Yesterday I went to the free half-day Microchip seminar in my city, I
thought others might be interested in my experience.

It was about 3.5 hours long. PowerPoint was used. There was no hands on. I
expected that, I attended mostly to hear about new products. I'd been to a
couple of these in the past. In the past they had application engineers
doing most of the presentations. Not this time!

Mostly I think it was a waste of time. If I just spent 3.5 hours with a
copy of the line card I'd have gotten more information.

Too much emphasis was placed on how important Microchip is, their market
share is growing. Marketing-speak. The demonstrations they had either
failed to work or were gotten over with very quickly so as to make more
time for the sales pitch.

When technical questions were asked(I would say over half the people in
the room had experience designing with PICs), the questions were either
not answered very well, or the speaker would use this as an intro to his
pitch for the Master's Conference, and remind us we could get a $100
discount using the provided coupon.

A 20%-off coupon for dev tools was provided. A "pickit" was awarded as a
door prize. Dev tools were not available for sale at the event.

I realize now that the title of the seminar was "Microchip Corporate
Seminar", so I have no one to blame, but I think if Microchip expected
corporate types to attend they needed to target different people and use a
different ad campaign. Having a piece of fruit with LEDs plugged into it
for the logo seems to appeal to the wild designer, not the BMW drivers. I
didn't see any BMWs in the parking lot.

The CD they handed out has the 100 PowerPoint slides in PDF format, and a
few app notes. The app notes can be gotten off the web site, if anyone is
interested in the slideshow please email me off-list. It's about 7
megabytes.

Cheerful regards,

Bob

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