EEVblog #1032 Part 4 - John Kenny Keysight Interview

do you expect to ever sit have you ever seen an actual the agilent keysight cloned like and like an actual do you like 100 sent client it's got the badge and everything it pretends to be a ok so i haven't seen a hundred percent counterfeit we have seen in a few case i know in the power of products where someone took our pc board depopulated and put it on a Xerox machine and copied about including our logo yeah and they were so small they were selling so few that we didn't go after him but we had several guy in that product we could have taken him out earlier but it wasn't worth them the cost they were not a threat we have had other people do you know the front panel looks identical to our product yeah certainly the function air there's someone cloned our 33:20 and the menus are practing the difference between us they're practically identical so what's interesting of that one is the function if you take the help screens the help screens are copyrighted and the new not to copy verbatim the help screen so they changed them and that word because that gets around the cut inside it's not the same function it's not no no it's totally different happening inside but the front panel the screen the user interfaces and that was a very very good user interface for its time do you think this possibly code copying going on there they simply write a from scratching use it as it as a visual template we see why we see much less of that rise that requires a lot of work oh you've got to disassemble it that's almost impossible to it's not impossible right but it's a lot only you put enough like he's at a typewriter fixed yeah and you know I've seen some people who've spent in an ER an amount of time when they probably could have spent it better developing their own product all right you know sometimes that's what they want to do for me to question it we're trying to find ways to keep them from representing themselves as being us that's really the challenge caught it is it flattering is it part of it flattering now in your UI so yeah they copied it sir yeah when Samsung copied Apple Ryle it was a little bit flattering was also they lost market they sued him for a billion dollars right now so Apple was furious when Samsung I stole a lot of what they did some of it they had no right to patent in the first place but a lot of it they did they created a lot of great concepts so yeah it's flattering but not this one do you see any future for do it all products liked it will you ever release like a like a meter with a power supply and a function gen and a little scope in it and they arguing that you were during these scopes have function oh yeah yeah they do they do but not in the same all year for most people think I fired the five in one trend and what is it ten in one some companies are up to you we call it the busy box we have to busy but little kids thing with all little rise in his crib you know but the fact is that's a more productive environment for people and if you already got the scope hooked up to the circuit just tell me what the voltages it makes all the sense in the world if it's using the same hardware though would you make a scope that actually had dedicated multimeter we did got a little circuitry we had scopes with multimeters built-in and things like that I can't go into some details of future stuff but if it's a productive environment we're gonna we're gonna do it if it makes sense on the bench and people want it we're gonna do it what if it just makes sense in the education think would you just develop products for education or some of our center paid enough markets education market as you'd it's one of the single largest Morgan's rob is it's difficult to access at a profitable level one of our biggest asset imagines it makes a dedicated box that you sell almost at a loss and they give away their software to run this box and they basically we say we get the kids hooked on our drug first that's the kid comes out of school knowing how to use their software it's a brilliant strategy if you can do it cost effectively are a company has always balked at doing that we we don't want to spend that money that way and we've avoided we haven't been as successful in the education market because that ROI okay do you think that's still the plight and still okay so I think we're always debating how to we one of the problems you have is it's such a big size you can't avoid Rosten and there's different ways to access that market I think that the way that our our scopes team has come out with a low cost effective product that makes the customer familiar way the user interface and they're gonna sell into when they get into the real world yeah I think it's a smarter move but there's no right answer I mean the fact is as long as it works to carry you through it makes sense we need lower-cost products to make education work for us you know $1,000 is a big gulp for someone yeah but only 50 of them in a lab yeah okay and we figured out sometimes with aggressive discounts and you know a special version of the model we can sometimes get at it but it's it's a struggle frankly what about providing the teaching material because I always thought that could be the seller we're doing that yeah we're doing the I know you sky be educational sky you've always I'm different probably we were doing with IOT test we rotten with some special versions of products that for IOT education we're this I've actually got a class behind it Oh interesting I'll ass is big for for us because IOT is got our effing world's largest our you know test a measurement companies are and IOT is rapidly growing and it's going into all different frequency domains and new standards are proliferating it's it's a huge heading to keep up with it but you know if you're in a cell RFQ you gotta