Author Archives: paulmcl

SaaS for EDA

SaaS, or software as a service, is the capability to deliver software over the net. In web 1.0 years this was called the ASP model, for application service provider. The archetypal company doing this is Salesforce.com, which provides customer relationship … Continue reading

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Royalties

Venture capitalists love royalties. They love royalties because they think that they might get an unexpected upside since they are hoping that a customer, in effect, signs up for a royalty and sells far more of their product than they … Continue reading

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Wall Street values

Wall Street does a terrible job of valuing investment. I’ve talked earlier about how financial accounting standards do a poor job of capturing the value of many modern companies in their balance sheet. But Wall Street is driven by people … Continue reading

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FPGA software

Why isn’t there a large thriving FPGA software market? After all, something like 95% of semiconductor designs are FPGA so there should be scope for somebody to be successful in that market. If the big EDA companies have the wrong … Continue reading

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Ready for liftoff?

I talked earlier about how it seems to take $6M to build a channel in EDA once you get to the “just add water” stage where all you need to do is to ramp up a salesforce and distribution. However, … Continue reading

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Downturn

Superficially, the present downturn is similar to the “technology” crash of 2001. I put technology in quotes since very little of that first internet boom involved true technology, and many people who called themselves programmers were writing plain HTML. As … Continue reading

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Creating demand in EDA

I talked earlier about how EDA marketing can’t create demand. Small companies cannot afford much marketing and large companies are in the vicious cycle of not being able to get innovation into the channel since they can’t create demand even … Continue reading

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Presentations without bullets

I talked earlier about the typical hi-tech presentation where the content is largely on the slides. In that case you must add color by what you say rather than simply reading what is on the slides. The alternative approach is … Continue reading

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Swiffering new EDA tools

Why isn’t a new EDA tool like Swiffer? One point that I’ve made before is that big EDA companies suffer from being unable to get new products into their channel. As I said earlier: “When so much is riding on … Continue reading

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The art of presentations

As a marketing guy, and even when I was an engineering manager, I make a lot of presentations. I’ve also been on a couple of presentation courses over the years. The most recently by Nancy Duarte, whose biggest claim to … Continue reading

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