Everybody loves a train wreck
Who knows why, but my business and my blog both seem to thrive on other people’s disaster. The number of hits on my blog has tripled in the last week, and one post had 6X the traffic I normally get. Everybody loves a train wreck.
When models go south or file management practices blow up, I get a call and get to help people out. When SolidWorks melts down in a new release, I’m right there to welcome the news. When the SolidWorks forum needs a kick in the pants, I’m lucky enough to be the guy who gets struck by lightning for the 8th time this year. Several people recently have reminded me of my symbiotic love-hate relationship with the SW Corp and software. I guess I’d be nowhere if they were consistantly good at this. On the other hand, I guess they’d be nowhere if they were consistantly this bad at it, but an occasional train wreck is good for business.\n\nAm I gloating? Well, yes. Now that sp1 has hit (and been removed and replaced unexplainedly with sp1.1) everyday users are starting to see for themselves what SW08 has in store, which is for the most part, you guessed it, another train wreck. This is kind of an unfortunate train wreck, though, because it is masking some other enhancements that look good on paper.
In various places, I’ve heard people say that their reseller said that SW made these interface changes because all of the mid-range CAD products are starting to look the same (I wonder how that happens when SW is copying as much Inventor functionality as they can hack together). That is completely believable. It means that marketing is driving the bus, and the UI changes were not customer driven at all.
Another person said that a SW RTM (regional technical manager) said that SW is driven to change because of the competition. This was a commendably honest answer for an employee. If I hear one more person say “SolidWorks is a customer driven company”, I’m going to puke. They are driven by competition, not by customers. If they were driven by customers, they would take a release and just fix things, or come up with an alternative OS solution, or not release software until its ready, or enable SW2005 to open SW2008 files.\n\nInstead, if there is a particular function you would like added to SolidWorks, send an enhancement request to Autodesk, you have more chance of seeing it.