Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Just how unsexy is EDA?

April Fools in October? I thought I must be reading a joke: in Life without Dataquest, Gabe Moretti reports that research firm Gartner Dataquest has dropped coverage of the EDA industry, and laid off reknowned analyst Gary Smith and his colleagues.

This is disturbing. I don't like changes like this! Dataquest (and Gary) have been covering the EDA industry for many years, providing analysis and prognostications, that, agree with them or not, were a starting point for debating the direction of EDA technology.

Let's hope that Gary and crew resurface to share their wisdom and opinions again. Best wishes to them.

10/25 Update: see the "backstory" and lots of comments from EDA industry personnel in John Cooley's article on Gary Smith's departure.

6 comments:

德漂理财 said...

Yes, that's sad.
I guess they may start a small consulting firm, as Gabe hinted.

Anonymous said...

Did you see Joe Costello's keynote at Dac'06 - 'look where the fishies are ...'

I still cant believe that they let him do that keynote at DAC.

John said...

Sandeep, what were the main points of Joe Costello's keynote? Do you know if it's available online?

My general impression is that Joe is a super-charismatic guy, but he hasn't kept up with EDA since he left the industry.
I think he's involved in the Mechancial CAD industry now.

Anonymous said...

http://videos.dac.com/43rd/costello/costello256.wmv

Costello is now CEO of Orb networks - in the media and streaming industry. IT has been getting some pretty good reviews.

Anonymous said...

Baseball had a golden age because you had a wildly dominant team. It gave casual fans someone to root for and they were easy to remember.

In EDA, having a big gorilla is bad. The startup costs are too high for me to fund it myself and, unless I already HAVE the cutting edge technology,* a VC won't fund it because there's no exit strategy beyond selling to Cadence, etc.

And they just won't do that much in the near future. If I were Fister walking into Cadence and seeing 5 simulators, I'd want to know how to get that number down and I'd shoot the person who came to me and wanted to add another one.

EDA is unsexy because you don't need a whole group to distill info from 5 companies into a market analysis. It isn't doing anything exciting enough to merit the attention.


*However, should you have cutting edge technology and can afford to starve while it ramps up, let's talk about that.

Anonymous said...

Gary and most the rest of the crew are at http://www.garysmitheda.com/

They seem to be doing much the same work that they were before.

Sean Murphy http://www.skmurphy.com/