The cost of change

There is a sub-story in the Solid Edge ST3 saga that I think I can share, and it has to do with change. To some people “change is good”. I don’t believe that at all. I believe “change” in itself is neutral. I think to say “change is good” reveals an overly simplistic and myopic view of the world. You have to consider the change in the context that surrounds it in order for it to have any value or meaning at all. And even if you are talking about one particular change, any change can be seen as good when viewed from a certain perspective or bad when viewed from a different perspective.

I don’t think anyone really knows where it’s going to wind up, but the CAD industry is trying hard to change. What makes predicting it difficult is that its changing in several different directions at the same time. Low cost 3D, free 2D, direct edit, cloud delivery. Customers will be the ones who decide which changes stick and which ones become footnotes in CAD history.

When I visited Huntsville, Dan Staples told me a story about change. This change was when Solid Edge was young and getting its ass kicked by SolidWorks in certain modeling challenges. SolidWorks was developed on the ACIS kernel, but before the product was released, it was changed to the Parasolid kernel. A CAD kernel is like the engine in a car, but instead of torque, a kernel puts out geometry. Changing out a kernel is painful. SolidWorks did it while still in development, which is work, but there are worse times to do it.

Dan’s story was about Solid Edge switching from the ACIS to the Parasolid kernel as well, but after Solid Edge had been on the market for a couple of years. This was far more painful. They knew that in changing the kernel, there would be certain things that would not be able to go forward, and they knew that they were going to take a hit from customers in biting the bullet and making the change that would ultimately give them more capability in the long run. Dan recounted a difficult time for Solid Edge and painful decisions. In the end, the move to Parasolid was the right thing to do, but in the short term, Solid Edge and its customers paid a price for the change.

Dan also recounted to me the cost of the initial Synchronous Technology change. This was again a painful one for some users. It was in any case incomplete. They were adding a whole new way of working to the software. Users still had the option to work in the “traditional” way, but the old and new could not work on the same parts.

Then Dan started thinking about a different change, SolidWorks changing from Parasolid to Catia V6. Catia uses its own kernel, and V6 is said to include a lot of technology, including support for the cloud and direct editing. To continue the earlier automotive analogy, changing from Parasolid to V6 is like taking the engine out of your car – the one that the car was designed around – and replacing it with a completely different engine that was never intended to be used in your car. This change is relatively simple if done during the development phase. After a couple of years of selling product it is painful. After more than a decade and within a product that is sprawling in its scope, Dan anticipates with some eagerness that a kernel change will be disastrous for SW users. The change from SW201X to SW V6, considering only the effects of the geometry kernel change (without even considering effects of the cloud) will be disruptive enough for end users that moving to a completely different CAD package may be less disruptive.

Now it may possibly turn out that the long term effects of SolidWorks moving from Parasolid to V6 will be very beneficial, but you have to live through the change to get there. Do you really believe in the kind of change that DS is looking to make to SW (watch this video)? If your company has an address near Hollywood, some of this may look appealing, but if you are more closely related to manufacturing than movie making, it may not.

In SolidWorks 2011 the feature that gets the most attention is one called Defeature – so the biggest news in a CAD modeler is a feature that removes features. The second biggest news is the latest rework of the renderer (recall Photoworks, Photoworks 2, Photoview 2010, and now Photoview 2011 is substantially different).

Solid Edge has come out swinging in the past couple of months. They actually have a product, and the product looks better than ever. Solid Edge is also making a convincing attempt to look like they are listening to customers and solving their problems.

From SolidWorks we have a series of vague statements that mean little, and from PTC (with Lightning) we have an attempt to imitate the hype Solid Edge achieved with the first ST release. Lightning is another “just wait and see what we have” sort of thing, but I think the consensus is that it is an attempt to compete with ST3 and V6, possibly bringing together the direct editing technology of CoCreate and the history-based modeling of Pro/ENGINEER.

In the end, stuff changes, and CAD is no different. But some changes really are better than others.