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May 22, 2007 at 12:45 PM |
We are just past the half-way point of the month of May and I have already received requests about meeting companies at SEMICON West, which doesn't happen until July!
On the back of that I have been receiving new product press releases all for the same show but few actually have pictures of the product attached with them!
The problem with that is that we have no idea whether the tool/product actually exists. It is not uncommon to find out that a product touted to be the next saviour of Moore's Law is still a dream tucked away in an engineers CAD/CAM library.
Show me a picture rather than an artist's impression and you have a better chance that we will write a product review on it.
The other problem is that once upon a time you could see the new tool at an exhibitor's booth at the show and get a better understanding of it because it was real. It didn't matter that much that a picture of it wasn't available before the show as you could cover the new product in the following edition, knowing it was no figment of the imagination.
But very few equipment suppliers bother to have new tools on display at SEMICON events anymore so the picture becomes an ever-more important requirement.
Gone are the days that even Applied Materials would show a complete range of new tools at their booth. They once displayed an implant tool and everyone knows how big they are!
Another problem with product press releases is that the details are so lacking nine times out of ten that you wonder why companies bothered in the first place!
Think about this for one moment.
A tool that can cost more than a million dollars to purchase has a press release produced for its birth that has less than FIFTY words actually telling you something about it!
No kidding, it is amazing to receive so many new product press releases that simply defy any sense of being taken seriously due to the lack of any information. Often the boilerplate at the bottom of the release has more words describing how great the company is than has been used to describe the new tool!
But thinking about it, it's actually worse than that as companies I shouldn't name - like Lam Research - have designed, built and shipped brand new tools to customers without actually going public with them!
The message simply isn't getting through!
I have honestly failed in my little behind-the-scenes crusade to get equipment companies to actually provide enough information about a new product so that we can actually do that product some justice.
There are, thank goodness, some converts but they are still outnumbered by the terrible masses.
Some that didn't need educating have worryingly slipped while others have got their act together. But overall I have failed to make a difference.
With SEMICON West due in a few months the intensity of new product introductions will increase and so will my frustrations over the lack of information to do a good job on reviewing them.
If anyone cares to look at our ‘Product Briefs' section here at the website (http://www.fabtech.org/content/blogcategory/0/68/) you will notice that we try very hard to cover a new product in as detailed a way as possible. The results speak for themselves in that the traffic to that area of our site is high, so there is a reason for doing things properly.
What you may not realise is that 90 percent of the press releases don't have enough information in them to write more than the intro, let alone provide a picture, which we all know is worth a thousand words!
The template we use for product write-ups has proved highly popular with you the reader, but it should also be used by the equipment suppliers when constructing product press releases.
The reason being is that if you construct a press release that covers all of the areas we try and fill in then you have helped inform and educate people to the basic level of understanding.
Anything less and you really haven't tried and that in itself is not a good reflection on your million-dollar-plus shiny new gizmo!
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