be on top i OT on I know you're not in the RF group or you don't oversee yeah I've seen anything I don't ever see any but I just all right yeah yeah I sit in the background and help people become more effective that's excellent how do you see like sampling technology has gotten so good these days mm-hmm do you see like spectrum analyzers they're just like they can sampling technology so good you can just sample it straight to digital and that's it well I do that up to until say at what level is it currently do I think we're in a single-digit gigahertz we're doing right okay so anything up to maybe Bluetooth 2.4 gig is what it requires is because you can't buy eight at these that go that fast we develop your ETD it's all customizing stuff that's right yeah so we're doing that and because the higher you go the more you can do we can get rid of artifacts but you also have the problem where if you have interference if you're doing external world measurements it's a problem because you have side bands that are outside the frequency you're trying to digitize and they can overload the front end of call effectively when you have a down down converter in the front end it's tuned so you take out those other frequencies before they hit the so you can get better performance with the downconverter than you can with direct digital call it let you put a pre selector in front of the thing which exactly so it's always gonna be a trade off it's always gonna be a trade off right so your space you need both you almost need to have two different grades of instrument well if you're if you're doing like an you can disconnect the antenna and you can just plug around the transmitter then you don't have those side bands do you so much I'm sure but if you're hooking into out there picking off an antenna or something yeah it becomes a problem so there's often you for both manufacture you're talking about manufacturing loss and evolutions and manufacturing great oh yes well one of the things the biggest disruptive change in the last my whole career has been the transition from electronics being about the industrial market to the consumer market when I started the consumer market didn't exist right I mean it was television sets they were CRT yeah and they were NTSC in the u.s. you know pal he yeah pal here and it was really crude yeah exactly we felt that was okay and that's transformed where now that you know at one point in time we were the largest customer that along devices hmm we were their number one customer today we're not even top 20 not right Wow consumers that's interesting taken over and that's growing I mean consumer electronics is growing so fast and so it pervasive you know and electronics in general all the mechanics and cars are changing electronics all the airplanes all the tanks all the stuff is electric motors it's not hydraulics anymore okay gas engines are gonna go away soon countries are banning gas engines inside their cities so that's all going to electronics so that's the the biggest change I see is just the sheer volume electronics and it's it's the wave is not even halfway through to change every electric electric system electric system to electronic system everything like you take a light bulb light bulb you just put a filament a wire across the line yeah it's up and he gets hot and lights up now it's got a electronic ballasts that's driving an LED man and it's got an RF communication device so it's what I mean it's just that the transformation is just amazing how much more electronics the reason everything we own and how much it's changing and in ways that you look at it and say that's it's already finished no it's not even close to finished you know today when you buy a light those are those are still fluorescent bulbs right no let's everything in he's later so yeah but those light bulbs are in the form of the law there is needs original phone factor yeah well in a few years you have the actual panel those those things are gonna be delights yes because LEDs like being flattened yeah okay but you're still using a ford factor that's driven from the the fixtures and all the things they take a lamp and you screw a light bulb why do you need a screw in light bulb do they never fail so you don't need that screw at the bottom of the light bulb in fact why do you need the shade and the light you need to shave because the light bulbs hot you don't want to get in your it and touch it it's like a guard and it also diffuses the light well they can make an LED that the shade is the LED but they haven't yet but they're going to and it's not to be replaceable you when the lamp breaks you're gonna throw it away mm-hmm so there's and that's just a simple trite example but there's so much of the stuff where we've only started to see the changes and it's gonna change everything in your car when it becomes autonomous the whole way your car's laid out you're gonna have seats facing backwards because right why face forward why face Florence there's all these ripples that haven't happened yet that to me or what's amazing it's like the ride is just beginning we're just the first we just went to the first top of the first roller coaster and there's many more rides that are gonna happen and it's all gonna change more than we can even imagine that's what I find the coolest a path what are the big changes coming up in test and measurement do you have like a vision of the I think the big changes in testing measurement some of this is the synthetic instruments the multiple instruments participating in a greater solution is one of the biggest things software today you know we do front panels because you can't get good latency except believe it enough the video gaming industry can't handle that you can buy special keyboard surprise and stuff that stuff is the computer interfaces 5g has super low latency