Synopsys

Last year’s Design Automation Conference was kind of quiet and dull, muted by the impact of the global recession with low attendance and just not a lot of real interesting new developments. This year looks very different; I’m actually having to make some tough choices of what sessions to attend. And with all the recent acquisitions by Cadence and Synopsys, the landscape is changing all around, which will make for some interesting discussion. I’ll be at the conference Monday through Wednesday.

The other day, I was listening to John Wall interview Simon Sinek on the Marketing over Coffee Podcast. Simon Sinek is a marketing consultant and motivational speaker and has a book out entitled “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” In addition to the podcast interview, I also came across the following presentation that Simon gave at a TedX conference a few months ago. To make a long-story short, the key premise is that companies spend too much time marketing what they do and how they do it better than the other guy.

I was contacted a few weeks ago by Synopsys’ PR agency to see if I’d be interested in covering an upcoming product announcement. I usually ignore these “opportunities” since the information provided is usually carefully wordsmithed marketing gobbledygook and not enough for me to really form an opinion. However, it turned out that this announcement was on a subject I know a little bit about, so I took them up on their offer. The announcement was “embargoed“, that is, I was not to make it public until today.

Our summer has been pretty hectic and full of uncertainty, so we put off planning a short vacation until just this past weekend. We usually go up to Big Bear and stay at this one place that is dog friendly and has a pool for the kids and is close to town. We’ve stayed there 3 times before and have always been very happy. This past Saturday morning, I Googled the name of the resort in order to get the web address when I noticed that there was a Trip Advisor listing for the place. So, I thought I’d check it out. Much to my surprise there was a slew of negative reviews.