Tuesday Sep. 18, 2007
It's like Déjà vu all over again
Many of my friends in the U.K. and Europe won’t appreciate an American sports legend, Yogi Berra. But Berra was a solid catcher for the New York Yankees during their golden days of the 1950’s. But Yogi is most famous for his “Berra-isms”, his unusual knack for mangling the English language in his own brand of folksy wisdom. Impossible to describe, so here are some examples:
• “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
• “You can observe a lot by watching.”
• “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
• “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”
I was struck by another Berra-ism, “It's like Déjà vu all over again”, when reading the announcement last week (Group proposes new IP association) about a new standards body forming around the topic of IP.
The industry has been littered with dead bodies of organizations trying to herd the IP cats for more than 10 years now. As John Lennon famously penned, “some are dead and some living, in my life I loved them all.” Let’s have a look at the organizations that have tried in the past:
• RAPID (dead)
• VCX (dead)
• VSIA (recently dead)
• FSA (living)
• OCP-IP (living)
• SPIRIT (living)
• IP Industry Association or IIA (newly living)
Sometimes “standards” organizations are thinly-veiled market orchestrations led by companies that can see a strategic advantage to controlling the standards. I’m shocked! And bully for the company(s) that can successfully do this.
However, I might caution the nascent IIA to step back and take a lesson from some of their wounded and fallen brethren. Don’t let ambition blind you from important learnings that can help avoid the failures of the past. A few suggestions:
• Clearly identify the value you bring to customers (in real money terms)
• Clearly identify the value you bring the IP developer (in real money terms)
• Make it open, not a club—nobody likes a clique
Certainly what the IIS is trying to do is worthy, and I commend all these organizations for trying to make the IP market a better place. There’s a long way to go and I think Yogi probably put it best in saying, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
|
|
RSS Feed
Add this blog to your RSS newsreader!
Archives
IP Urban Legends
Transparency Arrives
Goodbye 2007 -- Hello 2008
Don't Fence Me In
Enable Your Dreams with IP
Power to the People
Black Swans on IP Lake
Cindarella stood up at the System Verilog Ball
News of our Death Greatly Exaggated
About the Author
Warren Savage, President and CEO of IPextreme, is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property.
He has a long history of pushing the envelope of design methodology from his work in fault tolerant computing at Tandem Computers in the 1980's and driving reliable design metholologies into commercial practice at Synopsys for its DesignWare IP product in the 1990s.
Much of his thinking became embodied in the seminal book on IP reuse, the Reuse Methodology Manual. Warren is taking his vision to the next level with his latest company, IPextreme, which is focused on enabling broad commercialization of IP captive in large semiconductor companies.
|
