SolidWorks 2013
I was going to put a verb in that title, but I’m not sure what it is. Announced. Released. Rolled out. Not that it matters. You can’t get it now anyway, except in Beta 3 format. (Update, pre-release 1 is now available)
SolidWorks people have said a lot of things about this release: “Best release ever”, “high beta participation”, ” 5point increase in customer satisfaction” and some other stuff. It sounds to me that whatever they say, it is almost guaranteed to be not true. I want to talk about what’s new, but I want to address some of this other stuff first.
Best Release Ever
I have a feeling that the “Best Release Ever” award is going to go to a pre-2000 release. I haven’t wasted any time on researching this yet, and probably won’t. It’s just a gut. Here’s why. The “Best Release Ever” would not have so much irrelevant crap and persistent bugs. So you have to take the great new stuff and divide it by the old baggage. This (2013) IS a good release, and definitely the best since 2007 (which other less controversial bloggers have also mentioned), but it is not the best. If it were the best, I’d be excited. And I’m not really excited.
Watch out. Now I’m going to be quoted as saying “Best Release Ever” by some damned SEO genius because it shows up so many times in my blog, and because it shows up as a heading.
High Beta Participation
When I tuned into beta, the “leaderboard” was not even filled. This means that the contest for points did not even fill up the top 10 slots. There was a poll that had only 4 responses (it was the only poll I saw). This does not sound like any sort of participation to brag about. It sounds abysmal and embarrassing. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t even access the beta area, and I know I wasn’t alone because other people were asking about it. When I did get the software, I had a high rate of failure for installs. SolidWorks bragged that they had over 4000 downloads of the beta software. I downloaded it myself probably 6 times. I’m updating the SolidWorks 2013 Bible, and had to have fresh installs, and talk about the download and install and other stuff. There were 3 betas, and I’ve got 3 computers to install on. I don’t always save the install files, plus I installed on both 32 and 64 bit, so, short of doing admin images, I just downloaded it fresh.
Fuzzy Math ironically about Education
So 4000 downloads is going to mean about 650 testers, which isn’t a lot for a company that claims nearly 2×10^6 licenses. And let me tell you about those 2 million licenses. How many are educational? neighborhood of 2/3? Most of the edu licenses are free, not paid for. And I know that at one local school, they were given 500 licenses, a max of about 20 are in use at a time. Plus, they teach NX and Inventor. So its definitely a little “funny accounting” going on by counting edu licenses with the commercial. You know they don’t figure in the free edu licenses when they are reporting average seat price (which they want to sound high) to stock holders. Not that it’s anything new, but any statistics these people put out is nothing I’d believe without applying a giant BS filter.
Customer Satisfaction, or More Fuzzy Math
And Speaking of funny accounting, it looks like our old friend whats-his-name is up to his old Customer Satisfaction tricks again. So they are up another 5 points (or whatever) over 2007? You don’t say?!? I will be eager to see what year it is when their customer satisfaction number goes over 100%. They need to milk this 9x% thing a little longer. How can customers be satisfied when you don’t communicate with them about the future of the product for 3 years? SolidWorks favorite customers are the ignorant ones. The ones who aren’t curious, and don’t care. There are plenty of those out there. They might even be the the majority. I’ll bet if you rig a satisfaction poll where the default answer is 100%, and send it to 2 million bogus email addresses, you might not get anyone who challenges that 100% assumption. Add absentee ballots and you could go over 100% if you do the math right.
SolidWorks is 52% CAD
Here’s a little chart I made. I went through the headings of the What’s New 2013 document, and called each heading either CAD (creates geometry) or non-CAD (doesn’t create geometry). And then I took the page counts for each topic. Is this valid? Well, you can argue about that on your own time, I think the “geometry” test is valid, which is why Routing makes the grade, but simulation does not. Configurations could go either way. Is this really scientific? No, but it’s at least based some some factual measure, and is in any case less fuzzy and more transparent than any of the statistics SolidWorks quotes.
I’ll leave it to you as an exercise to go through previous releases, but I believe what you’ll find is an overall trend away from CAD content. I’m guessing that this is the highest the CAD content has been since 2007. The same number of enhancements, roughly, but less and less of it is devoted to CAD. You might need some of these other things, and if you do, that’s a happy coincidence. Some of us just need “Moar CAD”. Yeah, I know, sorry.
If anyone at SolidWorks thinks that CAD is a solved problem, look at the Pet Peeves post on the SolidWorks forum started by Don Van Zile (who, for all his bluster and enthusiasm, never scheduled a visit). There are enough CAD related requests to keep you guys busy for years.
