC'99, because Avanti needed a "new" product to counter the Synopsys physical synthesis Chip Architect publicity push.
Switch to the quasi-EDA world of FPGAs and the Web panacea hits new heights with "Club Xilinx"-the ultimate in Web corporate con games to make our single mom appear to look like Pamela Lee Anderson. Go to www.xilinx.com and ask yourself: "What has fundamentally changed with Xilinx FPGAs or software?"-and you'll see it's 98 percent hype, renaming, repackaging, and propaganda. Yeach.
The former CEO of Cadence, Joe Costello, accidentally summarized it: "The greed factor has gotten so large around the Internet opportunity and going public that people will try anything. This is the kind of market when pigs can fly. And if a pig can fly, then why not loft a dog or an elephant?"
John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC Designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com OR (508) 429-4357.
