Is CAD a Commodity?

Is CAD a commodity? (Don’t bother googling that question, you’ll get an earful about the CAnadian Dollar and the price of wheat). Well, what is a commodity? Dictionary.com defines it as “an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service”, but I want to add a little flavor to that definition. In the sense intended in the above question, I think “commodity” implies that the item in question is disposable, or a throw-away item, something you might burn through as if it fell into the category of “supplies”, stuff you use in bulk, like paper, grapes, cotton cloth, and so on.

It feels to me that there is a segment of the industry that wants us to believe that CAD is just another item. Something you buy from this vendor or that, something that comes as part of a big bundle of engineering technology software and they are pretty much interchangeable, indistinguishable.

This is after a time in the market when CAD was the schizzle, so to speak. In the 1990s and early 2000s the CAD market was hot. If you need evidence that competition is good for a market, compare that time in the CAD market to now. SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER, and Solid Edge were tooth and nail going at it. Customers and everyone downstream from CAD were the winners. Engineering technology was all about creating the data, making shapes, representing products digitally. Remember when the CAD products were all coming out with new jaw-dropping features every year? And then slowly, slowly, the percentage of new geometry creation functions started to dwindle, and we lost development time to things like PDM, simulation, 3D print, and eventually cloud and database development.

Pushing the technology to the cloud hasn’t really done much for the engineering tools, and if you search “What is PTC”, almighty Google will tell you “Digital Transformation Solutions to Unlock the Value of IIoT”. Industrial Internet of Things?!?!? Did they just give up after changing the name of Pro/ENGINEER to Creo didn’t erase the sting of having their arse kicked by SolidWorks? The competition was great for the industry. The conquest has been less so, in my opinion.

So when seen from that perspective, is CAD a commodity? No it’s not. Just because some marketing people have a need to have you see your tool as a small part of a larger system doesn’t mean that you have to look at it that way. Marketing is just psychological terrorism on people who buy stuff. CAD is the lifeblood of the mechanical engineering department, and it brings together all the engineering disciplines via the drawings, and takes products to manufacturing. You deserve the tool that you choose, not one chosen by the purchasing people or as a compromise with the shipping department. Best in class tools produce better products. Commodity level CAD produces commodity level products.

And now at a time when we are seeing the next generation of CAD diverge in two directions – one where the distinguishing difference is being delivered by the cloud, and another where the new technology and development has been directed into something that is a benefit to engineers and design process – expanding engineering tools and methods into data types previously not thought of as engineering data (mesh, subd, point cloud). Tell me what benefits the delivery method brings to the design? None. But give me a new data format, new tools, new workflow, new methods – all without getting rid of the old methods – that sounds like progress to me.

Here’s a better argument of why CAD is not a commodity, rather than just an anti-marketing sloganeering, concept manipulation:

How long has it taken you to really integrate your CAD system into your company’s workflow? And integrate it with the rest of the tools that you have chosen to use? It has taken some time. It has also taken time to develop your best ideas, train your users, and get everybody on the same page with the tools. It’s an investment over time that goes well beyond the price of the software. You and your company have grown around the software to form a living organism. It has taken time, effort, money, and commitment. Does that sound like how you’d treat an interchangeable supply? No of course it doesn’t. Calling CAD a commodity is a tactic to belittle its role in your company’s success. They want to rip it out and replace it with a “integrated system”. What are the chances that a CAD developer can produce best in class ERP? Zero. Same with a bunch of other products they offer with this integrated system.

Who is driving this market? It is the developers or the customers? When customers are given good options, they make good choices. Bundling makes sense for car insurance. CAD? Even if the decision weren’t so fraught with internal politics, I still think it would be a bad idea. With a bundled technology buy, there are going to be a lot of losers at a company, and one department that wins. I don’t think that’s good for anyone.