so you can control things wirelessly there's a good chance in 10 years all our tests and measurement equipment it's not going to have kaitlin's it's gonna be five cheese ultra-low latency and it's all gonna be synthetic front panels are gonna disappear it's all gonna be through software interfaces and they're all gonna be touched and easy to use and even though everybody likes this and it's comfortable yep it's nothing stick around it's not gonna stick around you think everything's going I don't know how big screen touch no more knobs I remember we used to go out to talk to engineers and we'd say how do you feel about a PC controlling your instrument yeah that's one years ago 10 years ago Lisa no way thank Ryan now if you go out most things new expansion it's funny because yours this and like this they all have an arm one of these oh yeah my god used to have one yeah and then you have a PC under their bed yeah yeah and they have a LAN router along the back of their behind they pop all their instruments in Italy and they bring this schematic come on why not well I have two articulated arm I mentioned my basement when I bring schematics up on and when I have I don't use it first displaying the test equipment but I'll bring up like a YouTube video on how to do a repair and I'll have this come back there more and more PC as part of the bench yep so what the injury so I don't want the PC controlling my instruments how long you think that's gonna last all right it just doesn't change overnight a lot of it is the people in charge are the ones who did it the old way and they eventually retire God and then when that starts to happen then people roll over next thing you know well I wouldn't chew on it that way mm-hmm why did we ever do it the other way again like we watched NTSC you know for power whatever you and you look back and say you know now you hang your TV on the wall all right 20 years ago you bought a big cabinet it was this deep and you put this big 35 pound you know or 150 pound actually for a 35 inch TV and now you see them sitting on the curb free right maybe and the thing how do you think feel about knobs cuz they even it's the Microsoft they they have the knob that you can just put on top of your surface tablet and it you know because people still like the tactile yes things just work great how do you deal with that that's a great question and they're they're costly struggling with that you know when Apple did the touch they started through things but there's still things it doesn't do great yeah you know and there was a period of time where everybody had a fingerprint reader to get into you all right yeah now I was trying to get rid of that in his 3d face I claim it's gonna be great yeah if anybody can do it they can't but word slappy baby right yeah so it's going to require you know evolving and changing and adapting but not may never go away right you know or they may find some brilliant way that you use your hands and gestures you know BMW has the gestures in the car down right I you know yeah you can just turn the volume up you put your finger up in the air and you go like this and the volume goes up ya know ya know when you can make the screens like this in the air just like Tom Cruise in Minority yes exactly swiping in the air you don't have to touch you just do it in here and whether or not that pans out it's actually safe in a car who knows but there's people trying every possible Avenue you know somebody's gonna break through with something yeah and it's gonna change whether or not the knob goes away or you're gonna stick a knob down on your tablet or on the screen yeah who knows it's hard to say for sure but it will change and it will change in ways we can't even imagine today please keep them noble like them well actually it's what customers accept interest if we get rid of it everybody else keeps it and we lose sales we'll bring it back yeah right we just don't get something stupid and changing cuz somebody thought it was cool all right but there's always that constant experimentation to try new things and let's figure out what sticks mmm good retro become a thing in test instruments maybe you know I could you know like everyone's going aw portable tablet oscilloscopes and in almost an eye and then twenty years down the track everyone get no I want my real jobs in mind I think there's always you know being that guard and forward guard and ready but it's not as big in the test and measurement industry because it's it's there for a business it's it said yeah it's not a hobby thing I mean for the hobbyist there's certain things that because they're inexpensive like you can buy these little tiny scopes that hook up to USB yeah Rio and they did go into your phone well that's great but how many people can actually use that yeah it's not bad if you're playing with a Raspberry Pi and on your bench and you just want to play but to actually get real work done it's not super effective and you know let's face it that scope doesn't look all that different than its scope the 7i 40 you have exactly in fact one of the things that our our scope team learn was that they like separate knobs for each of the channels and so absolutely because we had scopes for a while then one knob yeah no no no you're not they found out that no that's just isn't what people want no that's right simple stuff and in fact you'll see on new power supply we have a voltage knob and a curtain because our feedback was that people you know what I don't want to have to press sit I don't have to toggle it between them but well we like to joke too because power supplies are the only piece of test equipment that we make that can maim and kill I think so we want people to have a lot of confidence or or destroy your device under test which is plus a thousand times more than this power supply yep so we