This is a teeny tiny business...

At lunch, I ran into several very familiar faces. This is a small incestuous business. Gary Anderson and I chatted (Sue Lynch hurt her ankle, and couldn't come up from Georgia for the meeting)after Gary gave Sue's talk for her. To show you how small the world is, my dad repped Gary's dad thirty years ago. The usual suspects from P+F and Maverick were here...I long-time-no-see'd them, bringing laughter, since we had all spent most of last week in Utah at AutomationXchange. In field instruments, Yokogawa is producing some excellent flowmeters, wet chemisty sensors, and differential pressure sensors. They've partnered with Ohmart Vega to give themselves the level instrumentation they lack, but it wouldn't surprise me to see them produce non-contacting level products on their own...Gary showed a very interesting film about changing the removable electrodes in an Admag magmeter. For years, Krohne claimed uniqueness on this type of design, and it is good to see Yokogawa doing user-centered design changes. In Analytical products, Yokogawa's new slogan, tongue-in-cheek, is "Yokogawa! We make the 'magic' go away!" Yokogawa believes that they are not in the blue smoke and mirrors business (despite inviting us all to spend several days in DC) and the concept, novel as it may be, is to produce replicable results with easily repairable and upgradeable hardware and software. Walt