Satisfaction is purchase orders, perferably in quantities of hundreds
and thousands, received from serious customers. Our VME 4-channel ARB
is approaching 500 sold, and our NMR temperature controller is close
to 4000.
In years past Princeton Applied Research seemed to do equally well. I
was a bit surprised when the PAR box-car integrator we'd ordered - on
the basis that it had been used by the Siemens physcists whose work we
were commercialising - didn't make it's 5MHz sampling rate, and in
fact fell over at a bit under 2MHz. I got it up to about 2.3MHz by
swapping faster TTL into the critical path but the design could never
have run at 5MHz.
If you are one of the few suppliers to a specialised market, you only
have to be better than your competition to sell well.
For electron beam testers the Cambridge U.K. company Lintech were the
first in the market, and they did very well - in spite of the dubious
quality of the electronics in their system - right up to the moment
when Schlumberger introduced a better tester. After that, they never
sold another machine. The joke was that the engineer - Neil Richardson
- who did a lot of the detailed design of the Lintech machine, left
them for Fairchild (who were taken over by Schlumberger) and was very
active in the design of the Schlumberger electron beam tester. which
fixed all the - many - obvious faults in the Lintech system. It wasn't
a brilliant design, but it was good enough. I designed a better
system, and got it working, but Graham Plows - who'd set up Lintech -
had then moved to Cambridge Instruments, and his sales-driven demands
on my design ended sabotaging the project as descisively as he'd
sabotaged Neil Richardson's work at Lintech.
Design is like skiing; neither is an intellectual activity. Both are
enhanced by doing with friends, with an occasional beer break. Or
coffee, depending.
Good design is an intellectual activity, but I'm happy to agree that
it works better in a co-operative environment, where everybody is
curious about everybody else's designs. About the only nice thing
about designing in pencil onto A0 drafting film was that everybody
could take a look at your work in progress and talk to you about the
design choices as they got drawn onto the board.
At EMI Central Research, the drawing boards tended to be surrounded by
coffe cups half-full of cold coffee, left by coffee drinkers who had
been distracted into a discussion of what was being drawn. We did
clean them up ourselves, but the discussions went on long enough that
there were always a few hanging around waiting to be taken care of.
What, if anything, do you find satisfying? Aside from pretending that
you are more intelligent than everyone else, which we all know about
already.
I don't pretend to be more intelligent than everyone else - that is
merely your reaction to the fact that I'm better informed than you and
Jim Thompson, which isn't anything to be proud of - and your
resentment of this undeniable fact is distinctly petty-minded.
I'd find it a lot more satisfying to be producing good electronic
design, but that doesn't seem to be an option in my present situation.
Give me some design work, and I won't have the time to expose the
daftness of your sillier opinions.
Mike