want people to be really confident they're getting what they wanted with no surprise it's like oh that's fifty volts or 5 volts yeah how do you get because I probably find that the keysight velocity controls on your knobs are probably the best i've used how do you get how do you choose the right you know a lot like your turner and it gets quicker and quicker and quicker and like how do you we make everybody try and make everyone try it and you did like we actually find there's a bell curve of people who like some like do you just go for the center of the bell curve or do you do you find everyone sort of converges upon it once you get it right we've had like was right when we first did it there was a lot of not so good and then once somebody gets it on any product gets it right then we can use that as a model and we can write it's easier it's much easier once you get it right the first time but a lot of it is we use our own products gotta eat your eye dog food as ice yeah yep spin still works for some things right and one of the biggest problems we have is when we get somebody who goes off and develop something and they're just they have a hundred percent control personally of all those details that we've made some of the worst feeling products insurance you know everything we need they kind of go off and do something themselves and then you go look at all this is right then they fight you because they have control right whereas when you do it were in a team environment then you tend to filter out those kind of really three sigma bad decisions that's interesting because I would imagine that going for the team approach can be while we're going for the individual approach can even be hit or miss even thought like it's a complete miss or it's a complete win because that person controlled everything that's correct but they is it more diluted with the like design by committee kind I by Tony you don't get the highs you don't get the lows yeah in the middle yeah we had a design we did on our logic analyzers had one knob yes I remember that and the guy who worked for them worked for our voltmeter team for a while and he kept trying to get us to do that again hi oh I'm your vote on everything on it he thought that was the greatest solution and everybody who used his logic analyzer hated it but he thought it was incredible hyatt because he was too close to it but he couldn't see and didn't listen to his customers as much as he probably should have but he kept insisting and his code is in here he did they're actually the graphics library all these products he's an engineer yeah but when he carried it all the way to the final UI it wasn't as good right I mean he was fantastic at a coding level creating graphics libraries which like I said he wrote all the graphics libraries for all these products but uh when he put him in charge of the whole UI he didn't like all right he was kind of that three Sigma that you probably should listen to yeah but he he along the way he was abused like the most amazing graphics guy I mean it's literally using every single one of our products do you find that your when it's only developed internally with no outside control do you get stuck in your box sometimes you've got much lunch none of my biggest frustrations I call it a failure of imagination you know it's very much the one of my favorite analogies that you ever see The Brady Bunch movie yes and you're the father every time he tries to do an architecture of a gas station or something else it's his house with a pump in front and I use that announcer you know you keep trying to take what you did before and just do it again because it felt great when you were great at all right and that's one of the biggest curses our biggest success is strapless and try to replicate our biggest successes and antithesis when I was a kid you could buy two kinds of sneakers you could buy a DJ superstar leather very expensive very nice or you could buy converse campus on us and today if you go into Foot Locker yeah how many kinds of sneakers are there tenzou the fact is this function of this volt meter is very close to what the 34401a yeah it has capacity but it's pretty much the same yeah and the fact is there's so many other opportunity to go sideways and you have different things and we're looking at that now more but the tendency is saying now we nailed it Daniel there's nothing beyond that and that's just not correct and the markets always fragment over time they turn into multiple different things and our competitors show us that in so many ways if you look at that power supply from one of our competitors overnight you know that's a very different way to do a power product yes it's not an expensive no but and these things that you can't do with any of our power products yeah it's very imaginative re looking at you know how things work and we need to do more of that frankly not get pigeonholed into oh yeah our scopes group is probably one of the best of that they figured out it was really useful to have a function or built right into the scope right yeah it was the first well you guys the first one to put a function okay so I think it would our reaction and we were developing the function interest was how dare they do that yeah right except if customers wanted how dare us to say we shouldn't do it just because we have that Charter the fact is nature will find a way the fact is that that's the better answer we got to get there we don't somebody else will and to put our head in the sand and act like you can't believe they did that they're hurting our sales well somebody else was gonna do it if we didn't you have to eat your young you really have to replace yourself whether you like it or not and if you don't somebody else will but with that example of the function ginyan skype i noticed you did it somewhat it's a simple