Last Thursday I was at the San Jose airport flying the AA nerd bird to Austin with my wife. No, not for business this time, but to join the celebration of my son’s wedding. But, the real world goes on around us 24 x 7 x 365!! So I am on a conference call with the other participants for IP-Extreme’s Constellations program on how to more effectively reach new customers.
As we shared anecdotes from our recent travels, one common observation regarding design programs – even with the workforce reductions that have become common place — is the consensus operating mode for most semiconductor companies is, as Warren Savage, IP-Extreme CEO says, “keep the schedule the customer originally wanted for the next product, even with fewer resources.”
Then… as I am in line to check baggage – and what a line it is — severe thunderstorms at DFW have shaken the schedules and the lines are getting overwhelming. Well, I am keeping my schedule, so I participate in my next 45-min conference call standing in the line waiting to check in. After the call ends, still in the same line in what seems like the same place, I am talking to the guy behind me. He worked at IBM, contributed to the AA Sabre reservation system and later went on to a fruitful career at Altera, where he recently retired. It turns out, he has a great idea for a new company and is now working to get first round funding. (I have two other CEO friends doing similar fund raising activities now as well).
We are talking about how important persistence is in the face of daily economic and business challenges. We both agreed how important it is to continue to work on your plan and not back off of the original vision.
So my new friend and I are talking away and we review our common experiential learning – need to have a good product with great confidence in the product’s capabilities; need to have a focused strategy that sustains your initiatives as prospects consider, evaluate and validate your product’s delivered value. And, of course – luck and timing – winning the right designs is key to moving ahead. The ultimate moral of this story: Combining a good product with the right schedule usually beats a better product entering a late market!
Schedules matter – getting a good enough solution to create value for our customers helps them make money. Too many times we want to take more time to provide a product that exceeds the requirements, then wonder why our customers don’t value what we provide.
Same message from a different market segment – Strategy Analytics’ recent update of market share for the mobile handset market shows that “Other” is growing. When looking how the Top 5 suppliers are faring – ‘Other’ has grown 30% in the last 5 calendar quarters. In many cases, the range of suppliers categorized as other are providing a ‘good enough’ solution to stimulate consumer purchase. In business, that’s a real tradeoff that inherently occurs, but it often seals the fate of a product’s overall effectiveness and market penetration.
For Sonics, in our customer meetings, we work to understand the critical measures that define ‘good enough’ and then show how we help the customer deliver a compelling product. Sonics enables the use of any IP, from any source, any time – and our customers have 100 successful designs to date, and have shipped more than 500M units, and counting…
Jack Browne at Sonics, Inc.
twitter.com/Jackb650