harry … the ASIC guy

How much would you pay to be in the audience for some of the most thought provoking conference presentations from some of the greatest minds in the world. Here’s your ticket.

It’s FREE … completely FREE.

No registration. No airplanes. No hotels. No rental car.

While you sit at home, on a Sunday afternoon, drinking a beer.

Of course, nothing can completely replace the face to face interaction at a real conference. But in these “hard times” and with the technologies like flip cameras making video ubiquitous, it’s a damn good alternative.

It should be interesting to see what comes of DVCon, SNUG, and DAC this year in this regard. My prediction is that you will see an explosion of coverage. Videos (authorized and pirated) of presentations and floor and suite demos and interviews on flip cameras. Blog posts. Twitter feeds with customer hashtags.

What do you think?

harry the ASIC guy

Coffee Shop

This past Saturday I went to grab a cup of coffee at the local mom-n-pop coffee shop that I really like. There were no stirrers so I told the server that they were out.

“Yeah, we’ve been out for a few days. You can use a straw”.

“Why don’t you just go to the Smart and Final or the Von’s 30 feet away and grab a box”, I asked.

“I’m just the server, that’s not my job”.

Electrician

On Sunday I was talking to Chuck, one of the other parents at the YMCA Adventure guides induction ceremony and boat regatta. Chuck works as an installer for AT&T and also does electrical jobs when he gets a chance.  He’s a hard worker, putting in six 12-14 hour days each week.

As we talked, I suggested that he could set out on his own, make more money and work less hours. Like Joe the Plumber.

“I don’t need the headaches. If something goes wrong on a job today, it’s not my problem. It’s my bosses problem. If I own a business, then it’s all my problem.  I’d rather someone just give me the job and I do what I’m told.”

My Client’s Large Company

I was trying to install Office Communicator the other day and there was something wrong with my account on the server. I called IT and the woman on the line tried to help me but could not figure out what was wrong.  So she closed my ticket, the one with her name on it, and opened a new one for a specialist in Office Communicator to look into it.

About a week later, someone else in IT called me up to help me with my issue.  He was able to figure out what was wrong, but lacked the permissions to make the fix.  So he closed out my ticket, the one with his name on it, and opened a new one for the person with permissions to fix the problem.

A few days later, I rebooted my laptop and Office Communicator was now working.  Later that day I got 3 emails from IT requesting me to fill out a short survey regarding the resolution of my issue.

A Person I Work With

The other day I urgently needed help to run an analysis on a chip I’m working on. So I asked one of the people on the team who knows how to do it quickly.

“That’s  not one of the things I’m responsible for.”

______________________

Am I the only person not afflicted by the “not my job” disease? Has this really become such an ingrained part of American and corporate life?

I’m sorry, I just don’t think that way. If I see a problem, then it’s my problem.  Maybe I’m anal or a perfectionist or neurotic and maybe I need to let go.  But I’m just not wired that way. And I don’t understand people who are.

harry the ASIC guy

Since Cadence decided to disappoint us by canceling their earnings announcement and conference call at the last minute, it gives me a chance to share some other cool stuff going on.

Seth Godin released his new book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us.  If you are a Seth Godin fan, then you’ll need to get this book.  If you don’t know who he is, then you need to get this book too. Trust me.  You can order it on Amazon, or download it on iTunes or get it for Free at Audible.com.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen for pointing out a great Slideshare presentation on the credit crisis.

Last, on the topic of Software-as-a-Service for EDA, I wanted to point out a new demo on PDTi’s SpectaReg product. The demo is a little stiff, especially the pre-written copy. I’d rather hear the developer and a user speak honestly and passionately about why this is a cool product. But the fact that Jeremy Ralph is offering this product as SaaS makes him a kindred spirit, so I’ll cut him some slack. Good vibes!

That’s all for now.

harry the ASIC guy

During these last few weeks of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, many of us have become all too familiar with the term “leverage” as it applies to those entities that used to be called investment banks.  That kind of leverage is very powerful and is also very dangerous, as we all found out.

