Installation problems

If somebody likes to rant, there are a few easy targets. 2008 interface. Software quality. Toolbox. Routing. Each of these topics conjures negative emotional responses in different people.

What about SWIM? SolidWorks Installation Manager? SolidWorks seems to change the software installation scheme faster than Paris Hilton can get out of a night in jail. Remember Install Shield, Windows Installer, and now Installation Manager? And the seemingly constant stream of problems associated with each? Each time the scheme seems to get more involved, and SW employees and resellers look at you funny when you suggest that A) you’re not familiar with the new system or B) this is crazy, why can’t I just install the software or a patch? or C) the automated tools don’t work D) The rest of my life is so easy, but installing SolidWorks is so hard? (Sounds like a Paul Simon song.)

To me it also seems that for every improvement, SolidWorks wants to make the users pay. So like much of the rest of the software, it’s two steps forward, four steps back. Moving from 3 CDs to a single DVD was a welcome change, but we had to deal with the Installation Manager. Not needing to have a physical disc in the drive was a great improvement, but instead of downloading a 15 MB patch, now it is 1-3 GB. (Yes, GIGAbytes).

If SolidWorks people have been involved in CAD administration, they are clearly getting their revenge now. I know SW employees are among the smartest people out there, but for all their collective brain power, the installation scheme seems to get sillier and sillier (or is that more silly and more silly??)

In preparation for this post, I decided I would update my HP Tablet PC (tc1100) from 2008 sp2 to 2008 sp3.1. Lately I have been in the habit of sidestepping the SWIM and just downloading the patch and installing, but today I’m on the road and don’t have any SW installation discs with me, so I thought I’d play the game this one time.

I started the process through the SW Help menu, Check For Updates. It starts out well enough. I think to myself, Only a 15 MB download? What is everyone complaining about?

Well, it turns out that the 15 MB is to update the Installation Manager. For every version of the software, you get a new Installation Manager. Oh, goodie. I like new stuff. I think they are just trying to soften you up a little bit. The Installation Manager is a function that you don’t care about at all, installation management is complete overhead, no value add whatsoever, so if they can make it somehow important by making you download a 15 MB file to get it, you are being assimilated. Resistance is futile. This formerly useless function has now become the center of your existence. (Or the center of someone’s career, it can be hard to tell the difference).

So the Installation Manager has so many bugs with it that it also needs to be updated every time there is a new version of the SolidWorks main software?

Wow. Netscape used to have an installer app, but it was like 435 Kb. I know, Netscape is now dead, and it must be because they didn’t play the bloatware game like everyone else.

Once the installer is installed, then you can get on with installing the main installation. Of course the update turns out to be a 1.1 GB install if you go through the SWIM. If you browse to the SW installation site manually, and circumvent the effort to force you into the SWIM again,\n\nusing the “Click Here” in the center of the screen, you find out that to update SolidWorks is really “just” 138 MB, rather than 1.1 GB.\n\nOf course this doesn’t get you all of the other stuff like COSMOS, but I don’t really use all of that anyway.\n\n\n\nAnyway, when I did finally go forward with the SWIM download, of course the download fails. Even though I can download absolutely anything else available on the internet, the one thing I have paid a lot of money to be able to download, well, that’s just asking too much.\n\nThe part of this that I think SolidWorks is not remembering is that the installation process is overhead. Maybe they are in conspiracy with IT people who are scrambling for reasons why we shouldn’t just spend their salaries on company parties or health care benefits for the rest of us. Installation maintenance is not a valid field of study, it’s housekeeping. It doesn’t help me to get my work done, especially when I have to install updates because the original software I installed was released in an inexcusable state of un-readiness. This just adds insult to injury.\n\nAnyway, I encourage people to stop playing the SW game, and start just downloading the stuff you need. Or better yet ask SolidWorks to just ship you the SP5 cd for each release when they get it done rather than wasting production time with beta releases SP0-4.\n\nThere are other parts of this discussion, such as Administrative Images, now renamed by marketing to something more flashy and less meaningful. CAD administrators have been pulling their hair out due to the SW installation for a long time.\n\nOne of the newly fashionable words thrown around by SW employees at SWWorld 2008 was the word “scalable”. I had to stop several of them and ask them what they meant by that, not because I didn’t know what it meant, but because I didn’t think that they knew what it meant. It turns out that in SW-speak it can mean anything from bigger installations of software to using larger assemblies in SolidWorks, and even to mean simply “going faster” – presumably scaling the number of 0s and 1s of SW data that your computer processes. After SolidWorks next conference on torturing the english language, I think they also need to learn that flying buzzwords are a far cry from actual results. How can you make SW “scalable” (easy to install on a lot of computers at a company) if it can’t be installed easily on a single computer? Why also would you want to play the service pack game when every service pack this release has required an unplanned fix (0.1, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1)?\n\nCheck out Phil’s blog where he rants on the same subject.