Altium (Protel) Moves Global HQ to China

For those who care about such things, the title says it all:

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Dave.

Reply to
David L. Jones
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From Taswegia to Sydney to Shanghai. I guess there's a limit to what you can achieve locally. Considering moving there Dave?

Reply to
Swanny

I had to check that it wasn't dated April 1st...

That's rather an odd press release... it kinda rambles without a lot of focus at times.

Moving my R&D and management from Sydney to Shanghai isn't a gamble I'd want to take with an EDA company!

"Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) creates electronics design software based on the belief that anyone who wants to create electronic products that make a difference should be able to do so." -- Of course, actually having a few skills in electronic product design probably helps as well, one would think...

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

My guess is that is because it's not a normal press release- it's an ASX-required release of information they'd otherwise not be eager to yap about.

Why not? I'd certainly not want to go in the other direction.

I have certain concerns about 'cloud' computing though, and having their headquarters in Shanghai and servers (presumably) in the US is probably the worst of all possible worlds that way.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I'd consider it pretty high risk due to the vastly different cultures -- especially since they'll presumably be losing almost all of their current engineers and will have to find replacements in China; at best they're essentially putting their current product "on hold" for a year or so while the new Chinese replacements get up to speed with how the software is put together.

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Wait until you deal with outsourced support staff. Then the real fun begins. BT, a lot :-(

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Reply to
Joerg

They are in the process of doing a major release (10), so a bit of delay until the next major release isn't going to be too bad. They may have had the replacements working on it for six months already... just because they announced it now doesn't mean that they are starting now.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I like the way the makers of Matlab handle support- not outsourced, and nobody doing support has less than a Masters degree, with many PhDs. Of course if you can get $100K for a piece of software, it's easier.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I think Matlab has gotten so expensive that they're actually probably to the right of the peak of the profits vs. price curve -- I know where I work here, the price is high enough that while, yeah, we have a copy, we also spend a lot of time with SciLab or other freebie alternatives... and I recently spoke to an engineer at a large medical electronics manufacturer who said they do the same thing.

Their network licensing price is also pretty severe... I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like 1 network license was the price of something like SIX individual licenses! And they send out rather threatening "clarifications," making it clear that if you're purchasing individual licenses, it must be to *an individual* -- no sharing of a common PC, no remote desktop, etc. It definitely left a sour taste in our mouths...

I wouldn't be surprised if Matlab were eventually gobbled up by someone like National Instruments.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Yes, indeed, quite onerous.

I wonder how much profit they would make if they priced their stuff more like Solidworks does- just a few versions and you get pretty much the whole shebang including stuff you'll don't need to use very often, or at all. A $10K _adder_ just to emit IEC PLC code? And didn't get so acquisitive about floating licenses.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Dave, Commiserations.

How's your Shanghainese?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Luckily I don't have to worry about that.

Quote: "The first stage of the move will involve a reorganization of the Sydney office operations including a significant reduction in staff."

Dave.

Reply to
David L. Jones

Ahhh, engineering your own redundancy. Good one.

Reply to
Swanny

Bummer. That happened to me a couple of years ago, when my infrared antenna project got cancelled, and I got cancelled along with it. On the plus side, it turned out to be the best disaster I ever suffered--consulting suits me, and business has been good. I haven't missed any meals, or any mortgage payments either.

With your visibility, I'd expect a good outcome for you too. It's rough at first though, for sure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Bloody shame, that is. Fancy coming to the part of the world that's right side up?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Sigh, that stinks! I'm sure you can land on your feet Dave.

(There's always the 555 timer competition to fall back on.... :^)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Sorry to hear that, Dave.

Perhaps on the last day of work, you could put up a review/tour of Altium's software on your blog... what's the worst they could do, fire you? :-)

(Dave Haynie, an ex-Commodore engineer who designed a lot of the hardware for the Amiga series of computers, did something like this, shooting a video tour of the Commodore building on their last day, as well as a post-Commodore party later that night. Looks like it's still around --

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-- also available on You Tube these days.)

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Are they shipping you over there too?

Reply to
who where

Not very professional, or from a more self-centred perspective, who'd hire you after that?

On another sub-thread, I share Joel's reservations about putting software from China on a crucial PC.

Nemo

Reply to
Nemo

Actually, I'd say there's something quite unprofessional about any company that would object to an employee putting up an objective review of their own products.

But there are a lot of unprofessional companies out there.

In a good company, your own employees are often the best evangelists you could hope for. If it turns out instead your own employees are critical of the company's products -- and we're talking objective criticisms here -- the worst possible move would be for a company to try to get the employee to shut up rather than improving the product and removing the criticism in the first place: Few people criticize just for the heck of it; most do so out of an honest desire to see an improvement.

I do realize that, in practice, getting fired is not much fun, and hence those who work for not-so-great companies are, pragmatically speaking, sometimes better off remaining mute until they can find a better job.

There's also a sometimes-grey area between "objective criticism" and "ranting because you don't like your job/boss/etc." -- the later certainly is unprofessional. I.e., some employee at, say, Cooltech, Inc. would be doing the world a favor by putting up a web page entitled something like, "Compensating for the high-ripple in the Splatterblaster-5000's frequency response" ... whereas one entitled, "Since we can't fire the clueless engineer who designed the Splatterblaster-5000's filter, here's how to deal with the pain that incompetent dolt made for you" wouldn't make me want to hire the guy. :-)

Tact. It's all about tact. Respectfully stated construction criticism should not be feared or punished, even when it's done in a public forum. Sadly there's a lot of mediocre equipment that gets foisted upon unsuspecting customers because no one in the company was wlling to speak up and -- respectfully -- say, "look, this just doesn't work very well -- let's fix it before we ship, OK?"

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

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