Whew! My blogging fell behind as I was forced to do my actual job for a while. Our first PROFINET one-day training event is March 15 in Kansas City. I was frantically getting the material ready for the printer. With that done and the webinar infrastructure in place and the PROFINET Developer Workshop preliminaries finished, I can resume blogging. The fact that it’s after 5 on Friday helps, too.
First, celebrations. PROFIblog is on the verge of its first anniversary. I would not have realized it except for Jim Cahill announcing Emerson Process Experts first anniversary. When I checked PROFIblog’s first post, I realized that our first milestone was approaching as well. (I checked, not being lazy like Nick at ProSoft. J )
I discovered from Gary Mintchell’s blog that Siemens has a blog now. I wonder how many other PTO members have blogs that I have not discovered.
For prospective bloggers, I found this advice: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/67/Ten-Things-to-Consider-Before-You-Blog/. It’s clear from the article that all bloggers should have an agenda. Hopefully it is not PPP (pay-per-post). My agenda is pretty straightforward: 1-show manufacturers the benefit of using a fieldbus (any fieldbus) over hardwiring and only then 2-show manufacturers the benefit of using PROFIBUS and PROFINET over other fieldbuses.
Segueing into Dialogues: On fieldbus market share, Bob Gill made a comment to my observation on Feed Forward about users not caring about fieldbus market share. My observation was in response to a new study that shows Foundation Fieldbus with twice the revenue of PROFIBUS PA. I asked that since the node counts were about even did that mean FF was twice as expensive for users. Anyway, I agree with Bob to a point. Users should not worry too much about who’s number one, but they should be sure to choose one of the leaders, lest they find themselves with too few device choices and concern over long-term viability.
But I am proud of this technology that I evangelize so seeing a summary of a VDC report on remote IO here made me happy. (If you don’t care about fieldbus market share, you can stop now.) The summary showed PROFIBUS currently in the top spot in all categories and projected that to hold true through at least 2010.