There is a 2nd type of leverage that we engineers learned about in basic physics. As Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”

But there is 3rd type of leverage that is “the power or ability to act or to influence people, events, decisions, etc.” Some people call it ROI. I’d like to share with you three examples that recently came to my attention whereby one small EDA company in our industry is using the principles of leverage to try to “move the world”.

Productive EDA

I came across these guys through my Google Reader when the President, Jeremy Ralph, posted the following new product announcement to the OVM World blogs.  Jeremy cleverly used the power of OVM World to reach hundreds (thousands?) of potential customers.  And what did he invest? Only the time it took to write the blog post and put it up.

That’s leverage!

But wait, there’s more.  Jeremy caught my interest when he called the SpectaReg product a Web2.0 application, so I clicked to view the press release and was pleasantly surprised to see that their “products are available online, at lower cost, as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)”. Well, I had been fooled just last week into thinking that Cadence was completely entering the SaaS market, so I wanted to make sure. After all, as President George W. Bush once cautioned, “fool me once, shame on…shame on you…you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” So I spoke to “President Ralph” on the phone, and indeed, this truly is a Web-based Software-as-a-Service, pay-per-use offering. Using the power of the internet and SaaS, his company is able to deploy its software to virtually any customer of any size anywhere, all from their office in Vancouver, BC.

That’s leverage!

But wait, there’s still more. I pointed Jeremy to xuropa.com, a recently launched online electronic design community and tradeshow platform, that I covered back in June and again three weeks ago. To his credit, Jeremy was already aware of Xuropa. I’m not sure where that will go, but his small EDA company would be able to reach even more potential customers worldwide and provide product training and evaluations through their online labs.

That’s leverage!

Leverage can be your friend. These new media business-to-business (B2B) strategies can enable smaller EDA companies like Productive EDA, which is exactly the type of company that I was considering when I wrote on my blog three weeks ago:

The pieces are coming together for a revolution in EDA. Like most revolutions, it is starting small, hardly noticed by the big guys on the block. In the next 5 years, it will change our industry forever by leveling the playing field, allowing smaller EDA companies to compete with larger ones, giving customers greater flexibility on how and when they access tools and which vendor’s tools they use.

Indeed, leverage can be your friend.

harry the ASIC guy

Last Saturday, my daughter earned her orange belt in Karate. So we decided to treat her to some ice cream at Baskin Robbins.

You would think that an ice cream shop just down the street from the YMCA on a Saturday afternoon in August would be packed with happy chocolate coated faces.  Yet, we were the only customers.  Strange….

As we ate our ice cream and I walked around I started to realize that something was odd.  See if you can guess from these pictures I took with my cell phone…

I’m sure the owner had a good reason for each of these signs. But taken together, the impression I got was that she didn’t trust her employees and she didn’t trust her customers. In short, she didn’t consider how her customers’ might interpret or misinterpret the message that these signs were supposed to convey.

Emails can be the same.

When you write an email, you know exactly what you mean to say. But emails are just words and words are open to misinterpretation. If you write something in haste or just the wrong way, you can give a false impression, even if you don’t mean to. As a simple example, here is an email that I received recently from a former co-worker to whom I had not spoken in over 10 years:

My son’s high school robotics team has a competition at Northridge this week, so we’re going to be in town.  Here is our rough itinerary (below).  Would love to meet you and Joyce and any others at some point on the itinerary.   Please make suggestions for an activity (spice it up a bit — think like a high school kid).

I’m sure that Dave just wanted to catch up on old times.  But I felt like I was being commissioned to plan an activity that was going to keep his high school age son, whom I had never met, from being bored. Not exactly what I had expected.

To be fair, I’ve done this too. What makes email so powerful, is that it is quick, easy, and immediate. And that is also the danger when it comes to misinterpretation.  Back in the “old days”, when we had to hand write and mail letters, we had plenty of time to choose our words carefully and read and rewrite what we had written. With email, you can just hit “send” and off it goes.

So, how can you and I keep from making this mistake?

