Monday Nov. 19, 2007
Don't Fence Me In
Remember the old Cole Porter song your parents listened to:
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
 The same might be said of standards which serve as virtual fences for us. Standards can serve two purposes: to create order in a chaotic world by establishing rules that everyone plays by, or to protect an asset from those who might want to take it away.
IP standards have had a tough go of it in the last ten years with no significant progress being made towards the adoption of a substantial IP standard. One possible explanation for this is the “range war” between the parties that wish to erect fences to level the playing field (customers) and those who see that erecting fences can protect their franchise (suppliers) by making standards that serve as a barrier to entry in the rapidly growing IP market.
This topic will be explored by an expert panel at the upcoming IP ’07 show in Grenoble on December 5-6 and I encourage those of you interested in this topic to attend the event.
The conflict of interest between customers and suppliers is one explanation for why there has been so little progress. If we look at successful standards in the past we see a convergence of purpose between customers and suppliers to work together to achieve a win-win. That’s not the case with IP. As we all know, an IP transaction is often hand-hand combat between the suppliers battling for the attention of the customer and finally between the customer and the supplier for maximum financial advantage.
This is not how a traditional market that benefits from standards operates. This is more like a war, with each party seeking an advantage over the other. It’s like the wild west of a hundred fifty years ago where the laws were loosely enforced for lack of anyone to enforce them. There were good guys, bad guys, and a lot of people in between. Just about like the IP market today.
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Goodbye 2007 -- Hello 2008
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It's like Déjà vu all over again
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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.
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