( DVcon 07 Item 10 ) -------------------------------------------- [ 04/26/07 ]
Subject: Mike Fister doubts this is statistically relevant
SALARY TIME -- When I released the Part 1 results of this survey on Tuesday
morning, I didn't know that Cadence was having it's 2007 Q1 earnings call
on Wednesday night. (Moment-by-moment EDA financials aren't a major concern
of mine.) After the Cadence call, two different EDA financial guys phoned
me and said Mike Fister had directly attacked this Census in the call after
one of the Wall Street analysts had asked him about it.
"You know, I read that with some interest. I think there was something
like a 3% return rate, so I don't even know if it was statistically
relevant. The body language from our customers is that the trail
blazers that are out there with "e" are happy as a clam and pushing
along forward. Those are really complex digital devices. There's a
lot of momentum in VHDL and Verilog as it exists and there's a lot
of *hype* for System Verilog."
- Cadence CEO Mike Fister in his Q1 2007 earnings call
I put *'s around "hype" because Fister's voice in the recording stressed the
word *hype* here. He then warned more about disinformation and SV:
"You have potential fodder out there, or FUD, around the convergence
of a System Verilog across all the different continuum and you know
that's going to be a tough thing to do. That may take 10 years as
far as I'm concerned."
- Cadence CEO Mike Fister in his Q1 2007 earnings call
I'll be honest and confess that I laughed when I first heard this because I
predicted this reaction on the first page of this report. (See DVcon07-01.)
My second question was "what is this 3% that Fister is talking about?" Then
I figured 818 responses / 25,000 ESNUG subscribers = 3.2%. That must be it.
Hmmm... I'm not a statistician. So I phoned Gary Smith about this 3%.
"Heck, 818 responses is plenty. We do directed surveys all the
time and easily as few as 35 responses in a selected category can
be statistically significant. Fister needs to track these
subcategories very closely to know. So far, Cadence has not been
open at all about outside information coming into the company."
- Gary Smith of Gary Smith EDA
OK, so I'm not drinking my own Kool-Aid in this survey. Crap! And I'm just
now remembering all those CNN polls where they only asked *500* people about
some Big Issue -- and *that* poll data is considered statistically kosher
to represent the attitudes of 300 million Americans! Crap.
All this barking was just Mike Fister protecting his $4 M paycheck. Funny.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair, American author (1878 - 1968)
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