The irony is all the greater because both, to some extent, are right.
Technology wants to evolve toward a single standard that works.
But it's one of the tolerable flaws of capitalism that competition almost always delivers freedom of choice and almost never delivers a single standard that works-without trying to stomp it out as a monopoly. Today's largest semiconductor makers say they need a highly integrated tool flow to tackle the rising complexity of designing next-generation chips, but they have too much freedom of choice. There are dozens and dozens of decent tools out there from as many suppliers and no way to flexibly pull them together as needed. Thus, Richard Newton of UC Berkeley quipped at an interoperability workshop at the Design Automation Conference that what this industry needs is a Microsoft. Of course, if there were a Windows of EDA, its designer would no doubt be an aggressive competitor.