No
Call from PCB makers ... "Can you avoid Maxim parts?, they're bastards to get hold of". Me... "Yeah, no problem". {verbatim]
That was 7 years ago. Reading this thread, seems not a lot's changed. john
Right. I don't have time to spend hours or days deciding if a part is really available and affordable; that sure breaks up the design flow. If it's in my stockroom, I know instantly how many we have and what it costs, so I tend to re-use parts. If it's not, I check Mouser and Digikey and prefer parts that both have in stock. I figure purchasing can shop around later for better pricing if necessary. Nothing's more expensive than a part you can't get.
John
Well...... The whole ISP business seems to be in a state of flux with several once well-regarded names goofing up and failing to deliver.
Do by all means take a look at adslguide.org. The compare is very revealing.
Zen are also very well thought of. As seemingly are Nildram at a lower cost.
You ought to take a peek at the forums there too.
If Idnet is as good as it appears to be and you fancy giving them a go let me know and I can refer you and we both get a tenner back !
Graham
I'm still a share holder and have a right to bitch. If someone decent company made a raid on Maxim, I'll vote my shares to sell it.
Senior management is too busy reading the inside information dumped on yahoo forums to worry about ex-employees. The stuff posted on yahoo is dead on, and they name names.
Pete,
I don't mind hearing constructive criticism. I understand your frustration, or at least I try to. I am not an engineer, but of course in my position I speak with customers who have elevated their issues to me because they are in dire need. As a stockholder and employee I am very sorry to hear that we have lost so much when we lost your business. Right or wrong, it is equally disheartening just to have a customer (many customers) feel such anger and betrayal towards our company. It is especially hard for me to hear, because I wonder if there wasn't something that could have been done to salvage the situation/relationship. Look at this email thread. I have been provided with two different customer needs, one for 1 part and one for
4 parts. ALL of which I was able to provide from inventory with almost no effort. And yet these customers believed there were no parts to be had. I realize this will not always be the case, and I am not trying to pretend there are never delivery issues. As I have said before, and as I read more and more I feel more and more strongly about it, customers need to be educated about MDD. Distributors absolutely add value. But MDD has the relationships, expertise, and drive to do everything in our power to ensure customers have Maxim & Dallas parts when they need them. If nothing else comes from this usenet thread (other than the 2 customer's whose problems I have solved), I hope people are at least aware of MDD and if they are in need of Maxim or Dallas parts they will contact the manufacturer directly. We will accept orders for 1 unit or 1 million units. I'm not here to change your mind, but I am very sorry to have lost you as a customer.Sincerely, Rebecca
In message , dated Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Rebecca of Maxim Dallas writes
No doubt there was, but the opportunity was missed.
BUT THAT'S THE PROBLEM! The customers hit a wall when they tried to get them, but YOU could break through it 'with almost no effort'. Fix that situation and sell an extra jillion [1] parts!
Yes, why were they led to believe that? That is where the problem is in your system.
[1] OK, a jillion is 10^j, and thus purely imaginary.
You probably know this, but it is better to have 100 customers ordering
10k parts, than one customer ordering a million. This keeps the margin higher, and if eveyone does their job (a big if), it really isn't much more work."Rebecca of Maxim Dallas" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
Many also get their parts for prototypes and small runs, from Digikey or Mouser. Mouser carries millions of parts, from hundreds of manufacturers. As far as I can see, not a single one from Maxim. You can ask Mouser why is that.
"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:shtEg.9518$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net...
Okay, I must be naive - I never see such things as risks and thus not as a remarkable initiative. Better to speak up than to remain silent, regardless the message.
They may have other reasons to sell it.
didn't they say if customer arranges freight, they won't charge... send them a stamped addressed envelope.
Bye. Jasen
Teach your sales people to ask "do you need it *now*?" if the customer isn't forthcoming. If the answer is yes round up some alternatives. You'll probably have to train them how to do that too.
- YD.
Hello Rebecca,
A lot more has come from this thread, like some crystal-clear suggestions how to fix things. Ok, let's assume Maxim goes the MDD route. I still believe you should go Digikey in parallel but it's your choice. Now, one suggested improvement from this thread you can implement right away is to eliminate that ridiculous "request formal quote before we tell you what's in stock" barrier. That, plus staggered pricing (see Digikey for how that's done). I believe it would be very detrimental to your business not to do that and, since you are a stock holder, to your personal financial situation.
Very good. But most important is to ensure and track your delivery performance because this is what seems to have damaged the reputation of Maxim. Blowing a major shipment due date like what happened in John Larkin's case can be equivalent to losing a large account for a long time. There needs to be a mindset at Maxim about how to avoid that in the future.
Hi Rebecca
As I noted, you are braving the den here, but if you read very early in the thread you will find I have had direct chats with Maxim on a number of occasions, and each time those chats (including the statement from me that they would lose the design win) never dented the attitudes I found.
I would *love* to use Maxim parts - there really are some high drool factor parts in the catalog and some that would be a perfect fit for me.
As to the ultimate reason I decided to drop Maxim completely, it's quite simple. As a designer, I need to spend my time designing (and of course debugging). I simply do not have the time to chase recalcitrant suppliers. The facts speak for themselves, in my case. I have been burned too many times after hearing Maxim promise they had mended their ways, and yet when it came time to run perhaps few hundred units, I ran into lead times of 16 - 24 weeks, after being assured these were 'standard' parts, always kept available.
