But seriously, there is one somewhat divisive part to an embargo. If you take a vendors release embargo, it means you can’t go to their competitors and get their views on the product. This in most cases doesn’t turn out to be a big deal because in the times I did actually get to talk to competitors for a new product announcement, they of course bashed their competitor’s product. In my many years of reporting, I never heard a vendor say of his competitor’s product, “Wow, that sounds way better than what we have” or “our customers love their product so much and they are cancelling their licensing with us like crazy.” Embargoes made the job manageable especially in the month or so leading up to DAC where we not only covered a ton of products but breaking news as well—and tried to do so as comprehensively as possible. Pop open the EET archives circa 2001 and see how many product writeups Rich and I did a week.

JB, I’ve never been to an editorial planning meeting with vendors to plan the timing of their product announcements. If they ever invited me to something like that, I would have had one hell of a cover story in the following Monday’s issue or even later that day on the web.

There have been publications throughout my career that didn’t want to honor embargoes, and that was fine. You just didn’t pre-brief them. No big deal, and hardly new.

If publications feel the world has changed enough that they want to ‘jump for it’, fine. I’ve certainly worked both ways.

But I think much of what our world cares about is not who breaks the news, but who ‘gets’ it. The stuff we talk about is technical and complicated. It isn’t something that you can pick up off a news release on the wire and deliver useful analysis to engineering readers. You want to talk to the company in detail and ask your tough questions. Telling people that somebody delivered a new product first doesn’t help if you can’t tell them what that tool does and why it’s relevant.

That’s where the differentiation comes in. Not in who does the story first, but in who does it _right_.

I do think, however, that being “first” with a story has become less important than being insightful. I doubt whether readers of Harry’s blog really cared whether it came out the same day Synphony was announced. What matters is his unique perspective and analysis. If Harry hadn’t received a pre-briefing under embargo, the blog would be no less valuable.

I have hated embargoes forever. I have hated them since I began my career at UPI where my job was to get my story on the wire faster and more accurately than the AP. To Ry’s point about fairness, at EE Times, the embargo dragged me down to the same gutter that my competitors wallowed.

The situation needs to be this: When a company announces something, that’s the first strike, the jump ball. Its press release hits the wire and then everybody takes their shot at building a story around it.

Nobody gathers in the mailroom anymore to pick up their weekly trade journals. They gather their information in burst mode online and so a Monday release date makes no sense.

In addition, the whole notion of a press release is anachronistic. We live in a info-streaming world; we should evolve our communications strategies and tactics accordingly.

Lastly, added kudos to Harry for covering an announcement in a Web-friendly/sensitive manner. We are bombarded by so much information that we generally know the story by the time we read the headline. The traditional press tells us what we already know (even online). To read a text-bloated story with no breakheds that parrots a company’s press release is a ticket to perdition.

Harry gives us an angle and insight we probably won’t get anywhere else and does so using some nice Web-useability techniques.

You did not talk much about the ghost of Behavioral Compiler and the view from within the application consultants on how they view this product? are they ready and excited to promote it ? I would predict that the Systems group has a hard time getting cycles from account teams, thus you have Innovators Dilemma, potentially good technology but no way to foster and grow it.

Also in terms of verification flow, you did not mention the need for formal equivalence between the user input model and the synthesized result. Calypto offers C-to-RTL equivalence, but no one offers M-to-RTL equivalence. Output of a gate level C model is good, but suffers the classic problem of dynamic stimulus verification being inherently incomplete. Bad logic bugs are a problem which can undermine confidence, particularly when they cannot be discovered. For any synthesis methodology to work there should be 1 golden source for verification, and the rest needs to be automatically statically verified through complete equivalence checking.

On the embargo topic, you are in good company as TechCrunch has established a no embargo rule after getting burned with their competitors jumping the gun and breaking embargo rules. I guess you are not large enough to set the rules yet, but others are making the same point. The good EDA editors like Richard Goering would actually conduct research, talk to competitors and contacts and have a balanced treatment with multiple points of view, all before a print deadline. Nowadays that balanced point of view can come about real-time through blogs like yours.

Second, I’ve got to agree with Ry. Most PR folks and especially journalists are not that sinister. From the journalist side, pre-embargoed briefings are as much a matter of work flow timing (allocation of resources) as anything else. There are so many things that deserve coverage, but not enought journalists to cover them.

In the past, journalists used to have editorial planning meetings with all the major companies to make sure all the important technical topics were covered in a year’s time. Naturally, vendors used this to their advantage, hoping to time technology coverage with product releases. But back when journalists covered the entire industry, such vendor specific advantage was minimal since all of technology was being covered anyway.

Just be to clear, I’m talking about cover that consists of actual content development (such as your blog) - which is what journalists used to do (and a few still do it). Not merely removing the adjectives from a press release and pitching it as content.

BTW: Major companies seldom want their names mentioned as reference in press release. Legal issues and whatnot.

You’re learning the ropes. Before long, you’ll be a journalist - whether you want to or not.

I was involved in a similar process when I was with Synopsys when we announced the Pilot Design Environment. We briefed the press and Cooley (this was before bloggers) and also embargoed the materials. The main concern of the PR people was controlling the timing of the message. They wanted to avoid it coming out when there were other hot news stories and industry events because it would have gotten buried. They wanted it on a certain day of the week. They wanted it to coincide with a speaking opportunity for one of the execs at a conference. None of it had to do with being fair to the journalists. You might be the only one.

Harry