It’s interesting that the biggest topic in the 2013 What’s New by far is drawings. It really needed it. It’s not an area I use a lot, but it is CAD.
How much credit does Bassi get for this? I’ll give him at least Conic, lame as it is. He came late to the game. Who knows, Bassi might turn out to be a breath of fresh air compared to O’Malley.
Anyway, SolidWorks had this non-disclosure thing, and they said we could talk about 2013 on September 10th. I must have been busy, or doing something more interesting, and never got around to it. So I’m getting around to it finally on – of all days – National iPhone Announcement Day. Or is that release day, or rollout day? Has your company given you the day off so you can watch the simulcast? You can’t hardly read any tech or gadget news without someone pretending to be excited about the iPhone announcement. I’ll make the point that SolidWorks is trying to become Apple later.
But now I’m too tired to write about CAD. I’ll have to come back later to talk shop.
Solidworks is an amazing program. It is full of geometry bugs and other bugs. Strangely there seems to be a workaround for most of them. I get good results but tread a difficult path. It is irritating that they do not seem to fix very many bugs. I am finding that there are many remarkable capabilities. Structural fea and aerodynamic cfd actually work.
The company does not give me any good feelings. Why does anyone work there with that kind of management? The airtight secrecy is not a feature of an innovative progressive company. The bullshit and obstrufucation is not reassuring.
This is my first visit and post to this blog. For many years I’ve been struggling with SW to produce the various parts required for the machines I’m employed to design. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve complained to SW reps. about SW’s basic features malfunctioning, only to be either stonewalled or ignored.
I’m so glad I finally came across this blog, as just this morning I was told once again how wonderful SolidWorks 2013 is going to be. I began to research online to see if anything had changed with SW. I can discern from this and other sources that SW continues to obfuscate as a method of business, and to leave those of us who are forced to use this terrible program (I prefer either Inventor or Solid Edge) to flap helplessly in the wind.
Thanks guys for saving me time and for validating what I so painfully experience each and every day.
Matt-
I was watching the short videos on the Modeling Enhancements. I was watching and listening to the New “Section View Assist.”
I heard one word that piqued my interest- “Solidworks 2013 re-invents how sections views are created.”
“You don’t have to draw sketches to get the section you are looking for.” Now is this a big change in direction for them or not? I guess the real answer to that would be what they have actually done here. Are they still using sketches but they are predefined and using some sort of “sketch assistant” tool in the background to create the section or are they truly moving away from 2D curves and relying on the geometry ID to locate points and let the sectioning programming handle the cut segments, directions and orientation? If it’s the later I would say that is a big step for them.
I would also follow that statement with…gee..that’s been that way in other CAD systems for over 15+ years! It looked so much like NX drafting process to me I had to laugh! So, yeah, I guess after 15+ years they truly have “RE-invented” how sections view are created.
My next questions are this: “When I open up a drawing containing a section created in SW2011 with a 2D sketch does it get converted to this new section type? If not, then I am I going to have to teach users how to create, modify and manage both types?”
Ryan
Dave, its nice to imagine some soul searching going on behind closed doors however I think the only arguments they are getting are from this blog and the feedback given here no matter how honest and relevant is probably about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit. A vicious fart that sounds like a FUD when leaked into the vacuum of information 😉
A basic problem Dassault have is that only people who say and do safe and agreeable things are employed or talked to. Step out of line and we are liable to read of your departure in a Twitter post. Its sort of the digital equivalent of being fitted with concrete boots and dropped off a wharf at midnight….
How can you have a realistic view of the world and make sound decisions when you only hear yourself and yourself repeated? At no stage has Bernard Charles looked like he knows what he’s about and yet everyone continues to follow his direction regardless. How can their be anything but confusion and fluffed results in the circumstance? Just stop thinking and do what you are told. As long as you get paid who cares how long it takes and how often it has to be redone… This is a situation that could go on for a l-o-n-g time and produce absolutely nothing useful. If the worst comes to the worst I suppose Dassault could easily be nationalised since it would closely resemble a government department already.
Actually Dassault don’t do introspection or due diligence, they make large impulse bets and keep putting their money on red even if the wheel is obviously turning up black. Its only a matter of time and persistence isn’t it?
Matt, the last time I had access to beta, and I am sorry I can’t remember what year that was, 2009 maybe, it was claimed there were a large number of participants and yet the forums were very very quiet. If my memory serves me correctly I estimated that only about 0.04% of the entire SW community bothered and of those only a few had anything to say at all about their experience. Many of the posts came from the same familiar small band of people who you find posting around the SW traps. It was pretty hard to believe that very many at all were actively engaged in testing except for those conspicuously trying for a prize. I think the others if they really were present were window shoppers. Honestly I didn’t believe the numbers claimed then and you are probably right to doubt/question them this time as well…
I commented here and the comment is sometimes shown and sometimes not. I would be really pissed if I were depending on the cloud for my CAD work. Of course that is something entirely different than a blog.
