Not out of the woods, SolidWorks still must die
– Gimli, son of Gloin
I’m as surprised as anyone that SolidWorks seemed to have corrected their position on whatever this unnamed Catia V6 based product that we’ve been hearing about for almost 4 years is going to be called. The fact that it isn’t being touted as an immediate replacement for current SolidWorks should come as a relief to a lot of people. But then again, SolidWorks made a pretty effective case for why the current SolidWorks must die, and none of those reasons have changed. Just as a reminder, SolidWorks must die because:
- 18 year old code needs update
- history based CAD is no longer fashionable
- still want to consolidate business onto the CGM kernel
- SolidWorks wants to be first with new technology (although by now they are dead last, behind Siemens, Autodesk and PTC)
So they are making a concept modeler instead of a full blown CAD product. This doesn’t change anything, when it comes down to it. A concept modeler is just a 25% way station on the road to a full-on CAD product. It is smart, because it gives customers a chance to weigh in on the whole cloud-Catia concept without needing to fully implement it. It allows SolidWorks to go public with something before its really ready – I mean, that is the SolidWorks way, after all. Customers are getting restless about the new direction, and competitors are capitalizing on the “mushroom PR” – keeping customers in the dark, and feeding them a line of crap every now and then.
Given this situation, I don’t think the overall goal has changed. I think that they are still planning on eventually replacing SolidWorks with a cloud application based on V6. They may just delay that for another couple of years, which can only be a good thing. It may still be the wrong thing, but its at least a more reasonable approach. It may also signal that they are willing to learn from mistakes, but it could be that they were just forced into a slight alteration of plans by the reality of development delays and panicky business people. It’s impossible to say what the real situation is. Short term its good news, but long term, I doubt the goals are much different. I’ll be interested to see how Bernard Charles spins this, or if he allows Betrand Sicot to spin it. Hopefully DS is using this time to figure out the difference between the SolidWorks market and the Catia market.
Don’t be fooled into thinking you’ve heard the last from the DS and the Mid-range Cloud.
On the positive side, a concept modeler is something I’ve long been interested in. Imagine and Shape, Shape Shop, Shark, MoI, Rhino, Cosmic Blobs, and others are among the stuff I wrote about frequently 3-4 years ago. If they bundle the concept cad with a greatly enhanced n!Fuze, that might be something worth paying money for, but the money they were asking for n!Fuze would be an outer limit ($80/month/user). Concept CAD is an incomplete tool, and there is a fair amount of competition in that space. What I’m hoping is that what they see as a “concept modeler” is actually 100% of what I need from a CAD tool. Jacked up on surfacing and subd, and thinned down in drawings/accounting/management. Like a nurbs-capable modo one stop shop.
Neil,
If you are refering to the bit of controversy which really was not from the PLM World guy that was a non issue. The one thing Se has really done right was the SE university which went from 250 to 500 in one year and I expect it to double again for next year. I believe in a couple of years there will be more SE users at their convention than PLM World will have at theirs. Now If that dedication and effort could just get into marketing to. I have no answer for this peculiar behavior.
Seems like the dealership have a sporty model they are enthusiastic about but they have been directed by head office to park it at the back and sell the boxy straight six instead. Maybe they met their monthly target already or someone at head office considers boxy straight sixes as being real cars for better people.
More of the same strange thinking that has obstructed a forum and annual get-together? 😉
If Siemens made the iPod they would sell about 300 of them and be known in professional circles for the technical quality of their valve radios, something they would also sell about 300 of and be quite content with. OK so I’m leg pulling but it makes you wonder if SE would do much better if it was run with a different mindset.
We hope so to and we are expecting good things here based upon the fact they have kept their other promises where the software capabilities are concerned.
Neil, I have no idea why marketing is so lame for SE. It bothers me a lot and I can’t quite grasp why it just never seems to get the attention it deserves. ST is five versions old now and yet to have any sort of true PR blitzkrieg. SW has done a superb job in this area and they seem to know the value of consistent and persistant and abundant contacts with customers and potential customers. I get lots of stuff each month for SW and they KNOW I am not buying but it has paid off quite well for them in overall market share. SE needs to copy SW’s marketing and SW needs to copy SE’s concern for customer needs.
