SolidWorks Clarification: “We Don’t Have A Plan”
In retaliation against their own unwillingness to talk straight, SolidWorks has come out with yet another “set the record straight” blog post.
Dassault has started referring to the legacy product as “SolidWorks Mechanical CAD”, and the future product as “SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual”. These are the products that we here refer to (tongue in cheek) as “Mechanical Desktop” and “Catia Lite” respectively.
At some point SolidWorks is going to have to stop blaming other people for the confusion of their customers. Let’s be clear – if SolidWorks customers are confused, it’s because SolidWorks is trying to send a nuanced, delicately engineered message that avoids the plain truth. The plain truth is this: Dassault is launching a line of products that will compete with The-Product-Formerly-Known-As-SolidWorks, and are counting on SolidWorks (now called SolidWorks Mechanical CAD) on dying a Mechanical Desktop-inspired death. They aren’t going to come out and say that, but they are already introducing the competitive line of products. I don’t think this is deniable.
Notice also that where SolidWorks is concerned, Dassault is no longer using the “V6” terminology. “V6” is strongly associated with Catia, while 3DEXPERIENCE is just this insane vision from Paris that might be any software whatsoever.
You know how it’s difficult to say “Yes” and shake your head “No” at the same time for most people? This cognitive dissonance is why customers are so confused. Dassault is saying one thing, yet doing another. They are trying to make you believe they are not doing what they are doing.
Here are some lines from the blog post:
SolidWorks Mechanical CAD… will continue to leverage the Parasolid kernel.
I don’t know who is telling users that SolidWorks is going to change to the Catia kernel, but I keep hearing it from users. I think it’s SolidWorks clumsily worded statements that make people think this.
The complementary nature of SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual reinforces our commitment to SolidWorks Mechanical CAD.
Now this, on the other hand, is unadulterated BS. There are many words you might use for a combination of tools including SolidWorks and Catia, but “complementary” would not be one of them. The very idea of it is so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. The Catia to SolidWorks translation continues to be one of the most problematic in the industry. Further, aside from looking at the past lack of interoperability between SolidWorks and Catia, there is no way to talk about how these two products will interact, because Dassault is not going to release it to the general public until this coming fall.
Furthermore, the workflow of Catia => SolidWorks is crazy backwards, and totally incongruous as you will see when Dassault comes out with the next in the line of 3DEXPERIENCE SolidWorks replacements. A conceptual modeler is just the first baby step to replacing the entire CAD system. Why would you make something new based on Catia otherwise?
The “select customers” bit is meant to protect someone’s hind quarters. They have to hand-pick customers where this V6 3DEXPERIENCE thing is going to work. After the failure of n!Fuze, they have to make sure this product launch works. This is going to mean that SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual will be rolled out to large international design organizations. Probably an existing SolidWorks customer who should have bought Catia in the first place. They will be big, non-governmental, probably European, with a bureaucracy big enough to accept working on the cloud.
…have no end-of-life plan for the tool…
Of this I have no doubt whatsoever. I think they have demonstrated this pretty clearly. They have no plan for the inevitable end of the trail for SolidWorks. The only plan is to sell you Catia Lite. Again, those of you who remember the demise of Mechanical Desktop will no doubt remember the same sort of planning.
@Jeff Mowry
Sorry I posted that Matt & Jeff without double checking first, my bad, again sorry.
Devon
ohhhhh,.. let us not forget… ô ma charité.
@Devon Sowell
WHAT?
*******
April 24, 2013 7:03pm PST I just got word from an anonymous reliable source that the information I posted here is incorrect, so I removed it & the link to the erroneous information.
Sorry, my bad for not checking.
Devon
@Ken
Perhaps Bernard misspoke himself at that conference, call me gullible, but I think it could happen when you’re on stage like that.
@Jeff Holliday
I took it as a practice in humor, albeit at your expense…
@Neil
Thank you for a demonstration of the wrong way to practice “constructive criticism”.
