Long hot summer when Baby was born
23 June 2008
It was the summer equinox last Saturday (June 21st) and that is a date not without its symbolic and historical interest this year.
I write this on a gorgeous day in early summer, but of course for all that the temperatures will still rise over the next few months (in the Northern Hemisphere that is), the days now start getting shorter.
So what lies ahead – a long hot summer or increasing darkness? It is all about attitude and expectation. This slightly contrived route takes us to my thoughts on a couple of events that I have recently attended, and what these events tell us about our industry in the coming months.
Firstly I went to SMT in Nuremberg, Germany. Now an established event, first indications are that it had a record year in terms of visitors, beating its previous record of 24,000. While unquestionably a German event in terms of its target audience, it increasingly attracts visitors from further afield, and this has to be a positive indicator for the electronics manufacturing industry in Germany and Western Europe. Should we then relax and enjoy the long hot summer ahead?
Sadly there are also indications of those long dark nights as well. Last week I was at National Electronics Week (NEW) in London – an exhibition making its debut and, in my opinion, looked like an event that both reflected the relatively small but buoyant UK industry, and demonstrated the huge efforts the organisers had gone to in order to make it an interesting and educational event. But the jury is still out as to NEW’s success. While at times during the three days visitors were undeniably scarce, most exhibitors reported some worthwhile contacts that, if they result in orders, will have made the whole exercise worthwhile. Equally, visitors were treated to an educational experience that would have been perfectly at home in far larger and more international events.
For an event to be a success there needs to be something for both exhibitors and visitors. I hope there were enough visitors to keep the exhibitors happy so that the organisers can go ahead with their plan for a follow up event next year (dates have been announced as April 7 – 9 2009). If not then the UK will be without a major national electronics exhibition for the first time, and I think the industry will be the poorer for it.
Exhibitors are not charities though – they need to get a return on their participation. So why are their customers, who according to recent manufacturing figures and anecdotal evidence from the suppliers have actually had a strong start to the year, failing to turn up? Ashamed as I am to admit it, I think the problem lies within the UK psyche. Just recently there have been consequences of the global credit crunch and fuel crisis that have hit the UK industry, but still not hard enough to prevent profits and growth. But rather than celebrate our resilience and ingenuity, we grow nervous of what lies ahead. Instead of making the most of the long hot summer we are growing wary of the encroaching dark nights and suffering as a consequence of it.
There is another event, connected with June 21st, reflecting that the British attitude used to be that the ‘glass was half full rather than half empty’. Admittedly we have to go back 60 years for this breakthrough event in Manchester, but it is just another to add to the UK hall of fame – unofficially started by Anand Sethi in his recent column UK electronics – a fallen or sleeping giant?
The breakthrough took place at Manchester University, where ‘Baby’ took its first faltering steps. ‘Baby’ was the nickname given to the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) that was the first stored program digital computer. It was, in essence, the forerunner for all modern computers, mobile phones, MP3 players and every other electronic gadget we use today. Storage was only 128 bits, which is about 2000 times smaller than the simple Word file I am currently writing into, which puts its performance into perspective. As a first step it was a huge one, however, and one that could only be taken in a time when industry and society had a positive outlook for the future, even though in 1948 the UK was still trying to rebuild after the war and it would still be another six years before rationing would end.
As a final word, we are still keeping open our competition to win copies of Susan Mucha’s book ‘Find it. Book it. Grow it.’ All you need to do to enter this free draw is to re- register for this newsletter. Click here for more details of how to enter. The competition will close at the end of June 2008.
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