My friends from marketing tell me that the target here are the press, specifically the industry press. In a competitive market you want to make it "hard" or "ea

My friends from marketing tell me that the target here are the press, specifically the industry press. In a competitive market you want to make it "hard" or "easy" to compare your product to your competitors product or service, if you're the leader you want it to be 'hard' and if you're the competitor you want it to be 'easy'. I originally asked this exact same question of the guy at AMD who started talking about their x86 chips in "equivalent" megahertz because they the actual clock rate was slower but they had a better instruction per clock (IPC) and so got more done per second than their Intel counterparts, but Intel was winning in the "Megahertz race" because that was what the press was fixated on using to describe the "leading" chips. Anyway, if you're a leader and and you can get the press talking about something your competitor isn't (or can't) do, then you "win" the perception of being ahead. In semiconductors, this has been very effective at getting the press to see Intel as "behind" because their "nanometer" number was stuck in the double digits while "more advanced" fabs were already in production on lower nanometer number processes. (Note the scare quotes are all just to indicate topics that both TSMC, Samsung, and Intel would have different takes on the current state of the art here).