The Making of The Security Guard - A Glimpse Behind the Scenes

So the most fun I've had at ASA in the past few years was writing and directing the "Surf" and "Security Guard" videos. It was not always easy to take having fun seriously... Email between me and one of the editors on 2/15/08:

  Courtney... I gotta agree with the first one.. 3.1. My reasoning 
  is probably transparent but it goes like this. What well-regarded 
  film is, structurally (episodic), most like the Frank video? 
  Clearly, Fellini's La Dolce Vida is the best choice, though I admit
  Kurosawa's Ran deserved, and got, some consideration here. How 
  did Fellini choose to handle the scene right in the middle of 
  the film in which Paola fleetingly interrupts the religious 
  cynicism and parade of raw sewage that forms Marcello's stark 
  and barren life as his albeit brief vision "Umbrian angel"? 
  Was he as heavy handed there as he was in all of the other 
  episodes and in particular, the beach orgy that preceded the final 
  scene with Paola; or was he (within the timeline of this film, 
  and to a certain extent within the latter half of his career as 
  well) uncharacteristically delicate in how he chose to present 
  her as an innocent... the antitheses of all things working 
  to transform Marcello from merely shallow to purely evil, though 
  evil in an unpremeditated way? Clearly, Fellini chose wisdom over 
  sizzle and went with delicate. And then why should we do anything 
  different when the films are so severely similar? Go with the 
  first one, and let's sit back and watch the film festival invitations 
  roll in... If we could only have worked in something equivalent to 
  Steiner's suicide...
  
  Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Courtney 
> Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 4:08 PM
> To: Mike Williams
> Subject: Re: Video fix up
> 
> let me know which of these you like best....
> 
> frank_v3.1
> here's one idea, which is just the time code that jumps in time i like 
> the effect but i think the idea of what just happened *might* be lost 
> on some people?
> 
> frank_v3.2
> same thing just with the text "3 minutes later" on screen
>
> frank_v3.3
> just shows "3 minutes later" with the time code already ahead in time
>
>  - courtney
>
> Mike Williams wrote:
> > Courtney,
> >
> > I think that will work. Here are some suggestions to your questions:
> >
> > Fade-start: "data at the down-stream latches, and"  > to black here>
> >
> > [Question - Courtney... can you put the time code in a la the start 
> > and end of the video? That was an effect built in to Final Cut. If you
> > can invoke that in the same font and position, I would say the most 
> > in-character thing we could do would be have that just
> > forward 4.5 min or something like that. Doable?
> >
> > Mike

Comments on Cirrus 2

Our little company has been the source of ideas and the dominant first-implementer in the scope-enhancing software space since ASA invented the space in the mid-90's. A little flattery is always appreciated, but now it's time to focus more on the customer and less on competing with the severely limited and ridiculously expensive, but well-publicized me-too products from ScopeCo. It's time to just change the rules and get it over with. Cirrus is a no-brainer for the customer... fill out an application... save enough money in some instances to buy another scope. I don't think it can be made any easier.

Cirrus is an incredible opportunity for the customers to save a massive amount of money. We estimate that the new-scope stream carries about $45 million dollars worth of scope software annually to scope users, and it's concentrated among the higher performance scopes. A scope purchase could theoretically include over $80k worth of manufacturer software, but the typical range is $20k to $50k. M1 OT just does everything they do, and a lot more... whether 'at the box' with much more analysis, debug and exploration capability, 'above the box' with how it increases team effectiveness through a powerful collaboration and automation architecture, or the way it represents the only complete oscilloscope software standard by running on every scope brand, and providing a common data format and a common automation standard. If you don't have to be concerned about which manufacturer's software you hitch your wagon to, which is what our standard can do for you, you have much more flexibility in which scope you buy and how you buy it. For example, used scopes are all of a sudden much more attractive and usable.

Cirrus will be a good business move for ASA. First of all, I see that $45 million that customers are spending on ScopeCo packages as my marketing program for Cirrus, and I'm going to spend every cent of that program connecting customers to a clearly superior solution. Secondly, we've never once seen a customer who knew about both ScopeCo software and M1, that didn't opt for M1. It's that much better. And thirdly, well over 90% of M1 purchases go out with Subscription because our fan base ‘gets it’... we deliver when it comes to frequent updates and innovation. I think supplying subscriptions and innovation unavailable from any other source is a great business for ASA to be in, especially when I can't think of any other company that could begin to compete with us on those terms.

