November 20, 1997

Laying down the law

We were at dinner in China. OK, so it was China in Disney World's Epcot, and the only true Asian in our group of about 20 was a Singaporean--Arthur Chen, global sales director for Motorola Semiconductor's Consumer Systems Group. Since I left Hong Kong almost a year ago, I've rarely passed up a chance to eat Chinese food, even the Americanized version (everything with the ubiquitous brown sauce) that I expected to get at Disney World.

After dinner, Motorola's Garth Nash, vice president, director of communications for the Networking and Computing Systems Group, leaned across the table and half-whispered, "I want to have a law." My surprised look--the result of the two beers I'd consumed, Chinese food that was better than expected, and an earlier discussion around the table about the mystic powers of a crystal--encouraged Nash to continue. "Moore has a law. Murphy has a law. I want one, too."

Consummate engineer that he is, Garth pulled out a pen and began drawing on a napkin the figure above. He carefully explained that products are initially introduced with an emphasis on their ability to perform necessary functions. He used consumer products, such as VCRs, camcorders, computers, and cellular phones, as examples. Universally, the emphasized functions come at the expense of ease of use--think of those VCRs that flash "12:00." Vendors then invariably apply increasingly powerful components to improve the performance of the product--still without regard to improving ease of use. At some point in the product's life cycle, however, typically just before the consumer revolt, emphasis shifts to applying subsequent component enhancement to ease of use. As an example, Nash pointed to G-code development and time-clock-synchronization features of VCRs and plug-and-play and USB efforts in the PC.

In recognition of his observation--and perhaps thanks to the contribution of the two beers--I hereby christen the GNashing Law, which describes both how consumer-product development emphasizes performance and features over usability for an undetermined period of time and what happens to customers' teeth during this time. That emphasis continues until just before the revolt.

An interesting corollary--the Markowitz Corollary--is that the length of time that the GNashing Law is in effect coincides with the length of time that the manufacturers use microprocessors in their designs. As soon as they begin using microcontrollers, which typically offer features and capabilities tailored to the application, the GNashing Law's influence begins to fade.

Notably, this year's Microprocessor Directory in the Sept 25 issue points to the decline of the general-purpose microprocessor and the ascendance of the microcontroller. As a result, the GNashing Law may soon be repealed.

NOTE: Check out the expanded directory listings of microprocessors and microcontrollers on EDN's Web site, www.ednmag.com. The database we've put them in lets you do parametric searches to the find the processor that's right for your application.

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