@solidworm
Siemens developed conics with “limited use where it will be needed. It’s like a bucket of blue paint with nothing to put it on”? Nice job!
I would like to know how the beta testers like the SW2013 beta?
Any geometry bugs fixed?
Do sketch fillets still flip into cusps?
Surface trims do they still flip?
Do lofts still twist?
How about surfaces; maybe we have seen the last of butt cracks, hogbacks, tits, ripples, curls and gaps?
Files; are they still 1200X oversize pigs??
Splines; are they still relaxed? Can we move one handle without affecting others??
Does the tangent relation still get cockeyed when applied to the end of a spline?
Do features highlight correctly when I click in the feature tree? and vice versa?
Is there a way to get an accurate ruled surface?
Does thicken work any better?
Is the user interface any clearer?
Are the geometry of features defined or just user discoverable?
Ralph,
Were they caught off guard with geometry creation or their ventures into the cloud and social media stuff? My main point is that they are probably not concerned with CAD as much as they are other things today and where they are putting their money is the best indication of intent.
I expect behind closed doors there are some vicious arguments going on right now about directions and failures to deliver and just what exactly is supposed to be the core concepts of CAD, SW and Dassault.
@Jeremy Harrington
I’m a former SolidWorks teacher at the Community College level.
Autodesk was happy to provide many free seats of their software to education facilities. Why would the schools pay for seats of SolidWorks? They don’t have the money especially here on the west coast. You don’t need a college degree to figure out how those seats of SolidWorks got into the schools.
Were all the seats totally free?, probably not. Were some of the seats free? probably. Were many seats heavily discounted?, probably. Were many students given free seats?, probably.
I know more, but I’ll leave it at that.
Cheers, Devon
Hi – Jeremy Harrington from the SolidWorks EDU Team. Specifically on the “Fuzzy Math ironically about Education”, the vast majority of our EDU licenses are sold, not given away. We are proud of the outreach, package and value we have created for the Educational Community and work very hard to earn every customer – “ironically” often versus free software or donations. We’re not aware of any school getting 500 licenses for free, and would be interested in understanding where that information came from and who the customer is. I will be happy to report back what I find after I contact them.
Jeremy Harrington/SolidWorks
@Dave Ault
Dassault is not so much fumbling as caught off guard by rapid changes in technology. Look at how the (relatively open) Autodesk has had to repeatedly change AutoCAD WS — first generation: Flash-based; second generation: rewritten for IOS and again for Android; third generation: they’ve got to be rewriting the Web browser version (in HTML5?) to remove Flash so that WS can do 3D on the desktop.
That’s three major technological changes in two years. No doubt Dassault has been doing the same kinds of rewrites frantically, just behind tightly closed doors, instead of openly like Autodesk.
With regard to the comments above about the beta program, we had over 4,800 activations (not downloads) for the SolidWorks 2013 beta program from June 25 through Sep 9. Each activation is one distinct serial number, so even if a user activated on six machines, it’s counted only once. EDU users never participate in the beta testing and the beta program is available only to active subscription users.
Matt / SolidWorks
Gamification, 3Dexperience, what was that silly thing they had a year or so ago where you could “model” your environment including those stiff lipped bodies? I have thought for some time that the emphasis on pure CAD and those who use it to design was becoming second place. Today I see some silly arrange your grocery store shelves thing from Dassault, part of their 3D Experience.
I have to wonder if pure CAD is really their main future goal. Look at the absurd amount of money Google and Facebook have made for themselves without generating squat for investors in the way of dividends. Social media so to speak. I wonder if they look at those dollar signs and figure that is far more lucrative and much less demanding than something that has to deliver precise results in what is a pretty narrow market all things considered.
Look, behind closed doors with the esteemed Bernard there has to be some logic as to what is going on. Dassault can’t be that clueless as to just be fumbling along without any plan. At least I hope so. But what other reason for something like Minimoys and gamification and experience and social stuff out the wazoo can there be except as experimental efforts in finding another direction that diverges from CAD as a core concept for existance?
FUD? Time will tell but I have always been told to follow the money and the SW subs cash sure seems to be doing a lot of things they never asked for as customers.
In my opinion solidworks does not develop any new CAD functionality. the new CAD tools in 2013 is there because Siemens decided to incorporate Rho-controlled conics and the intersect tool in their geometry engines which are embeded in solidworks. so kudos to Siemens for their good job.