These large, Large companies can't do an efficient, or particularly effective job of nearly anything. There are too many things pulling at them. Consequently they have problems different from those that small developers have. Megacorporations seldom produce anything. They buy it and whittle it to fit their marketing model, then make excuses about why it doesn't work as well as it once did.

The "smart" megacorporations don't change things as often as the "dumb" ones, however. Each time they change something, they have to dig into, and sometimes break, something that their people don't understand sufficiently to do that.

Cadence, for example, bought OrCAD, not because it was a good plum to pick up, though it was, but because it was a threat to their orders-of-magnitude more costly products. OrCAD released their gridless autoplacing autorotating PCB autorouter/editor v1.0 for the then-new 386 CPU in 1990. That one ran under MSDOS. Neither Cadence nor Mentor has a product under Windows that is in any sense as capable or as fast, nor have they advertised anything as flexible yet. OrCAD lost the people who understood v1.0, so they produced a much less capable version 1.1, still much more capable than anything else in its then quite generous price-class, and Cadence had to control it. It wouldn't surprise me if Mentor helped them. Mentor, of course, took PADDS (? ... another popular PC-based PCB routing package) over.

These "big guys" produce very little "new" stuff but do take the "good" stuff off the market. (Gresham's law, I suspect, i.e. "the bad stuff always forces the good stuff off the market") They make claims today that are based on a history from the *NIX days, when CAE software ran under some flavor of UNIX, often on a MOTOROLA 680xx. Their claims of "support" are far overblown.

Not even their sales department pays attention to their customers' needs. I once attempted to buy 12 seats of "something" on behalf of a well-funded client, yet couldn't even get a response from their sales guys for over 6 weeks. After that, I had to call a company exec I knew in order to get them to stop pestering me.

While both Cadence and Mentor have good engineering and software people on staff, they do suffer from the corporate whiplash that's felt whenever the company changes direction without telling any one outside the executive suite. They're mostly in defensive mode, trying to keep their jobs, or find a better one before the product they're supporting is discontinued.

RE