On Cores
Meditations on the semiconductor and IP industries
By Warren Savage, CEO, IPextreme
Wednesday Jun. 20, 2007
Help! I'm in PowerPoint Hell
Ever have that feeling that perhaps you're just a little too familiar with arcane PowerPoint features? Is there a queue of presentations just waiting for you to write? Wonder whether a little nip there, little tuck there, can tweak that tired old presentation into a real winner that will make customers go gaga?
Yea, me too. I call this blackness-- PowerPoint Hell.
Edward W. Tufte (www.tufte.com) so eloquently describes why PowerPoint is just about the WORST medium possible for communicating information as quoted from his seminal book "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitch Out Corrupts Within", in which he writes "PowerPoint, compared to other presentation tools, reduces the serious analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence. This is especially the case for the PowerPoint ready-made templates which corrupt statistical reasoning and weaken spatial and verbal reasoning." Strong words indeed for our most favorite business communication medium.
Almost all pitch masters, and certainly all IP marketers find PowerPoint as their master medium. While strong on theatrics and style, the key messages they try to convey struggle to find their way to the surface. Aside from the evils of PowerPoint, why is that?
Simple. In addition to trying to get their key positive points out, most marketing techniques involve trying to bury the negative points. Its sort of like noise-cancelling headphones, the bad cancels the good, leaving an empty story in its wake.
My advice to IP buyers is to try to pick up on the good and bad vibes in your IP suppliers' pitch. Let me suggest a couple cutting questions to cut through the crosstalk:
1. What's the most important thing about your product that's not in the presentation?
2. What the most important thing your presentation doesn't talk about?
I guarantee you'll get some insights about your supplier and their product through questions like these. In other words, shut down the show and get to the truth.
Meanwhile, next slide...
Posted by Warren Savage on Wednesday Jun. 20, 2007
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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.
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.
