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... if you take away the off-the-shelf design entry tools, the chances a rookie developer will start using Altera (and then stick with it for the rest of his career) are getting very slim indeed.
It levels the playing-field, and therefore decreases vendor lock-in (which is good for the market/competition, but bad for Altera in this case, since they lose one of the few edges they had).
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So-called entry-level tools are actually quite fine for even mid-sized projects by experienced engineers, which is why I miss the basic Quartus simulator: it's a good-enough-thank-you aid for incrementally-built designs. I neither need nor want a hugely-capable simulator that takes an entire dedicated, separate design effort, slowing me down and making me less productive.
Altera really screwed the pooch in discontinuing the native sim. If Xilinx's competitive tools didn't s*ck so bad Altera's position would be even more precarious.
//atemp99
Honored Contributor