>As long as Solid Edge adds some surfacing
Although they have made some opportunistic noises they havent really come across as being committed to it IMO.
I’m not actually sure that they will and frankly its going to have to be more than ‘some’ to make a viable alternative to SW for ID stuff.
Unfortunately despite its attributes and potential the marketing of SolidEdge still comes across as pretty halfhearted for some reason. Still there’s always hope they will get serious about it. It deserves better attention and success.
If the Dassault ‘conceptual mechanical design’ opener (aka Catia lite in the cloud part 1) due next year is *unimpressive* or worse and SE put out a release with some encouraging surfacing tools then its game on for sure.
@Ryan McVay
Ryan, no that’s not quite what I was saying. I’m not sure that would be possible. I haven’t really said what I thought would be the best thing for them to do. As long as Solid Edge adds some surfacing, I’m not sure I really care what SolidWorks does.
The best thing SW could do to avoid losing a lot of customers all at once would be to gradually make the changes to the current SW product. You can run software with dual kernels. For a while. I don’t believe the cloud changes are worthwhile, maybe shoehorning cloud into a CAD product would be appropriate instead of shoehorning CAD into a cloud product.
The real question is how they can add functional modeling into a history based product. They’ve got THE guy for doing that – Bassi. That would be useful, but I don’t think they’re going to do that. They are going to put the functional modeling into the cloud product and abandon the history based product.
There are two ways of looking at this:
Inventor/Mechanical Desktop. We all know how that ended, and this is the scenario I see playing out here eventually.
Inventor/Autocad. This is a possibility, but Inventor and Autocad are to some extent different markets, while I think DS intends V1 and V6 to be the same market. So I don’t see this scenario having much validity.
I suppose you could look at it in the NX/SDRC method, which I think is similar to what you are suggesting. But I don’t see DS as being willing to do this kind of thing. The two products were merged over many years.
Matt-
So you are saying that DS would benefit by following the PTC process by introducing SW V6(Croe- Direct) and SW 20xx (Creo- Parameteric) witha common overarching GUI and then use a couple years of software development to bridge the gap? I would have to agree that that would be a good development strategy.
As already mentioned DS would have to create the new foundation for the overall new product and slowly blend the two other products together…just like making dough..big bowl and mixer and start adding the cold water and flour together slowly..
In this example, you create the new GUI that sits on top of the two products, build your design environments and start populating “common” building blocks between the environments. Using the common building blocks ensures that you aren’t duplicating functions in different environments (something that SW has plenty of…just look at weldments and assembly functionality!)
Anyway, that would be my strategy..but what does that mean for my existing SW maintenance $$ (14-seats worth)? I’m not sure and I know that I can’t upgrade from SW2011 for quite awhile -XP, hardware, SW partner software and corporate IT issues. I guess we’ll continue to hang in there..but my arms are getting tired.
Ryan
They just changed the wrapping! And the time frame. It took them, what – 16-17 years??? to make the CoG availible in the model. Remains to see how good that CoG function is. Probably end up using the macros because of functionality anyway.
@Dave Ault
I think it’s all still coming. It will all arrive with the concept modeler.
Matt,
Presuming that SW is going to defer the cloud indefinitely what do you think they are going to do about the proposed kernal change and direct editing?
Yeah right. You call a twitter leak being made public? No, hold on, that’s how we learned the founder left the company didn’t we. Crawled off into the snow and died somewhere for the sake of the share price…..
I know people think I don’t play by the house rules, and I don’t, but look at the ‘rules’ and think about what they actually are about and then reflect on why the world has extra large problems currently.
@Neil
Neil, I posted at a strange time – beginning of the weekend. Plus, it was the first weekend that hasn’t been suffocatingly hot here in the eastern US anyway, and if people were inside reading blogs, I think there would be something wrong with them.
The two posts right up against one another look like a change of position, but it’s just a realization that it’s all the same thing, just using a delay as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Most of the decisions leading to what we’re seeing now were made months ago, it’s just making it public now.
Any company with public stock has an inherent conflict of interest. Public stock by law ensures that you can’t communicate with your customers in real time.
