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Scott Hamilton

With the 2010 Winter Olympics approaching, there has been some talk recently about those sports that Americans talk about once every 4 years. One of them is figure skating.

Now, I’m not much of a figure skating fan myself, but my mother-in-law is. And all this talk reminded me of the time we took her to an ice skating show at the LA Forum. It was not just any old show … it was Scott Hamilton’s return to figure skating after a fight with testicular cancer. Scott was as close to a superstar as there was in men’s figure skating, having invented the back-flip and won the Gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. So seeing him back on the ice was a feel good story.

The show featured a lot of other well known figure skaters, including Dorothy Hamill and Katerina Witt, but the climax was towards the end when Scott Hamilton took the ice. Cheers went through the crowd as he performed move after move, if not flawlessly, at least without major error. Then came the moment of truth. Scott would now perform his famous back-flip.

The lights dimmed. A lone spotlight. A drum roll. Scott Hamilton took a deep breath, began his run, turned backwards, took off ……. and fell

Obviously, it was disappointing. This show was being recorded and going to be shown a week later on Network TV, so unfortunately it would not be as great a moment as we’d anticipated.

When the show ended we started to gather our things when an announcement came over the PA that went something like this: “we’d like to do some extra takes of certain parts of the show. If you would like to stay, please come over to the west side of the forum and fill in the seats over there.”

What happened next I should have anticipated, but for some reason I was naive. The show producers proceeded to repeat parts of the performance where skaters had fallen or stumbled.  And of course, that included Scott Hamilton’s back-flip. Time after time the lights dimmed, the spotlight fell, and Scott skated and tried his back-flip. Finally, I think it was after 4 or 5 tries, Scott Hamilton nailed it and a roar went through the crowd.

I made a point of watching the performance when it aired on TV a week or so later. And sure enough, nobody fell or even slipped up. And of course, Scott Hamilton successfully executed his back-flip on his first try, to the cheers of a huge crowd.

Having been in the EDA business for many years, I know that a lot of EDA tool demos are a lot like Scott Hamilton’s return performance. If features don’t quite work, the demo avoids those features. Or if the feature is critical, then that is the one that gets fixed while other not-so-critical features may be left broken. It’s part of the smoke and mirrors that is the least well kept secret of EDA tool demos. The customer knows that the EDA company is avoiding the holes in its product.

But what if you don’t have big holes in your product? What if your tool really can nail that back-flip on the first pass? What if your tool really is a “game changer”? Won’t they believe you if you show them? After all, seeing is believing!

Unfortunately, customers have become so cynical and jaded about EDA tools and EDA salespeople that they hardly ever believe what they see anymore. I know. I’m also one of those customers. Read ESNUG or any one of the many EDA forums and you’ll know that I’m right.

But what if they could try the tool out themselves? No strings attached. That’s what we are trying to do with the Xuropa labs. To give your jaded, non-trusting, cynical customer a chance to try your fabulous tools himself.

“Seeing is believing” is no longer good enough. “Doing is believing” is the new reality.

If you’d like to see what a Xuropa Online Lab is like, you can try it out here. We’ve got some tools loaded and you can play with them as long as you like. No strings attached.

Oh, and to be fair to Scott Hamilton, here’s a video of him nailing that same back-flip just a few weeks ago. In this case, seeing is believing.

Posted under Xuropa, business, industry, marketing

We took my daughter to Disneyland this past Friday for her birthday. I know that she was playing hookie but please don’t call the cops. Her birthday was actually on Saturday but we decided to go on Friday because it would be less crowded and she’d get to go on a lot more rides. We had a great day and arrived home around 11pm dog tired and with sore feet.

On the way home, as the kids slept in the backseat, Joyce and I figured out that we were able to go on 12 attractions in about 7 hours at the park. Not bad. If we had gone on the weekend, no way we’d have been able to do as much, not to mention the frustration of waiting in long slow moving lines. Of course, Disneyland doesn’t want to frustrate its visitors or have them wait in long lines, but it can’t just add more rides and attractions on busy days and get rid of them on slow days.

Back in the 1970s, Disneyland tried to manage this issue by providing each visitor with a coupon book that contained a limited number of A, B, C, D, and E tickets, each type of ticket good for a different class of ride. The E Ticket was the most valuable, good for the most popular rides and attractions. In this way, Disney knew exactly how many visits there would be each day to each class of attraction.

Disnet E Tickey Circa 1970s

Which got me thinking that most corporate design centers are managed like Disneyland used to do it, IT departments handing out A - E tickets to its visitors via LSF in order to prioritize the use of limited CPUs and licenses. Like Disney, they can’t just easily drive up a truck of CPUs and licenses on busy days and send them back on slow days. In fact, it’s even harder for IT departments because you never know when a busy day or hour might come or what “attraction” will be the most popular.

But some of that may be changing.

Licensing has become much more flexible over the last few years. Cadence and Synopsys offer short-term licenses that allow customers to peak their license usage almost on demand for periods as short as a week. Cadence offers a license for mixed-mode simulation that allows customers to trade several A tickets for their basic analog simulator for an E ticket for their more advanced and expensive mixed-mode simulator. And I’m sure there are several other examples of which I am not aware.

