Mannerisms

There are few spectacles more enthralling than the electronics industry going through one of its periodic fits of mass delusion.

It’s enthralling because the electronics industry is full the clever people. The researchers win Nobel Prizes; the entrepreneurs are distinguished scientists; even the marketers have PhDs.

How can people of this quality regularly and collectively get it so wrong?

The most persistent delusion is that people want videophones. The first public demonstration of a videophone was at the Montreal World Fair in 1967. Since then it has been touted at regular intervals as the next great consumer product.

But it never has been. People obviously don’t want other people to see them when they’re on the phone. But periodically the electronics industry thinks that they should.

News Corp's Fox TV and movie studios are apparently talking to the GE subsidiary NBC Universal,the movie studio and TV company CBS, and the entertainemnt giant Viacom about putting their multi-hundred-billion dollar muscle behind a home movie-clip hosting site.

When the world moved from micro to nano, one of the myths which arose was that IDMs would win out over foundries.

Imagination is what grabs you about Las Vegas, the imagination which went into the building of the major hotels.

When it's quicker to walk and the weather's warm and dry, why do American prefer to take a taxi or a bus?

Stopping off for a bit of sun on the way back from CES I notice that a lot of the chaps have their swimming trunks on inside out.

Now I know what embedded means. It means boring. How can the world’s most creative and technologically dynamic industry produce an event so mind-numbingly boring as Embedded World?

There's a curious idea going around that the semiconductor industry is a mature industry ripe for consolidation.

Shades of Lord Gnome lecturing the UK from Villa Bourgainvillea in the South of France.

Last week something called the Electronics Leadership Council issued a report called 'Shaping the Future of UK Electronics'.

Gates or Samueli? When it comes to home networking, you have to make a big choice.

How is it that people who spend most of their time in offices get to be so macho in their work?

The home automation people seem to have missed what is absolutely obvious to everyone who lives in a home: that every piece of kit in it has a different plug, socket, and wireless interface.

For something like 30 years the status of engineers has been something that has been periodically bewailed.

Sitting with a glass of fizzy water over a one course lunch the other day I reflected that, in years to come, historians will look back on our age and call it The Age of Masochism.

Fashion is a funny thing. Apparently the Koreans have gone all woozy about the comic-strip type art of Roy Lichtentstein.

“As long ago as 1960, I listened to a well-respected engineer confidently forecast that 150-watt HF power transistors at prices comparable to valves of equivalent dissipation were but two years or so distant”, wrote Pat Hawker in the October 25th 1972 edition of Electronics Weekly.

Will home automation ever happen? Sharp was saying yesterday at its Innovation Forum in Munich that Zigbeee-enabled sensors are the means by which this could happen.

Recently,  I met a former Ferranti Semiconductors guy, now CEO of Xintronix, Steve Cliffe.

Thanks to a member of London Welsh RFC for this one:

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?Welsh_rugby_team_could_kill_the_Pope&in_article_id=450417&in_page_id=2

Makes you wonder: What should Welsh Catholics be praying for?

Buying the past happens more often than you might think. Especially when bureaucrats are doing the buying. When Japan's government decided to take over the world computer industry in the 1970s, Japan's bureaucrats decided that Japan should build home-grown, vertically integrated, mainframe companies - just as the computer industry was about to go for the PC.

Reports of the death of the gallium arsenide industry have been greatly exaggerated with GaAs ICs just short of being a $4 billion market last year, according to analysts Strategic Analytics. The 2008 market, at $3.9 billion, was 8 per cent up on 2007.

What a lot of time and money is being wasted duplicating other peoples' products. Microsoft has spent years producing Bing - a sub-standard alternative to Google's search engine, and Google has spent a fortune producing Android - now being dropped all-round as a Netbook OS - and gaining little traction as a Smartphone OS.

With the end of the G-20 conference, with nothing much decided on, it's time for us to face up to an unwelcome fact: whether it's the, G-7, G-8, G-20, Davos, Bilderberg, the UN or any other convocation of powerful people, nothing useful is going to come from it.

So what does fab-lite mean? Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, tried to figure out the answer at his company's International Electronics Forum 2009 (IEF 2009) in Geneva last week.

Thanks to Saxo Bank for this one - its ten 'Black Swan' events for 2010.

Can bankers and engineers get along together? It was interesting see Frans van Houten, former CEO of NXP, move to the banking group ING.

At all costs, chip company CEOs should avoid following Wall Street's recommendations on how to run a semiconductor company, it was stated at IFS 2010 in London last week.

Do I want to pay another £30 a month to a network operator?

Do I want to carry around a ten inch screen?

Do I want to read books on a bright screen?

Getting caught in a heavy snowstorm while visiting a pub or three, recently, I was surprised to find that my new, snazzy, nautical-style jacket was soaked through in seconds.

What can you get for the cost of an Olympic Games? Answer: A transition to 450mm wafers. Both cost between $25 billion and $30 billion. 

One of the remarkable things about technology evolution is that the TV and the PC have remained separate products despite many attempts to merge them. So what hope has the latest attempt from Google, Intel, Logitech and Sony to make them interchangeable?