CADForum.net turns 1 year old today!

It was one year ago today that CADForum,net crackled to life. It turns out that creating a new forum is very easy. The time from deciding to do it to having a fully functional forum bereft of content was about 2 hours, and cost me a grand total of $15 for a domain.

Which brings me to a question. When you have the most popular CAD related web destination, why would you destroy it? It took a lot of people a lot of time and energy to build the Solidworks forum, and it was utterly destroyed in an instant.

I understand that forums are considered maybe a little “old fashioned”. But when “new fashioned” options are going to include facebook, reddit, discord and maybe LinkedIn, an old fashioned discussion forum still seems to work the best for the kind of conversations software users have among themselves. Plus, I don’t really do facebook. I don’t want to be dead in the water when something happens to facebook (remember a time when AOL ruled the internet?) Discord was probably the next best option, but again, you’d be tying your fate to another organization’s future. At least if PHPBB dissolves, I can continue to use the software as long as browsers support it.

Speaking of tying your future to another product, that’s what happened to the SW forum. The Jive platform died, and SW could either support it themselves for a while, or move to another option out there. There are plenty.

But they chose to bolster their belief in this V6 platform, 3DExperience (here after called 3dx to avoid the obnoxious capitalization fetish and the perennial mis/overuse of the word experience). In a way you kinda have to give them credit for believing in the 3dx, and pushing so hard to force it down the gullet of customers who mostly just don’t want it.

The “SWYM” (see what you mean) was introduced a long time ago. My first interaction with it was back in the days of Jeff Ray. To be honest, I don’t even know how to classify it. I’ve tried to use it, tried to retrieve information from it, tried to get or read responses from it, and I have to admit I’m a little stymied.

I do see a bit of a parallel here between pushing people off of the most popular CAD conference in the world (SolidWorks World), pushing them out of the most popular CAD forum in the world (Solidworks forum) and off of the most popular CAD product in the world (Solidworks) into this bizarre (and I might add only partially existent) world of 3dx. You can’t really blame them, when the foundations that Solidworks is built on is owned by Siemens, their biggest rival. It’s like trying to transition between oil based paint and water based paint – you just can’t do it smoothly. You’ve almost got to force people off of one boat and make them swym to a totally different boat. A boat that doesn’t speak the same language or have an even vaguely similar culture. And is going to charge you to board, and then kick you off if you stop paying.

You can see the business strategy, which at its base appears to be sound (rely on your own technology instead of your competitors), and even necessary. But it’s the execution that seems more like a – well, it seems less like a retirement, less like a transition than an execution.

Anyway, the point is that we owe the existence of CADForum.net to the artless transition from the dominant SW Forum to the pitiful 3dx SWYM. I believe that the 3dx SWYM transition pretty much represents the future of decision making at DS. In general, I don’t believe that people who bought into the SW way of doing things are going to be happy with the 3dx way of doing things.

And I recognize that CADForum.net is not the most modern platform, but it was built to be more about content than style. And it was done in 2 hours on a $15 budget, yet still allows CAD users to share and communicate better than the 3dx boondoggle.

What’s the goal? The goal is to offer a platform like what was taken away. One that’s open to talking about alternatives. One that’s for users by users – the thing that attracted early SW customers. There are still some SW users that are in denial about what’s going on. But they took away your conference, they took away your forum, and they are slowly eroding your software and many of the things you found attractive about it. So maybe a little education too.