Between a Rock and a Hard Place

In the sports car world, new versions of classic autos always stir up emotions good and bad. The new Corvette to me looks like a new Chevy Camaro tail ended a Ferrari (Ferrari was obviously parked;o)). And then they went and called it a “Stingray”….aw geez.

SolidWorks has a bit of this kind of problem as well. On one side, they have competitors coming up from behind with great new technologies, like Autodesk with Inventor Fusion, and Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology, and on the other side, they have a lot of customers who are disengaged from the whole CAD conversation, but who love their existing SolidWorks software. So in one respect they have to change, and in another respect, they can’t. So they’re about to get tailended by the rest of the industry.

Their problems wouldn’t have become evident so soon if Jeff Ray hadn’t let the cat out of the bag about the new cloud version 3-5 years early. And the problem was that he led with “cloud”, and that the innovation had little or nothing to do with CAD.

I really do believe that SolidWorks does need to change. Old-school SolidWorks software is slow, inefficient, suffers from “multiple ego syndrome”, and most of all, complex from file management and best practice points of view. History-based modeling techniques are fine for some stuff, but for simple machine design, it’s way overkill.  You might need history-based methods for maybe 20% of your modeling. By that I mean that the first part of each model (main shape) could be non-history, and the last 20% might benefit from ordered features (mainly fillets. I’m a big believer in a hybrid approach between direct and history. We are already seeing the market going this way. With Inventor Fusion, and Synch Tech, and also from what I understand Creo is integrating direct and history in some fashion (maybe someone could offer some details here).

If I believe they need to change so much, why do I seem to be ranting against change? Because the stated change is the wrong change. Content and execution matter. They are changing the underlying IT, or at least that’s all they want to talk about. Or you could look at it like they aren’t changing at all, they are just substituting Catia for SolidWorks. They have yet to proclaim themselves for any type of real CAD changes. V6, or “The 3DEXPERIENCE platform”, or whatever the hell they’re calling it this month, actually has some cool looking modeling methods in it. They seem to have direct edit, functional modeling (what they call “declarative modeling”), if you can interpret what you’re seeing in some of the V6 demo videos that have been around for years already. And these things might be cool, but we may never know, because Dassault is leading with IT technology changes rather than CAD technology.

The good news is that they appear to be slowing down the transition to The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, but the bad news is that the change is still about the platform, which is entirely IT, and almost nothing about the CAD.

To the casual observer, SolidWorks is still on top of the CAD world. And while there is not a clear leader poised to take this crown from them at the moment, I’m convinced this position is in jeopardy, specifically because they themselves don’t seem to believe that CAD is part of their future. You may have seen references to Glassdoor in the comments. It’s a website that makes exit interviews of employees from some corporations. You can read these interviews, and how these people rated their former employer. While SolidWorks overall gets high marks, almost every interview of departing SolidWorks employees over the last couple of years makes mention that Dassault and the French management are destroying what was a great corporate culture. It’s no longer wild speculation.