A good rule of thumb, before sending an email, is to read it and ask “how might this email be misinterpreted”? Read it like you’re reading it for the first time. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipients. Try to anticipate what they might misinterpret and fix it. Especially if the email is important or sensitive. Especially if you are delivering bad news.

Better yet, if there is any doubt, pick up the phone or get off your butt and walk over to have a face-to-face conversation. And if it’s a real sensitive topic, discuss it over an ice cream.

harry the ASIC guy

About 5 years ago at Synopsys, I set up an internal email alias so that everybody working with one of our top customers, Qualcomm, could communicate important information to the entire team. All get on the same page. Make sure the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Make sure we were communicating the same data and recommendations. Account managers … applications engineers … consultants … R&D … all working as one well oiled machine. I must say, it was a great idea … on paper.

One morning, after driving down to the San Diego office, I hopped onto a 10 AM conference call and logged into my email. As I watched my Inbox load, I noticed that there were about half a dozen messages sent that morning back and forth between two individuals who reported to me on the Qualcomm team. All regarding the same subject. Each one sent less than 5 minutes after the previous email.

As I settled into the conference call, I took a look at the latest email in the thread to get a sense of what was going on. Apparently, there was a disagreement between two members of our team as to the correct approach to addressing some methodology issue.  That’s fine.  People disagree.  But this was different.

Have you ever been at a party and a couple starts arguing in front of everyone?  At first you ignore it and make believe you’re not aware.  But then the tone gets angrier and the language gets personal and the voices get louder. Until you can’t ignore it and everybody stops what they are doing to watch in embarrassment what is happening in public that should have been private.

That’s exactly what was happening on this email thread.  As emails 7, 8, and 9 came in, the tone got angrier and the language got personal and the voices got LOUDER. And thanks to the email alias I had set up, there were now about 25 other people watching this “couples spat”.

I had to stop this, but I was stuck on this damn conference call !!!

Forget about the actual issue. This was now a matter of saving these two individuals from the ridicule of others on that email alias that were witnessing this boxing match. I sent urgent emails to the two individuals asking them to stop the emails and that I’d speak to them at 11 AM.

Email #10. #11. #12.

Mercifully, the call ended a little early and I was able to reach the consultants on their cell phones. One of the individuals was a contrarian, so from my previous post on the subject you know that:

1. If everyone else wants to take road A, he wants to take road B.
2. If everyone else wants to take road B, he wants to take road C.
3. If you’ve got a plan, he’ll tell you why it won’t work.
4. Once he takes a stand on an issue, he’ll never give up.
5. He doesn’t really care what others think about him.
6. Every battle is worth fighting … to the death.

Bottom line, he thought there was nothing wrong with “having it out” over email with everyone else copied.  In fact, this was good documentation since everybody on the team could now see the rationale of how this decision was arrived at. He was just trying to get to the right answer and can’t be bothered about having to worry about other people’s feelings.

The other individual just couldn’t resist replying to the emails since they came so fast. And he totally forgot that everyone else was being copied. He was pretty embarrassed.

In the end, the damage to these individual’s reputations was not that bad. As it turns out, the one individual already had a reputation as a hothead and contrarian and the other was more the victim than the aggressor. Still, I overheard comments in the office that day about this “tiff” and, in the end, the issue was not really addressed.

The morale of this story is that there are two rules:

1) If it takes more than 3 or 4 emails back and forth, then pick up the phone or walk over to the other person’s office. Email is a very inefficient and slow way to have a discussion or solve a problem compared to good old fashioned talking about it. Still, sometimes, and this was apparently one of those times, people just find the allure of the quick email response too appealing to resist.

2) If you break rule #1, don’t be stupid enough to copy everybody else.

harry the ASIC guy

The prime directive drummed into me as a freshman AE (Applications Engineer) was to ALWAYS get back to the customer in a timely fashion.

Even if I did not have the answer…

Even if I was already working on the problem…

Even if I was not the person who could help him…

It’s practically no effort to return an email or a voice mail and just let your customer know what’s going on, so he’s not sitting in the dark.  A matter of fact, I’ll write the email for you and you can just fill in the blanks:

Hi <customer name here>,

I got your email regarding <problem, issue, question>. I’m going to <look at it tomorrow, send this on to R&D, ask my boss to handle it, etc>. I expect to have an update for you <in an hour, tomorrow, next week, etc.>. If you need an update sooner, please feel free to contact me directly.