Hardware is a lot more difficult. Whereas a peak license can be downloaded over the internet, hardware can’t be shipped and installed overnight. Or can it?

Cloud computing has been all the rage the last year or so and as it goes with rages there has been a lot of hype, misconceptions, and promises. And as is always the case, there emerges the first practical application of the over-hyped technology. We’re seeing the industry start to focus on so-called hybrid cloud environments that allow companies with captive private data centers to virtually provision additional peak resources from public clouds like Amazon EC2. There is a HUGE potential cost savings for companies operating large data centers. The Economist quotes a study by McKinsey that estimates “on average only 6% of data center capacity is used” since data centers are scaled for near peak capacity needs, not average needs. That’s like building Disneyland to handle the busiest day of the year and letting the rides sit idle the rest of the year. Good for the visitors but hardly cost effective.

With a hybrid cloud, data centers can scale to meet the needs of the users. For IT and CAD groups, adding additional CPUs and licenses is kinda like adding additional Splash Mountain ride capacity on a hot day.  For designers, it’s kinda like having your own private E Ticket ride whenever you want it. And for EDA companies, it’s a way to keep the IT, CAD, and design guys from getting frustrated.

No waiting in LSF queues.

No getting cut off in line by the VIP project.

Ride as much as you like whenever you like.

Surely, The Happiest Place on Earth!

Posted under Xuropa, industry

When I was in 11th grade, my Social Studies teacher, Mr. Lewis, took us on a field trip from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. That was the first time I ate “real” Chinese food and it was also my first time in a “real” bookstore, The Strand.

Back then, circa 1980, it was very common for people to go browsing in used bookstores, and I caught the bug real bad. Not only was it an affordable way for a kid to buy books, but there was also something exciting and addicting about the serendipity of the process, not the least of which was the intoxicating fragrance of those weathered and worn volumes.  It was like a treasure hunt.

I never went in looking for any one book in particular, but I always walked out with half a dozen or more books on totally different subjects. In fact, if you were to look at my bookshelf today, over 80% of the books were purchased as “previously owned”. That’s one of the great things about books … even when they are used, they still retain 100% of their value!

One of the books I’ve picked up over the years is “John Dewey on Education”, which is a compendium of excerpts of his various writings. For those of you who are unfamiliar, John Dewey was perhaps the most influential educational reformer of the late 19th and early 20th century, best known for his writings on the role of experience in education. In fact, several excerpts in this book are from Dewey’s other book, “Experience and Education“.

In this book, Dewey proposes 2 important ideas. First, that real learning only comes by connecting ideas with experience. Second, that every learning experience influences future learning experiences. For example, consider a child that touches a hot stove. Through that experience, he first learns that stoves are hot and not to be touched. A valuable lesson, indeed. Second, this experience teaches him to be cautious about touching objects he has not touched before. In that sense, it actually dampens his enthusiasm and curiosity for future experimentation, which can be harmful to future learning experiences. Not so good. As can be easily reasoned, the best learning happens through experiences that teach and also encourage future learning.

__________

Last week I came across a blog post by Jim Lipman entitled “So this is where Engineers get their Information“. It seems that Jim attended a seminar by eg3.com on how designers search on the internet. One portion of the blog post caught my attention:

In the “What do Designers Want” category, ‘hands-on’ items such as demos, software and evaluation kits rank very highly. On the flip side, vendor articles and webinars ranked moderately low and podcasts very low in response to a “What Information do you seek” question (the webinar response probably due to the same perception that I have that many are sales or marketing tools).

In other words, designers want to be educated through actual experience with the tools, not by listening to webinars or presentations or even podcasts. If you have spent any time around a teenager, you know that this tendency towards interactive experiences will only increase. No longer will designers be satisfied being passive receivers of information. Rather they will prefer, no, demand to be active participants.

Second, their experience accessing these forms of online learning will have an effect on their future learning habits. If they have to log in through several screens and enter personal information just to get access to a Webinar, fagetaboutit! They won’t come back. But if the process is simple and easy and the experience is smooth, they will come back.

That’s what we are trying to create at Xuropa. An environment where designers can learn by experience, by using your tools hands on and where they will come back again. We’re trying to make the process painless, just a simple password login and there they are using your tools in seconds. It’s not just another form of WebEx or VNC or any other screen sharing program as some have suggested, but a way for the designers to drive the tools themselves and learn first hand.

We’re just getting rolling and we’ve got a lot to learn by the experience as well. The process, although smooth, can still be improved. And we are working hard to get more valuable tools in place for designers to try out. If you are a designer reading this, go ahead and try out one of our labs and let us know what you liked and how we can improve. We really want to make this painless and rewarding for you. If you are in the EDA world, consider putting your tool in the hands of a customer and providing a learning experience whereby they fall in love with your tool.

It’s all about the Experience.

Posted under Xuropa, industry, marketing