@ralphg
I understand, agree and do appreciate the info.
You cannot say that Dassault does not have a plan………. In fact, they have too many plans and I am sure new ones are being created every day, on this side of the ocean and the other side of the ocean and even on the other side of oceans that exist only in cyberspace. Their problem is how to maintain dominance over two very different customer bases.
The French have pragmatic issues whether it comes to national defense or CAD and Simulation products. There are even open source solutions that rival or exceed the sophistication of their commercial products.
But give them credit, they are just trying to keep us cows in the corral……….even though the gate is open.
@ralphg
Your giving SW folks at the Director and VP level too much credit.
Jeff will be standing on the beach relaying news to us who moved to higer ground that while it is true that the water level is rising he won’t be convinced its a tsunami until he experiences it as a fact. Until then its just a baseless rumour and our caution is unwarranted at best.
@Jeff Holliday
My reporting is based on interviews with insiders, such as the former CEO of SolidWorks and the CEO of OTOY.
Although there is no doubt that there have been and continue to be very confusing statements being made by SWorks/Dassault, it is truly amazing that anyone reading them can claim they have deciphered the truth. The only thing that seems clear is that there will be changes of some kind coming at some point that will effect some of us. Although I admire the prowess of many commenters to this and other forums, making grand statements of what they “know” is coming is odd at best. Constructive criticism is merited, factual statements of something that has not occurred are just as “suspect” coming from us as from SWorks/Dassault.
The reason for the contradictory statements and FUD generated by Dassault over the future of SolidWorks software is that the staff of SolidWorks is clashing with the overlords from across the Atlantic. This is why there were several high profile departures a while ago, and why Dassault put two of its own into the primary positions of CEO and CTO.
The reason why it has been six years and still no SolidWorks V6 is because the SolidWorks staff first launched their own skunkworks off-site, but then I think Dassault caught wind of it, and my guess is that the first three years of work was thrown away, because it was made from technology unapproved by Paris. This might explained why the “demo” at SolidWorks World 2010 was generated by OTOY remote gaming technology, instead of a local, platform-independent Enovia system.
The three-year delay since 2010 may well be due to (a) starting over from scratch and (b) trying to figure how to cleanly move Parasolid models into CGM. I am thinking that the 2D conceptual modeler is finally step 1, getting 2D data back and forth.
The SolidWorks staff don’t want this intrusion that Dassault is imposing, but cannot speak out against it. So they either quit, or keep their heads down, or repeat the mumbo-jumbo generated by Dassault marketing — while crossing their fingers.
Yet another carefully worded statement that describes yet another change in the plan to someday in the future offer something new, maybe a replacement for SolidWorks or maybe not.
Put this in your pipe & smoke it;
A supplier has over a decade of existing SolidWorks design files. His main customer buys into the “new” SolidWorks. But so far anyway, there’s no reliable, cost effective way to exchange the old & new SolidWorks files. Therefore both the supplier & the main customer will have to support two different SolidWorks CAD systems at the same time, right?
I yield the floor.
So does anybody else wonder why he completely contradicted his boss, CEO Bernard Charles as per the video on this post??? http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=8353
Clearly somebody at Dassault Systèmes is extremely confused with the current direction being undertaken… The big question, is it the guy in charge of the company or his employee?
There is some slight of hand going on here as they try to transition from one product to the other. Clearly they want to substitute one for the other in the shortest time while keeping the SW brand recognition going. Really though they have already shut down the user vibe that made marketing it so successful and half mangled the product image such that SW users no longer feel that the clothes fit. The difficulty is that a lot of people have a business dependancy on SW while DS management are only thinking of the bottom line. From that perspective DS are continuing to harm their prospects. Coming out with ‘social industry experiences’ and other nonsensical stuff like ‘solidworks mechanical conceptual’ only makes them look inept and alienates the user base morePeople need useful information and all we get is double speak and frankly users have worked out enough about the real situation to know lies when they hear them.
.. is it time for a Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil intervention?