Re: OT: OpenOffice not 100% compatible?

Hello Joel,


Depends on who runs them. When I ran the divison of a company that didn't fly. It's amazing how expensive upgrades can get if you are talking about dozens of stations. If an engineer had a compelling reason why a new version of FPGA or CAD tool was needed, fine. Otherwise I'd convince them to stick with the tried and true.

"Compelling," of course, can be somewhat subjective. :-)


We were pretty open with each other so that wasn't an issue there. They knew I was conservative with finances but they also knew why. We managed to bring that division into a nice and repeatable performance, and I am certainly not the only person to be credited for that because it was all one big team effort.


Personally I like the subscription plans that pretty much all the EDA tools have... not so much for the feature upgrades, which may or may not be useful, but for all the bug fixes. I think I've mentioned here before that unless you have an active maintenance agreement, Mentor graphics won't even let you examine the knowledgebase on their web site to help in troubleshooting a tool problem! (Much less actually let you download a service pack, of course.) To me that's the kind of corporate attitude I'd rather not deal with, but changing horses is quite expensive in re-training, translating libraries, etc...


Guess why I never used those tools :-)

Whenever a vendor inched towards mandatory service contracts and stuff like that I usually pulled the rug from underneath them.


... hence the usual problem where everyone agrees a particular tool really isn't all that good, but they keep on using it because -- at least on paper -- the cost of change looks too high.

I think that's the point where all the GOOD people at a company are supposed to leave and start a new company... :-)


It's a matter of communication. If the manager has an open door all the time and really means it people won't leave. And the manager must give engineers the chance to do it their way. The toughest one to let go for me was when the SW folks wanted to convert a design from my favorite realtime OS to Windows. I was not enthused, to put it mildly. They wanted it really bad and had some good arguments. So I told them "Ok, guys, but you'll have to make it work".

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
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