Regards,

<your name here>

Simple, right?

I’m sure I’ll get little argument that this is the right way to treat real customers.  But, what about our internal customers?

In my job, I’m amazed at how long some people will “Delay the Game” without responding to an email, without a simple 1-minute acknowledgment that they would get back to me. Instead, I’m often left wondering what is going on, sometimes sending follow-up emails, voice mails, dropping by the office…all just to find out what is going on.

Look. I know you’re busy and you have more important people and issues to deal with than my little request. But, just realize that everybody that sends you an email asking for something (a question, a file, a meeting notice) is your customer. If you keep them in the dark by not responding, and you do this enough, you’ve lost your customer.

harry the ASIC guy

As I stated in my previous post, I’m starting a series of posts on “Email Penalties”…football style.  For the first penalty, to get into the swing of this, I thought we’d warm-up with one that happens every day and we all can relate to…

Too Many Men on the Field (5 yards)

More directly, too many people on the cc: list.

Several months ago, I came in to work to an email from Payroll that had been sent to a long list of distribution lists, informing us of new timekeeping processes.  Only one problem … I did not use the timekeeping system in question, but another one altogether. So, I did what any sane person would do … I ignored it.

I guess I was not the only person who had received this email in error. But apparently I was one of the few sane ones.

Throughout the morning, I received 3 or 4 emails from others like me, protesting that this did not apply to them and asking to be taken off of whatever email list had incorrectly tagged them. Fair enough, but only one problem.  Instead of replying directly to the sender only, they had hit “Reply All”, so I and everyone else on all these distribution lists now knew that Joe Smith (name made up) did not use this timekeeping system. What a waste!

The emails stopped around noon and so I figured this was over. I was wrong. This was only the tip of the iceberg and there was much more to come.

You see, a totally unrelated event had occurred that day.  There was a Blackberry outage so all the Blackberry users without email access had not seen this email. About 5pm the outage was resolved.  And thousands of Blackberry users checked their email and discovered this erroneous email sitting in their in boxes. And so, with fingers furiously striking tiny keys, they started to “Reply All”.  Peter had wandered into my office to discuss a technical issue, but every few seconds another email would interject from someone else that they “did not use this timecard system and please take me off the distribution list”.

This had become an event.

It was obvious after 15 minutes and dozens of emails that “Reply All” was not a good idea. There were numerous individuals sane and brave enough to admonish others not to “Reply All’ … in an email that they sent by hitting “Reply All”!!! Duh.

One person sent a “Reply All” that said “The Yankees are going all the way this year.”

Another said “Greetings from Virginia” to which came the reply “Greetings from Florida”.

“I’m not like all those others.  ADD ME TO YOUR LIST!!!!”

“I haven’t seen a reply from President Bush yet–or did I miss that one?  Go Sabres/Bill”

“Hi”

One person referenced the despair.com poster on Idiocy, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

I packed up to go home, a 20 minute drive, and found 200 more emails waiting for me. Eventually, the torrent subsided.

The next day, the entire company received an email from the CIO informing us that the previous day’s email “generated 15 million unnecessary emails” throughout the company.

harry the ASIC guy

There’s no debate that email has become at once a valuable tool and a misused and overused communications medium. Seth Godin recently posted an extensive email checklist of do’s and don’ts for marketing email. I’d like to do something similar for corporate and business email, the kind of day to day email we use at work.

I’m also big football fan.

(The American kind … my apologies to the international folks).

I won’t tell you which college and pro teams I root for, but their initials are USC and NYG

So, with the football season coming up, I thought I’d address the corporate email issue by suggesting some new penalties that need to be added to the game of “email”.

