How to kill a great product … with innovation

“Innovation” is a word that’s easy to write, but it’s much harder to actually achieve in the product design world. And even if you do in fact “innovate”, innovation of itself is not always a positive thing. Some changes are better than others. [pullquote]“This time around,” Karl Brauer wrote for Edmunds when the new Eclipse appeared, “only the name remains the same. The body, chassis, interior and drivetrain are completely redesigned in the 2000 Eclipse. But is this change for the sake of change, or is the new car actually better?”[/pullquote]

With any type of product, whether it is automobiles, toothbrushes, or CAD software, making changes to an existing successful product is always risky. The more successful the product, the higher the risk. The risk is that you’ll take something successful and screw it up. It’s one of the advantages of starting a new product from scratch: you have nothing to lose by failing, but a lot to gain by succeeding.

There are a lot of examples of failed innovation. Like the 1998 Mitsubishi Eclipse, just to pull one. The original two versions of the  Eclipse were cool and sporty, with a cult following through the 90s. Then with the 2000 model it was “innovated” and became much less popular with customers. Eventually it landed it where it is today – goofy, heavy, not fun to drive. They never got back that original mojo in that car.

A more familiar example for some folks would be the Ford Mustang. The original 1960′s models were legendary, but in the 70′s it lost all its appeal. I’m not sure how the model survived all those years with such bad design, having fallen so far from the heights. The Mustang has bounced back and forth between success and failure, in styling, engineering and target market. Other successes-turned-failures like the Thunderbird weren’t so lucky.

The GMC Canyon is a great looking small truck, but it’s a piece of junk when you read the reliability ratings. People still buy it, though. Does that make it ok? People bought Yugos. People by products that are proven crap every day, and companies continue to exist making crap. Why people buy crap products is a study all its own.

How do big companies fail so badly sometimes? Specifically, how do they take a great productand turn it into something no one wants? How do you fail starting from success?

Among other things, I think it has a lot to do with getting out of step with what your customers want. And that comes from believing your own BS.

So is it fair to lump SolidWorks in with all of these product failures? How could SolidWorks possibly fail when they seem to be bigger than ever? Aside from the fact that statistics back up the biggest lies you’ll ever hear, I think it’s not hard to make a case for SolidWorks starting to fall into a period of failure, measured in one way or another.

SW new development is going into the cloud, not into the existing product.

And the cloud is good for CAD in what way? Well, the cloud is greatfor stuff like posting vacation pictures, small talk with friends, maybe a blog, sharing illegal music files. Although blogs are dead. You can either believe or not believe that CAD on the Cloud is a positiveinnovation. I think there are some very small niches where will be a benefit, but for most users it’s “tits on a bull”.

Hardware and storage are cheap-Cheap-CHEAP! And if n!Fuze at $70/mo/user is any indication for just a viewer/markup, then price will not be a reason to use SW Cloud. Between floating licences and on-line activation, there really isn’t a need for using the cloud to manage licenses. Distributed computing? Remains to be seen, but it’s a possible benefit.

I don’t want to say the cloud is useless, because I use it for plenty of things. I just don’t put anything important on the cloud.

Add to the “cloud innovation” SolidWorks taking over more and more of the software landscape that they used to leave to their development partners, and you can imagine that this “innovation” (read: buying into markets) is probably annoying some partners. SW is so distracted by all these other things (costing, architecture, sustainability, simulation, data management, etc.) and paying very little attention to what most of us really need from them – CAD. All these things are useful, and they all existed before SW bought into each field. Is SolidWorks on a suicidal innovation bender?

Is CAD really as advanced as it’s going to get? Can’t they find any CAD functionality to innovate? I can think of plenty. If you call cloud an “innovation” when applied to CAD (and that’s a questionable IF), are you sure it’s going to do us any good? How does where you store data or run programs improve your ability to design, model and document? It doesn’t. So cloud is an utter distraction from CAD. Is it really worth a CAD company innovating in an orthogonal direction like that? No. I don’t think it is.

I don’t want to predict stuff like SW customers abandoning their software, or Dassault destroying SolidWorks, then selling it off (although SW competitors predicted this 14 years ago), but I do want to say that cloud development is the wrong direction for a CAD company, and a lot of people are losing trust in SW and claiming parallels with PTC before they lost a lot of market share.  A lot of CAD users are greeting a lot of so-called “innovation” with a shrug and an eye roll, and with a little less patience than last year’s skimpy What’s New list.