Dec 14, 2009 at 12:00
After my daughter was born in 1994, my career also changed direction. That was when I joined Electronic Design Magazine as Analog Editor working alongside Frank Goodenough, that veteran ex-ADI employee who was such an enthusiastic man about technology. His writing was, quite honestly, dreadful in grammatical and structural quality but at that time we had a copy desk that could deal – for the most part – with the ramblings from the Editors, who were all engineers. It was fascinating to me that one of our major analog vendors continued for years to try to hire Frank as a technical writer: they had no idea of the trouble they would have brought on themselves. Frank has gone and I still miss him and his enthusiasm. On one trip to the Valley (when I was still living there) we turned up for an appointment, incorrectly on the wrong day, and the look on the PR Manager’s face – when he thought it was his problem – was an historical moment. Frank was somewhat of a power house in the analog business, but he was also easily persuaded to sign an NDA or two, to cover a new product or technology: something that I will never do.
PR people would do literally anything to land a cover story in ED at that time. Analog advertising brought 80% of the revenue to the magazine but we only had about 20% of the Editorial content allocated to us. I had substantial money offered to me, I had sex offered to me, in return for a cover story. I took neither… but the cover stories I wrote were monumental in the success of the products and the companies involved, including subsequent buy-outs of start-up operations.
Those were also still the days when news releases arrived by FedEx, by the inch, and were inevitably followed by a phone call from a junior at the PR company with a “did you get our FedEx package?” question. The notion that FedEx could better answer seemed to have little consequence to their rather dull lives. And, unfortunately, it remains true today that the number of effective PR agencies – or even personnel – can be counted on one hand.
Nowadays, of course, e-mail is supreme and I currently have 63 messages, from just today, unanswered in my in-box. Many of them will get deleted, no doubt, after I read that they are about clean coal, the new untapped clean natural gas, the great things about nuclear energy, the bad things about nuclear energy, audio domination, new toys for Christmas, and all the stuff about the US health care debate (or lack of debate). I have no idea how I have been planted on so many lists.
What I don’t get these days is fake announcements. The companies that I deal with seem to have come to the understanding that fake is not something to fly with me very far. Be it an announcement for a product that isn’t going to be delivered for another nine months – just to put the competition off kilter for a while – or data that just does not make any sense, those messages do not get to me. Until this week…
Yes, this week I received an announcement about what an analog vendor considered a hot product. I’m not going to get into the details because they are kind of secondary to the story. What is important, in my opinion, is that I offered an opportunity after a phone briefing – something I don’t do very often because products tend to be very obvious to me in intention and architecture – for the vendor to get out of the conundrum of factual inexactitudes, particularly as a follow-up e-mail wanted to treat me as a junior engineer who obviously didn’t understand filters. Send me, I asked, a couple of paragraphs about why a company would choose this product.
The reply was: ”I briefly talked to X as he was rushing off [to, sic.] a corporate design review that will tie him up until 5:30 or 6:00pm tonight. So we are respectfully declining your offer to provide a couple of paragraphs of why customers will find this part acceptable. I spoke to Y on this part and he told me off the record that we already have about 10 customers committed to (it), but he declined to put it in writing. So I will have to pass on this one.”
QED?
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