SolidWorks is Marketing Direct Edit

This is a strange move to me. It’s like Microsoft making a cell phone, and saying “hey, we have this small device that fits in your pocket, and you can make calls with it, search the internet, and play games!” If you listen to what they say, and watch what they do it becomes even stranger. They claim that you can move the mounting boss if you separate it as another body. Geez. Why would you say that? You can do it in SW even without that. The changes are to an imported part, but they are the simplest changes available, and they don’t show the big limitations of direct edit in SolidWorks. Of course they don’t show that Solid Edge blows this kind of stuff away. They don’t show any difficult changes, or any interesting changes. It’s all severely basic stuff.

The only thing I can think is that they are trying to learn how to market direct edit, or possibly soften up the market so they hear the “direct edit” phrase as something associated with SolidWorks. I don’t know when this video was made, but it seems to be intended for people who don’t own SolidWorks. I got the link to it in an email yesterday, and it seems to have been sponsored by TraceParts, although you’ll only see that in the fine print.

8 Replies to “SolidWorks is Marketing Direct Edit”

  1. Way to go and do something Siemens did ages ago… :/ (way to go me saying what you guys said ages ago on comments 😀 )

    I’m a SE user myself and it’s been a while since I tried SW so it would be nice to check out what the limitations are in Direct Editing of which Matt told about.

  2. In a way, this new wave of direct editing tools (and heck, even old ones like IronCAD or KeyCreator) have spoiled us.

    I think SolidWorks does have some direct editing merits, as long as it doesn’t involve to much topology change and you don’t mind having a more clumsy interface to do it with, and a feature in the tree.

  3. Well, if a company named Parametric Technology markets direct edit I guess SolidWorks can do it as well…:) I’m joking! How can one market this video and spread it worldwide ? It’s old technology with lots of limits compared to Creo or Syncronous Tecnology, and maybe Autodesk fusion as well. It’s on Matt’s channel and not on Solidworks Youtube channel, so I guess they don’t dare spreading it.

    The new technology is coming soon, it’s potentially powerful, but it’s coming late: other CAD companies made direct edit before Solidworks, and even the cloud (Autodesk, and maybe Siemens).

  4. geez… typical useless sales/marketing… selling fluff on a hook.. but, I betcha >80% of the engineering managers (who DON’T design a effin THING) will nibble on the hook and end up wasting every designer/engineers time with this smelly bait….. (off the soap box.. I feel better now) . 8^)

  5. 1. I don’t design like this
    2. Direct Editing is my last choice when modeling, but at least it’s available
    3. This video appears to have been sped up and edited to not show Rebuild wait times
    4. I’m guessing that the Options to not show Feature Trees Errors is “On” & Verify on rebuild is “Off”

  6. Marketing at its best (worst!)! “… without having to manually type in any dimensions” gosh that will save me all of 0.05 of a second and net me the wrong number anyway because it never steps in consistent increments!

    OMG pa-lease! These kinds of “videos” really get on my nerves. How can anyone, with any shred of integrity, release such insulting-to-the-user material such as this. Complete waste of time and resources. If they put 25% of the resources it takes to make these video’s and put it into fixing a single flaw, bug, or oversight that is currently within SolidWorks (you know SWCorp… the software some of us have to use EVERY DAY to earn actual money) the real users would be OVER THE MOON!

  7. Solidworks is confused. Just give me a Solidworks that does what it is supposed to do. For instance boundary surfaces that go to the boundary and do not have tiny curls at the edges. Flipping trims that destroy the rest of the feature tree are bugging me.

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