We have a massively better product, and now it's free.

Mike

An Idiot Speaks

I've had M1 on the market since 1995. One of the things I had in there from the first version was True Differential Thresholding, which reconstructs the signal's cross-over time and voltage exactly the same way the receiving chip does. It was actually critical to some work I was doing for DEC on the Alpha chip. Back then diff probes... what's the right word... sucked. The phase error alone was enough to cause you to chuck them. If there were no physical obstacles to using two single-ended probes, you were vastly better off using M1's built-in True Differential Thresholding. The reasons was that in addition to seeing the signal in precisely the same way that it's used in the circuit, it preserved a boat-load of information jettisoned by the diff-probe method that actually told you very useful things about your circuit, among these crossover-voltage vs time (not the timing of the cross over points but how the crossover VOLTAGE varied vs time). Just like today, the only people who crapped on the idea were......... the guys who make diff probes. Good thing ASA doesn't sell diff probes!

Well... with this history behind me, you had have thought I'd have gotten my arms all around the financial value proposition offered by True Differential Thresholding. But no... in talking with an M1 customer recently, I had HIM tell ME his big insight into what M1 did for him... "M1 saved me enough on diff probes to completely pay for itself". You're welcome Dave. Duh. Can't blame that one on early onset Alzheimer's... I was screwing that up when I was 37. Damn. So the pertinent question for me becomes... what else am I missing?

Every now and then, I've wondered why ScopeCo hasn't ripped this... er... umm... "flattered us"... on this idea too. But I have an idea why now.. it'd cost them more diff probe sales.

Mike

Comments on ASA's Track Record in Innovation

One of the things we did about a year and a half ago was an "Innovation census" for the oscilloscope software space. It was done by a guy who worked for, I believe, 18 years in one of the scope company's real-time scope division. I gave him 30 days to identify "the things that constitute the reason customers buy scope software". I was looking for features like, say, cycle-cycle jitter analysis (easy victory, since I have the patents) and compliance tests, etc. I further instructed him that I wanted to know who introduced that feature to the scope software market first, second, third, etc... Some of you have seen it in higher level discussions between our companies. It showed 76 product elements, of which 72 were done first at ASA. I have absolutely no qualms with asserting that ASA is "the imagination of the scope industry" because I have the data.

That thought exercise revealed ASA was the first in some very important areas... jitter analysis, interpreting a signal as serial data, real-time eye diagrams, compliance tests (we used to call them Application Specific Measurements or ASM's), true diff thresholding... and on and on and on. I got thinking about all of this again because a customer recently asked me a question after I gave a presentation to them. "How can a TINY company like yours possibly have so much in your product, let alone almost always have done it FIRST?". And the answer was simple... I don't ask mobs of people what should be in my product. *I* work on product design all day, every day and it's a long-held truth in the world of product design that was first driven home to me in the Advanced VAX Development Group back at DEC.... a single inspired point of view will always out-innovate a group "just doing it for a pay check", and produce vastly more elegant designs. While I wish it weren't true, I'm working on content and direction in my car, for hours when I'm doing pattern drills on my police motorcycles in some parking lot at 2am, and when I'm at the movies or out sailing... but it shows in the product.

If you want uninspired product content made by a room full of uninspired but well-paid "coders" because some talking haircut in their marketing group had an "epiphany" during a focus group... DO NOT BUY M1. If you want something from a guy who wakes up every morning thinking about how much more elegant and useful to YOU he can make his product... who employs technologies (neural nets to cal error out, knowledge capture and reuse, non-cooperative game theory) ScopeCo won't dare go near under their "just enough engineering" policies... your only choice IS M1. I don't ask "the mob" what should be in my product or what product architecture I should have. And that shows in the innovation too.

I think I'll update that innovation census and turn it into a white paper so you can see just what our track record is here. Take care.

Mike