Dear Altium and Brent Smith,

Being that I live in Arizona and it is spring season baseball time I would rate Altium's decision to not participate at the PCB West as a swing and a miss but, booo! Altium looked as if they did not even try.

I attended PCB West last week and was very disappointed not to see Altium representing PCAD and Protel tools at the vendor show.  Many people that I talked to had similar things or lack of things to say about Altium.  Most of the conversation was about questioning the tools path or focus.  I heard rumors or was it rumors herd, that PCAD and Protel were going to merge into one common tool.  Maybe this would be a good thing but I really wonder if anyone cares but the current users.  I was not able to go to PCB West last year but the year before ACCEL had a booth where ACCEL PCAD and Protel names were all displayed at the same both.  Looking at it then it looked as if they were unsure of who they or their customers were.  Now that you call yourself Altium you decide to not even show up, worse you thought it better to only showcase yet another tool Nexar.

Wake up Altium other PCB Design vendors are getting noticed while you look unfocused and uninteresting to your current PCB Tool users.  There are fewer and fewer PCAD users in the Arizona area with both Mentor and Intercept supporting local sales offices.  I do not know of any major business other than us that are currently using PCAD or Protel for new design.  I would hope that Altium will hear these words and make better communication decisions before others are forced to make better tool decisions only by moving to a different tool with support.  PCAD's next release incorporating LiveDesign oddly skips from PCAD2002 to PCAD2004.  Am I just cynical or is it odd how PCB tool vendors switch between having a design manager they are moving away from promising stand alone best of breed or a new one that promises converged nirvana.  Personally I prefer the converged nirvana myself because upgrades are easier to manage as a collective whole as opposed to well it depends.

We at Inter-Tel use a Mentor tool for Schematic entry and the Cadence SPECCTRA router along side of PCAD for PCB layout.  Personally dealing with all of these vendors and support issues has been both frustrating and rewarding with PCAD support lately being heavily weighted on the side of frustrating.  I rarely really have the use for support but in the recent past PCAD support calls have gone unanswered going to voice mail and emails were slow to respond. The worse thing that I learned is knowing that if anything that I requested really needed to be implemented in code it would have to wait until the next release because they are already working on one now.  So I go on and solve my own problems after being frustrated and upset at how many emails, phone calls it takes to get a, "no we do not intend to even consider it until the next release."  Why would I spend so much time trying to improve my tool by dealing with support when I can simply solve my own problems?  I guess now I know better but I am not going to give up hope because we have a lot invested in PCAD.  I know that any solution to a new tool will also require using PCAD while new designs are upgraded.  I can feel good that PCAD does do a real good job at our legacy design with little change. I think you see the irony in my last statement.

The Embedded Systems Conference looks to be a much larger audience than PCB West could ever be and LiveDesign and Nexar sounds exciting and may turn out to be a real success for Altium.  I hope the timing is just bad but if LiveDesign and/or Nexar is the answer for Altium it would have been really nice if we could have seen it at PCB West.  Altium could have used PCB West as a way of preparing for the bigger Embedded Systems Conference while letting current and future new users know that better things are coming. 
 
Please feel free to pass on my personal opinion about Altium's decision not to attend PCB West. 

The above personal opinions are just that opinions and they do not reflect the views or opinions of my place of employment Inter-Tel, Inc.


Cyrus Ringle   CID +
IPC Advanced Certified Interconnect Designer
CAD Engineer
Inter-Tel, Inc.  http://www.inter-tel.com
7300 W. Boston St.
Chandler, AZ 85226
(480) 961-2263
mailto:[log in to unmask]
President of the Greater Phoenix Designers Council

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