Regional Technical Summits
These events are things that I have come to look forward to. The Tech Summits are great places to learn something new from SWWorld quality speakers. Richard this year is going to shuffle the deck a little more, sending speakers to new areas. He is also incorporating some new topics, so if you have come to a summit before, you won’t just see the same things you saw last year. If you have never been to one, you owe it to yourself. Its a no brainer to justify the cost and the time away from work. Sign up for $40, and its a one-day affair. Send two people from your company because there are always two presentations going on. Click here to link to the SWUGN page to get signed up.
I’m going to try to be in Orlando, Nashville, and Baltimore, since those are the events in my SWUGN territory this year. I may make it to some others if I get invited and have the time.
Orlando, FL – 3/18
Nashville, TN – 04/08
Oklahoma City, OK – 5/20
Baltimore, MD – 6/17
Vancouver, BC – 7/22
Minneapolis, MN – 8/19
St. Louis, MO – 9/23
Salt Lake City, UT – 10/21
Chennai, India – 11/18
Los Angeles, CA – 12/16
Solidworks has really done something wrong with a new release that has a low adoption rate. I just hate it when software has plenty of bugs but the new release does not address bugs and just adds bloated features. Of course the new version needs more memory and a faster processor. Maybe it will soon require a new operating system, and more memory, more processors, more exotic graphics card. They must think that we secretly want to spend a bunch ot time and effort to maintain a platform to run upgraded software that is worse than before.
Both Solidworks 08 and Vista was not that bad,
in case of Vista,it is far more stabe and secure than xp.i like the new integrated search,Firewall (absolutly eliminates the need for a third party firewalls),built from the ground task scheduler (much more advanced than xp,able to start task with system events), resource monitor and many more administraive functions,image gallery,…
with 08, at least i have a tabbed toolbar which frees some space.
I’ve been bugging them to slow down the upgrade cycle since 2004. I spearheaded an informal policy where I work that states we only upgrade every two cycles (works out to odd years).
As far as MS goes, I hope sooner (rather than later) a viable alternative pops up. Mac is finally starting down that path, but has a lot of ground to cover since their missteps in the late 80’s and 90’s. MS needs competition to be good. They suck a little more each year. The more they try to make PC’s into Macs, the more they suck.
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Yeah, doggie! Say it!
I hope a lesson was learned with 08. The only thing ‘customer driven’ about 08 was the driving of customers to start looking at the competition.
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Amen, brother! Preach it!
Matt,
I think you’re going a bit over the top with your comments RE: SW2008. early on you had valid reasons for its backwards steps with the new UI etc. And i agreed with them whole heartedly. And still do. They are valid and OBVIOUS flaws. But it is a step in the right direction. But i suppose this is the problem with SWCorp (lets not forget MS) now. Its half baked. INstead of taking steps forward in UI, ease of use, productive, pleasant etc Its two steps back.
Painful little idiocies that not only piss you off as a user but make you NOT want to use the software that you used to love. But as i said there are some nice things about SW2008 that i’ve found are great additions. They just never went all the way like limiting our custimizibility and oh so many things you already know about. I wont even get to them when it comes to the actual feature front.
But yes, although i wouldn’t be so harsh (perhaps i’ve given up the lost battle?), i agree. Very little customer driven going on here. I think the only *real* customer driven i’ve seen lately in any corporation is RED ( http://www.red.com ).
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Yeah, I’m probably a bit over the top. Now and then I just get stuck in a corner and can’t complete something I can visualize. That’s what’s so frustrating. SW is all about communicating stuff that’s in your head, and usually you can get what’s in your head into the computer. But sometimes it just refuses to do something.