Oh, for pity's sake, stop!

This came in from the recent Profibus newsletter: THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FIELDBUS IN HISTORY: PI, the umbrella organization of PROFIBUS and PROFINET, recently announced that PROFIBUS passed an important milestone in 2006. A further 3.4 million PROFIBUS-equipped devices were sold. Not only was this the largest annual total ever but it also brought the total number of installed nodes to 18.8 million. How do we know how many? We count the chips. Almost all PROFIBUS devices use an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to unload communication tasks from the main device CPU. These chips are available from a number of suppliers who provide us with an accounting of their numbers. No other fieldbus comes close to our total, making PROFIBUS the most successful fieldbus in history. The story gets better too, because the rate at which PROFIBUS is gaining new users is accelerating, which means that the 2004 prediction of 20 million devices by 2008 will be reached early - possibly by the time you read this! What next? 30 million? First of all, it isn't true, unless you don't count HART as a fieldbus, which is silly. The market does. Second, this sort of "I have a bigger bus than you do" nonsense is bad for the industry, bad for end users, and really bad marketing.  First the Fieldbus Foundation, now PTO... Fact is, friends, HART isn't likely to go away anytime soon. Sure, all-digital is better. But it obviously isn't enough better to blow HART away. Let's stop slinging dubious statistics, and start tending to business with the end users. End users need information, not puffery. They need training and assistance, not bloviation. Get out there and help the poor embattled end users for a change.