July 01, 2004

It's official

Posted by Scott at 09:43 PM

TDI, NH - After a couple of months of keeping my mouth shut online, I can announce today that ARC (my former employer) has sold most of the assets of their Nashua office to Transdimension. Read ARC's press release and Transdimension's press release. It's a relief to be able to make the occasional reference to work again. Yesterday we had a bittersweet, somewhat awkward "new beginnings" lunch where we simultaneously wished some co-workers goodbye while looking forward to our work under new management and direction.

The move involves some changes for us. Besides our peripheral design work, the Nashua site made a handful of low end microprocessor cores which will now be maintained by ARC back in the UK. I liked supporting those cores. On the other hand we'll have the resources to focus more on the quality of our USB and ethernet hardware and software solutions. Now we'll even make chips out of them, which will be the primary revenue stream, rather than just selling the design work (also known as 'intellectual property', IP). Selling IP is a rough business. It's a very intensive, high touch sale where for six months to a year you end up feeling like a part of your customer's design team. That's where I (and the co-workers in my little division) come into the picture: answering all sorts of customer usage and integration questions. "How can I..." "What if I..." "Is it possible to..." Some of our customers want to tweak the designs more than an early 20's male tweaks his Honda Civic! *smirk* We also track bugs and feedback problems and suggestions back to the design engineers.

Three posts in one day. A new record, I think. Thanks, Suzy, for writing today. I'm always glad to see your smiling face next to a new post. Reading your issues always takes me back to my graduate school days.

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