SolidWorks 2009 Barcelona press event: Summary

This was the first annual International press event for the new SolidWorks 2009 release. The purpose of the event was to show off the new version of software to the press. The actual event lasted a day and a half, with the first day being dedicated to speeches from Jeff Ray, Bernard Charles, among others, as well as a number of customer presentations. The first day ended with what turned out to be a general sales demonstration on a wide range of functionality from sketching to Routing.

Bernard Charles presentation was interesting. He touched on the very early history of how SW was acquired by DS, and how it was almost Solid Edge that was purchased instead of SW. He also talked about the relationship between SW and DS. An impression I’ve had before that became clearer to me was that John McEleney was run out because DS wanted to bring SW closer to the mother ship. John seemed more closely aligned with the people who liked to keep France at arms length. I don’t know if that is correct or not, but it is my impression. For this reason, it may have seemed necessary for DS to bring in a new face who was more willing to toe the corporate line. Jeff Ray seems directly involved in making SW just another division of DS. This may make sense to the DS folks, but I don’t think SW users have much of a sense of belonging with anything related to Dassault. We don’t get much benefit from the relationship such as usable Catia translators. The only thing I as a user can identify as a benefit of membership in the DS family is the Fill Surface tool, which comes from Catia.

Anyway, Mr. Charles speech seemed in part focused around this idea. The “love mark” comment, probably meant to be reflective of “a trade mark that you love” was telling. I don’t know how they intend to get SW users to love being a part of DS. We will need to see more direct benefits from the relationship before any of us fall in love.

For better coverage of the press talks, see Roopinder Tara’s CAD Insider, and Ralph Grabowski’s World CAD Access. These two are members of the “real” press that have proven that they understand the blogging world better than the rest, and have also been personable good guys. Ralph Grabowski in particular was good natured in how he took a bit of ribbing.

We saw some user presentations on various businesses using SolidWorks. These presentations tended to be more about the business than about their SolidWorks usage. The most interesting were one on large scale construction projects like arenas or wind turbine towers, and another on the development of a sports car by an F1 race car team. I think these could have been much more interesting (from a blogger perspective) if they had included more information on how the modeling/engineering work went, what sorts of problems they faced and how they dealt with the problems.

One customer presentation had a full sized humanoid robot on stage. I thought they really failed to capitalize on some potentially great material. They showed a movie of the robot doing things instead of actually making the robot do things. The fellow also got a little defensive when someone asked the classic “isn’t this going to put poor people out of work” question. Also, I don’t recall him showing any SolidWorks models at all. This could have been a show stealer presentation, but instead, I think it just produced yawns.

I’m not sure of the value of this kind of presentation for the press. I haven’t seen anyone report on the user presentations extensively, and there wasn’t any news worthy new information in them. I personally would like to see more technical, engineering or CAD use content. Maybe SW could encourage these presenters to talk more about those issues in future events, including SWWorld events.

The second day was devoted to trying to walk the members of the press through a hands on session with the software. The main thrust was SpeedPak, simple weldment analysis, a PDM demonstration, and PhotoWorks 360. The value of this session for the press was questionable. The hands on functionality started with making assembly configurations, mating subassemblies into top level assemblies, and so on. This all happens without assuming that they knew anything at all about sketch relations or features.

It wasn’t clear to me that this was a real success. Stephen Wolfe gained some points when he asked that the boundary conditions of the sample FEA problem be made more realistic. His comments, although very brief, exposed one of the things that I think is a major weakness of trying to ram FEA into the mainstream, and even made more poignant by Mark Schneider, the SolidWorks demo jockey driving the session: FEA is all about assumptions. What is the difference between a CAD jockey with an FEA license and a real FEA analyst? Setting up the inputs and interpreting the output.

Mr. Wolfe was exactly right. The boundary condition assumptions of the table analysis were wrong, and would lead to wrong results. FEA in the wrong hands is a dangerous thing. The real problem was that the correct boundary conditions were too difficult to set up for an elementary tutorial for press. The problem was a table with a weight on it, and the assumption was that the bottom of each leg was fixed. Of course this is not true, the legs can slide. This makes all of the difference in the world in the results. The demo was able to show the difference between the elements being totally fixed on the bottom and being able to rotate, but not translate. I will be curious to see if Mr. Wolfe writes about this experience at some point.

In general, I think the First Annual International Press Event was a success. The planning was well done, Laura and Nancy of course did a great job. I would like to offer a couple of suggestions for future events:

• Make the customer presentations more about the software or the engineering problems and less about their company or their product.
• Make the demonstrations by the SW people less of a sales demo and more of a What’s New demo. What’s new is actually why we are all there. I felt there was almost no what’s new, and it felt for all the world that SW was trying to sell software to the press. I know in the end, that’s kind of the goal, because if the press buys it, the press will in turn try to sell it, and that after all is the goal of these events. Still, I think you should talk about what’s new.
• Have some product specialists on hand. In fact, you might dump the hands on thing, because that had real potential to backfire on you. It would be better to have 10 product specialists available to take journalists in smaller groups and talk about details.
• Cater to bloggers. Bloggers are SW’s biggest bang for the buck. We talk directly to users who influence CAD purchases, and we do it immediately with real credibility about software issues. We talk about real functionality. We have opinions.