I am sure you too are a busy person; indeed, with the industry feeling toward Maxim's delivery, I am sure you are intensely busy. Just like me, you would not want to have to keep chasing someone who said they would deliver something and then at delivery time told you it would be another 4 months. You'd drop them as a supplier if they kept doing it. It's got nothing to do with part quality and everything to do with *my* product availability.
As I have also noted, when I *see* Maxim mend their ways (and I will hear about it, have no doubt - the engineering grapevine is like no other) I'll start dropping their parts back in. Until then, they are, unfortunately, persona non grata in my designs.
I will also note I have nothing against Maxim - I have stated repeatedly that they have some great parts, but there is nothing they make that others do not provide solutions for (albeit slightly differently, but at original design that's really not a major issue - I am free to design the most appropriate solution). With that backdrop, Maxim really needs to go the extra mile. Get stuff on the shelves. Get stuff in distribution. Get parts out there. Do no-hassle sampling. (See any of On Semi, TI, AD, National and Freescale for what I mean by 'no-hassle').
When a customer asks about a part, ask about expected usage (you do already) - if it's 5k/year go ahead and quote it *and back it up with on-time shipment*. I have some smaller (more specialised really) designs in production of just about that quantity, but I schedule the build on them 3 months early as they *do* have Maxim parts in them, among others who are starting to garner a less than stellar reputation.
They too will feel my wrath by being banished from my BOMs if they don't shape up. It's nothing personal. That early build costs me extra money as I have money tied up in product not yet sold from my shelves.
Do the right things, (and many have given sound advice here) and we'll start to buy Maxim parts again.
Cheers
PeteS
The esteemed Joerg wrote:
I could contribute a similar story. But one should suffice and that is exactly what should land smack dab on the table in the board room.
Oh, I know I am hardly alone, nor even near the volumes of many, but I wanted Rebecca to have some specific information as ammununition, if you like, when the execs ask 'Is this really costing us sales'. I hadn't seen a specific so I gave one :)
On a separate note to Rebecca : The people who congregate here *do* share experiences with parts, and I have designed in specific parts after hearing good reviews from others here I feel I can trust. Please don't underestimate usenet or the engineering grapevine, which can lead to good results just as easily as bad ones :)
I think the average experience level in this thread is probably over 30 years, too - we're (generally at least) very senior designers who have a lot of sway, and it is [mostly] that group all semi manufacturers must convince :)
Cheers
PeteS
While we're on the subject of responsiveness, here's something that happened to me a little while ago (2 years perhaps).
I had a switcher from Maxim where the design had been done by an independent contractor. When I got the unit, the response of the control loop was horrendous, so I took a very close look at the datasheet.
It turned out that the order of operations in a key formula had not been properly specified (although it could be derived from all the other equations). Leaving aside the fact that the independent contractor should have looked askance at 2 microfarad in a compensation loop, I figured out the error in the datasheet and sent it to Maxim.
The response was underwhelming, to say the least. Basically 'err - ok, it's wrong. We'll fix it sometime (maybe)'.
Like all the designers here, I deal with a lot of semiconductor vendors, and mistakes in datasheets are a fact of life; we know they are going to happen. The difference is that when I send information like that to others (the usual suspects), I get a nicely worded reply *and* the updated datasheet with the error fixed, and a link to the errata notice for all the other users of the part.
My point in bringing this up is the attitude of arrogance (which I alluded to much earlier in this thread) seems to pervade the entire company. I checked that datasheet out of interest a few days ago at work and the latest download still had the error. I'll get the actual part number once I am at the office in the morning. As I noted, that was about 2 years ago.
One of the key things I look at in a vendor is the datasheets, apart from delivery. A part you can't get is incredibly expensive. A part with an incorrect datasheet is likewise expensive, and a committment to fixing known errors is important to me.
I personally think the attitude of 'we'll get it to you when we feel like it' is merely another aspect of an attitude at Maxim that has to be dealt with if they are to stick around. I would like them to do so as they really have some nice parts, but if they have that attitude toward datasheets, it's another major hit from my perspective.
Cheers
PeteS
Hello Pete,
Ouch! Time to write a note to the CEO about that. Then if he doesn't care we'd know what to do. Did that a few times with other companies and depending on what the reply was (or whether there was one at all) made the decision to blacklist or not.
Graham. Thanks for the useful info'. For the past couple of months it's been hit and miss as to whether the ISP allows me to connect. Only just got on now, after 5 hours of "some of our customers may be experiencing difficulties". According to todays paper we're now an 85% service economy. God help this country for the future. I'll do some foraging based on those links. Thanks again john
I'm pleased you found it helpful. The line should be transferred to Idnet in the next day or so btw. I'd be happy to let you know the results but Idnet's forum at Adslguide is already pretty much a fan club tbh. The worst problem I saw reported there was something like a 10 minute outage.
They answer the phone promptly too and you get to speak to a human not a machine which is itself rare enough these days !
I'd be happy to recommend you too if you fancy moving so we can both benefit.
Graham
[...] [...]
Yes. Mark me down for one!.
Only time I've ever come across a human, was 2 weeks ago when I demanded my MAC. Shock, horror!, fast transfer through 2 sections to a knowledgeable technical chap. Poor lad oozed world-wearyness. I actually felt a little sorry for him!. Must have been placed there as their last ditch defence. Had a good chat, gave me his name and extension and sent through a fancy, expensive looking wi- something or other modem. No improvement though. (as he and I both knew). john
Interesting. Do you do that with other carriers?
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