it's a simple it's grounded yes it probably delay yeah I know you later on you added firmware actually after I complained I think that didn't have our capability you added it like three months six months later or something softly yeah the full capability and stay tuned there's more to come but uh the fact is they were innovative because they actually broke the mold now they had no allegiance to preserving the lines between different products before and it was a valuable addition to the market people love that feature in the yes yeah I have a mixed signal which they invented was a you now it's all over the place you can't imagine a scope without make signal exactly that's like thinking outside the box and when the people have figured that out of the ones who really get ahead it's when you're picking yourself pigeonhole yourself into a narrow thing the world passes you by alright and that's we have to avoid and we've been guilty of it in some cases and part of my job as a change agent is to shake the tree and keep that from happening awesome I've got to ask the mega zoom for AC cos now I think I did the math the other day and it's like seven plus years old how old is the key site how old is the original 2000-3000 x-series now it's seven seven years yeah did the mega zoom for Kane came out with it yes it came out with - yeah was a project on Jack jackal yeah you have internal code names for everything we do yeah there was jackal coyote wolf hound and marsupial that one suit ah that's right alright is it written on the board no it's in some way it could be yeah that's right it's our projects was Tory yeah ah Tory's Tories which is I guess the Pine Tree Inn or no was one of the mountains in Colorado last decade was Tories yes and the funk generator was Garfield because they named him a nermal and Arlene from the car oh yes sure look at ya from Garfield car yep yeah Wow and then yeah each project that's one of the fun parts is to come up with a name that means something to people on the project team got it any fights over who gets to know usually a few only good at getting names no right now people are coming up with names and other people aren't and my favorite one was one that I got involved and I developed a product about 20 25 years ago to manufacture at lithium-ion batteries and I picked a good name but it wasn't a great name and we called the project Mufasa because what lithium-ion looks like lion so it was the Lion King right I'm selling this in Japan and we go over there in the Japanese city but Johnson well Fawcett dies doesn't mean not successful so recently we've been coming into that market again as the automotive energy market and we developed a product and the person I work with the original project was involved in the second project and I was only involved in helping transfer the technology they called the project g3 and no one knows if that means right it turns out he is Italian and he loves The Godfather movies Oh was it g34 Godfather 3 when just when Al Pacino thought he was getting out of the Mafia he was pulled back in so this was just when we thought we were getting out of the lithium-ion battery subtle things you'd have to be playing you and you wouldn't know if project things are fun they're not supposed to get out it's fun when you put it on the board you know some personalized we does allow them to put more personalized stuff inside well I had many stories one of the projects I developed was the the 66-thousand modular power supply with the plug-in snapping right displays on each one and we had a remote keyboard for it and we hit an easter egg in the keyboard yet have you held down certain keys it played it scrolled the names of all the project team members and beep the beeper with Morse code because the guy was a radio block right and we were at one of these internal training events and the engineer turned on the easter-egg to show it to somebody else and the beep was loud enough that one of our top managers who was a radio buff was going and he was he was reading the Morse code reading the most kind of one who has more starting their product and he came over and at that time it's great there was a big stink as somebody else used like 30 or 40 percent of the code space to put videos on the project team in the product oh they got a big trouble for it yeah we've got kudos because we encoded it in Morse code which is super efficient yeah it only took 1% of the codes base I mean how much did the old because the old HP scopes used to have the and I've got one there which is the editors in it yes it had Tetris and one ever had the asteroids asteroid asteroids game how much code space was no idea how much face but all I remember was we got like we were thought we're gonna get in trouble because it was right after he got furious because they wasted so much time and no doing it and when he realized we did in Morse code first of all being a radio buff made him think it was cool for that rod and he said and you know it's even better it's in Morse code so it's super compacted efficient and we didn't get in trouble at all right so engineers can still get away with that if it's not detrimental to a little bit goes a long way does you know things that make the team feel good about the object is totally it definitely helps yep a little bit goes a long way though mmm it's been one of the strange things up one I always remember the closest is the original Macintosh all right all the design engineers as I saw in the name in the case and it was embedding the case is embedded in the inside of the case yeah the most other case yeah yeah you could find five I've got one yes yeah I made the mistake of buying one at the garage sale and then realizing I didn't want to play with it because it was disc based and really you can't do much with it now they're worth like thousand