Fair enough. Just keeping my oar in for everyone’s benefit. 🙂
Actually I’m pretty much expecting to be let down by their conduct again, but it will definitely be the last time they do that, and then it will be goodbye to Dassault and Solidworks…
Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if the redirection leaks even turned into denials they ever worked on it. Then I am afraid I would have to loudly proclaim Dassault to be total slime and dog poo and they would completely deserve it. I might even place a hundred year curse on their VARS condemning them to enter and leave customer buildings only by the back door and with their head bowed 😉
@Neil
I’m completely burned out on the V6 fiasco, tired of reading/talking about it. The story has changed so many times I’m dizzy.
….strangely quiet here considering 😉
Actually I hope several things happen now to restore customer confidence.
1) It is officially announced the cloud has been abandonned except for useful and sensible things like rendering and analysis services.
2) Bernard Charles is duly replaced as someone who lost the plot and nearly killed the midrange part of the company, and after a decent restorative Xmas break there is a general shakeup/refresh of operations and duties at Concord.
3) They commit to 5 years meaningful development/effort/polish of Solidworks and then at least a 2 year managed transition to Catia lite if they really have reached a technical dead end at that time or customers are seriously disadvantaged.
4) They listen to and learn from the feedback given and try to serve their customers real needs and interests rather than their own. The founders values were good ones. Lets get back to what matters and worked well and the mutual respect we had. Life wasn’t perfect but at least we were going in the same general direction and both sides were engaged in and enthusiastic about making the tools the best we could.
Without fronting up to this situation and fixing it, and it needs to be put right rather than puttied over, its hard to see why customers wouldn’t give up anyway and wander off to SE for instance. I mean SE isn’t ideal for ID stuff but if they know where they are going, are committed and engaged with customers then its still more attractive than what Dassault have to offer. And lets not forget SE has some strong merits of its own. If Dassault stuff around for a couple of years more in a state of confusion and deliver mediocre get-us-by-until-we-have-Catialite-finally-ready-updates I may as well spend my time and energy helping SE to improve.
Anyone else have something to add? or perhaps disagree with…
I do not see why Solidworks needs to do a code rewrite because it is 18 years old. Software should evolve in an orderly manner with pieces improved and tested. New compilers may be smart but the code is much larger than it was in the past. Is that an improvement? The problem with old code is that the authors have most likely moved on. The company probably did not bring in people to learn from the master. The code probably is a mass of band aids. Bugs will just get more complicated. Solidworks needs some solid direction from management that understands and uses the product. They need to avoid copying bad ideas. Do not look at Microsoft user interfaces. Listen to the users. Clean up the current features before adding new bugs.
Well I’m picking they have given up altogether because the mission has turned into a total PR mess and the staff are burned out and demoralised. Of course that means they will need to regroup, rethink and do something else in a couple of years but the cloud has to be off the list. It would be silly to go there again knowing their customers didn’t want it the first time. I mean after years of effort including multiple restarts all they have managed to produce is n!fuze and that sank immediately. People were executed along the way. This is a humiliating misadventure considering they already had the basis of the code in Catia. Remember a large part of this mission could be described as cut and paste and change the icons and yet its been a bridge too far.
Its totally in character that they can’t come out and admit they went in the wrong direction and its a mess, so they are giving us an ID flavoured icecream to suck on. Yeah so I agree that it leaves them and us in the situation we were in before except the glass ceiling has been raised a little. There still isn’t a clear future for SW but it can go on for some time as is. Eventually though its going to be conspicuously old tech. My guess is a Catia v7 lite is on the cards.
It would be a new low in management behaviour, something I personally wouldn’t forgive them for, if this move was merely a diversion (ie blatant arse covering lies – and I don’t care if you think its part of your job to tell them…) and they were pigheadedly persisting with the cloud.
As I said I won’t be spending money on SW until I am convinced and I will never spend money on a cloud solution. The onus is on Dassault to come clean with their customers. Twitter leaks are just not good enough. Sort of reminds me of messages left on toilet doors…. Even if this is a total screw up at least show some class in the way you handle it.
I’m betting “everyone loves it!”
Yes I know, I’m a smart aleck.
My guess for the new concept modeling app is something like 123D! with eye catching graphics, and UI elements, but poor on performance and functionality, like always. 🙂