Starting Monday, I’ll be posting one each week, up until the football season begins. And I welcome your contributions as well, especially good stories and anecdotes that help to illustrate the new penalties.  Feel free to email them to me (harry at theASICguy dot com) or post them as comments.  And let me know if it’s OK to use your first name, full name, or no name.

harry the ASIC guy

(When Seth Godin posted this today, I knew I needed to add my voice to the discussion).

This past Sunday was already a bad day.

My 4 year old son had decided this was the day he would be “age appropriate” and assert his independence. (I won’t capture the details here, lest some day he decide to run for President, only to have this post show up on CNN and derail his campaign). As a result, he was no longer going to Mathew’s party, and Joyce and I weren’t going to get that 2 hour break we needed.

Instead, while Nate pouted in the other room, I tried to catch up on writing my blog post for Monday. I was halfway done when the little green DSL light started to blink and the Internet light went dark. At first, no panic. I had become used to these intermittent outages, usually lasting 2-3 minutes. Time to grab a Cherry Coke Zero, check on Nate, and all would be well when I came back.

Not exactly. The lights were still out. After about an hour, I decided I needed to prepare myself for the ordeal that is “Verizon customer support”. I’d called Verizon about half a dozen times with similar issues and knew my day was not going to get any better.

1st: The dreaded Voice Response System. After 30 years of using a touch tone phone, I know where the keys are, and so do most people. But instead of getting my customer info from my CallerID and routing met to a real person, I had to speak my way through 7 levels of voice response.

“No”.

“My phone number”

“Yes”

“Repair and Tech Support”

“DSL”

“Yes”

“Windows”

2nd: The dreaded wait on hold while listening to really bad music. The only break in the music was the voice interrupting every 20 seconds to tell me that my wait would be less than 10 minutes. Oh, and that I could get online support at the Verizon Web site. Duh!

3rd: 25 minutes later, a real person, who needs to once again verify my phone number and identity. After explaining the problem, he insists that I reboot my modem before he continue. Of course, having used Verizon before and being a hardware designer, that was the first thing I did. But he would not proceed unless I gave it one more try.

4th: “Do you have filters on the other lines?” “No, my filters somehow magically removed themselves from where they were a few hours ago”. I was getting annoyed now.

5th: “Maybe it’s your jack”. I knew it was not, but he was not going to help me until I went through the motions. So he had me crawl under the desk and disconnect the modem and reconnect in the living room to another jack. This took me 5 minutes…no difference. Then another 5 minutes to put the modem back where it was.

6th: “Could it be a problem on Verizon’s end?” I asked. “We’d know immediately if we had a problem in your area and there is no problem”.

7th: “We’ll send a technician out tomorrow. Please hold while I get dispatch on the line. It will be about 5 minutes”.

8th: 15 minutes later, “the dispatch computer system is down, so I can’t put you in touch with them. I’ll put this in as high priority and you’ll be called back within half an hour to schedule an appointment”

9th: 2 hours later, I get a call that someone will be out between 8am and 5pm. Yah, like we’ll sit home waiting all day. I ask them to call ahead and they say they’ll call half an hour before they come.

10th: 15 minutes later I get an automated call telling me that my issue was resolved. I look at the blinking DSL light and the black Internet light and say “NO”. OK, they’ll still come out.

11th: Late afternoon Monday, Joyce, who is trying to launch a new business (shameless plug), calls to see where they are. (See 1-3 above, except add in talking to someone in India who evidently had never heard numbers spoken out loud). “They came by at 12:10 and nobody was there”. Not true, she was there. In any case, they had determined that the problem was on Verizon’s end, despite their original assurance to the contrary (see #6), and it was fixed. Indeed, solid green lights.

12th: Since Monday, the outage seems to have been resolved, but it’s back to the 2-3 minute intermittent outages. So I call up again and this time speak to Derrick. He reads or recites from memory the standard excuses:

“It could be thunderstorms”.

“This is LA…we have 2 thunderstorms a year.”

“Could be that we were doing an upgrade”

“Several times a day”?

In any case, I insist that they open a ticket and someone tell me why my connection is so intermittent and fix it.

“You’ll be contacted within 48 hours.” Ticket # 197518950

Stay Tuned.

harry the ASIC guy