dollars they still work there were thousands of dollars no anyway instance I can we see signatures at one point inside I guess you could if we molded stuff I mean it's like putting your finger in the car I yeah sure there's been all different kind of stuff it's one of the strange Arcania part of the project development is gave them that kind of stuff hidden in the product but it's not found upon well at some level it will be at some level you'll cross a line and yeah yeah okay and I started now the projects are expected to go so much faster today one of the things that's you know staying up with the competition and we try to get products done in twelve fifteen eighteen months to a mistake three and a half four years yeah Wow larger project teams and you know more custom stuff now we try to use more off-the-shelf and get it done much much faster and the cost of money today is is much higher you know engineers get paid much more than they did twenty years ago so we have to get it done less time to make profit yeah and the expectation other we're a solely tested measurement company is that we we can't use any excuses all we gave all the money to try yeah we have to stand on our own as a process entity but that's growing because we want to be a growth stock not just a cash cow huh so that means we got to get lots of products up because you grow by getting more products out trying to hit the home runs and make the perfect product and happen to ride rare every now and then you see one light up the sky but it's their home runs having so infrequently most of the test and measurement the next one that's somewhat better you know a little bit less money for a little bit more capability there are disruptive new technologies that come but they're rare God much less common that gets back to my original question before we got sidetracked the 2000-3000 x-series it's long overdue and it's overdue we're certainly looking at the next evolution broad teams that's obviously no secret you know everyone knows you've got to be working on this there's a magic too not too quickly though yeah I can treat you get all evaluated and also waiting till the disruptive changes that your competitors in the news and market needs change so and because it's a huge expense to develop those chipsets took over five years five years to develop the magazine form even though you had to make a zoom three was it a complete would you know was one plain resource on the way six yeah but it was it a complete redesign in terms of architecture yeah oh it was absolutely for the mega zoom and three I believe they brought it into a processor to display though right yeah the digital ASIC has a display beauty paints the screen and in fact on the higher-end Wolfhound product this oh that's the four thousand yeah they actually use a processor with a camera interface and they take the the Asics output into the processor as a video all right and then overlay the higher resolution information the higher resolution outcome chip is hard coded as a certain resolution yes yes it is so in order to continue use that chipset and extend its life they had to do it that way so obviously we're not gonna do it that way going forward we're gonna take it to the next level but there there's this is a huge part of the scope market we went from being a smaller player than number one did you where you can that conduct on that course our competitors aren't standing still yeah nine are there in terms of memory space like the the keysight still rules in terms of response and user interface kind of you know stuff ends your speed of updating that sort of stuff but lags behind because of the limitation in the ASIC the amount of sample memory the size of the screen as you said is limited to 800 by 600 can't get any you can't so they're obviously looking at all that now and but you there's a magic time you don't want to go so soon that you don't pick up enough update and you don't you advertise the cost and making those chips but you don't wanna wait so long that you lose you know you don't want your markets to grow and then shrink a little bit because you're better off so the next growth comes at the peak of the previous growth yes getting that right and not over investing and not under investing is pretty tricky stuff it they're clearly working on the next step but exactly when you're gonna see it I can't get into that once you jump up that much in market share then you have the wherewithal to make that next investment you've got a lot they've got a much bigger revenue today than they did when they did the first ones when they did the first ones it was more of a leap of faith right because they weren't there yes exactly so yeah but the same you know I know that the the manager of that whole operation he cautioned his team not to just redo the next chip so quickly because they did they did unless they have enough of the insights that really would do it disruptive change okay and that's you can't just do incremental small stuff the investment for that is too high and you don't get you become pigeonhole you start doing things that look like the last one you do a pretty bunch of problem you know you just everything looks like your next last house to do that really disruptive change you have to take a deep breath wait a little bit wait a little bit and then you really make a big change you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 15,025

Rating: 4.8686728 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, john kenny, keysight, interview, knobs, control knobs, product easter eggs, velocity controls, design teams, the individual designer, gesture control, project code names, clone products, product counterfeiting, education market, consumer electronics, test and measurement

Id: DD7unrTrVdc

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017