SolidWorks V1 = Mechanical Desktop
***Clarification*** The 3D Vision post that I referenced here seems to have been written some months ago and was just accidentally posted by someone other than the author. This is not an attack on 3D Vision or Jeff Sweeney. The post was removed without knowledge that it had been linked to already. I originally got the link to the 3D Vision story from the Novedge Pulse.***
First of all, how scared are SolidWorks resellers? They are this scared. They are scared enough that they won’t offer a link to places that have a different opinion.
The announcement of SolidWorks V6 does not mean the immediate demise of SolidWorks nor a change of SolidWorks from the Parasolid kernel. SolidWorks Corp plans on developing and maintaining both packages until there is no more demand.
3D Vision
How many of you remember Mechanical Desktop? It was a system much like SolidWorks that started about the same time. It had a couple of advantages, though. First it was developed by Autodesk, which people had heard of, and a lot of people had bootleg copies of their AutoCAD product. Second, MDT was built on AutoCAD, so it was like adding parametric 3D modeling to the 2D you already knew. But it had even more disadvantages. First, you couldn’t keep it running long enough to save any work, it was slow, and the workflow was not easy. I was an early adopter, on version 1.1 in 1995.
Mechanical Desktop was so bad, that by 1999, Autodesk was starting to release Inventor to replace it. The promises from Autodesk to MDT users sounded like this: “We will continue to support this product into the foreseeable future.” Or to that effect. Does that sound familiar? There’s support, and then there’s support. Of course all of the development resources were going into Inventor. To be fair, Mechanical Desktop continues to exist, or did at least until 2009, officially. But talk to any MDT user and see how many of them are happy about how Autodesk treated them in the transition.
SolidWorks is about to go through the death that MDT users endured, with a couple of differences. First, Inventor was a better product than MDT in most ways. All we have of V6 right now is a series of failed initial product launches.
The commenter TUIT mentioned Post3D. Check out what the www.post3d.com domain looks like today. This was one of the failed 3DEXPERIENCE products.
Some of you may remember another failed V6 3DEXPERIENCE product, n!Fuze.
And of course Live Buildings was announced back in 2010, and only released as Lean Construction this past week.
These were supposed to be the V6 product launches leading up to the main mid-market Catia-Lite release that we’ll see broadcast from Orlando, and 2 1/2 of them failed. That means there’s a fair chance this new Catia-Lite V6 is going to fail, or at least not hit the target set for it by DS.
So you tell me, if your SolidWorks reseller comes around later this year selling a product based on Catia, they are most definitely selling you a kernel change. If Dassault is abandoning the SolidWorks name in new products (the new V6 product will not be named SolidWorks), and it has already abandoned the SolidWorks name as a business (remember, the SolidWorks name is not on the new headquarters building, only the Dassault name), then how do they say they are not abandoning SolidWorks customers?
Maybe the sky isn’t falling, but it is definitely time to start evaluating escape routes. Do you trust a company that has such a small success rate in test products, and will not communicate meaningfully with customers?
ok,..sorry, you have been talking about MDT… geez, amazing, my blood still boils remembering that fubar modeler.
I say with a big grin;
In defense of MDT to ensure history, for who ever may be silly enough to research the past developments in software, is balanced 😉 You are spot on about the appalling treatment MDT users received from Autodesk Matt and, in the main I agree with your post. But, I must put up a cry in defense of MDT.
As I have/did use MDT from before its public release to the end and beyond…. Whilst I am aware of the comments about stability I must say we never experienced (personally) any more difficulty with MDT than AutoCAD and there was a very good reason why.
However, one of my early customers (1984 he first bought his first AutoCAD) had quite a lot of trouble with MDT crashing on a plant model he was doing – a COMPLETE 3D model of an existing bottle manufacturing plant – 485Mb (brave man for the time), using hundreds of Xrefs, all 64 of MDT viewports and some 28 layouts on a Pentium machine he had built to spec.
He had been keeping me informed of his hassles over a several week period and we had helped him on, several occasions, fix the corrupted files after a crash. After several days of a very trying time I suggested he bring the lot to my office and put the entire thing on my stock Compaq Evo. The Evo, with a fraction of the memory he had installed on his machine, he completed his job with no more problems.
Cause: the core of his purpose built rocket (for the day) machine an AMD chip. Mine was Intel based and when his machine was changed to match no more MDT problems.
@Lin SD
Yes, as long as by “survive” you mean a Mechanical Desktop type survival. Forward looking people are looking for something else.
Shouldn’t announce the old is obsolete until you have something new ready to replace it.
There are millions of engineers and students are still using SolidWorks, this momentum won’t disappear suddenly, hence SolidWorks, as a product will survive, for at least 5 years.
I think entire CAD industry is getting crazy this days! Why all they want to do revolutions, not evolutions. This is self-satisfaction from the CAD vendors, forced by the stock exchange demands for higher profit. I know that (for example) 80 % of the SME’s are using not more than 40 % of their CAD products. And who will pay the cost of such a revolutions – the customer, of course. By the end of the day, I doubt existing SW customers will love V6 immediately by itself, rather, they will be forced to do this with some “carrot and stink” tricks by the same SW resellers!
I like to think of evolving software like skyscrapers. At some point in time you had a great foundation, but as you build vertically the exercise of balancing new parts on top gets very time consuming and you keep getting farther away from your base. In addition, markets and needs change over time. This is not an excuse for the poor handling of the whole SolidWorks V6 airing a couple of years ago, but a fact when it comes to software development.
I would be a lot more worried if we hadn’t heard something about new products in the pipe. Especially looking at Autodesk.
Post3D: When we were shown this at SolidWorks World I was led to believe that it was a product for the future. So far it has proven not to be, mainly because of the lacking launch of other new products using the same base I guess. All in all, showing it was just dumb.
SolidWorks n!Fuze: Must go into history as the dumbest rebranding of a already decent name; SolidWorks Connect. It never did work, not even when they did the first demo session.
Live Building (aka Lean Construction?): The best looking product of the “new ones”. I understand the need for a controlled demo, which was clearly rehearsed, but the product actually looked usable and a decent work in progress.
Whatever your feelings towards Dassault may be, I don’t see them killing the SolidWorks brand. It holds too much value. But I can see it taking it’s place as one of the products under the Dassault umbrella, following SolidWorks Live Buildings rebranding to just Lean Construction(?).
These days buying CAD software is not about brands but buying what does the job, it always was of course, but the functionality covered in the different packages weren’t as consistent as it is today. You buy what does the job well, and hopefully you buy into a partnership to help you do your job, which is the reseller channel. Software is never permanent, so thinking more than 10 years ahead is just people being overly optimistic.
I for one am looking forward to the first alpha/beta/public launch of the next generation product. New products is the only way to gain more than a small step towards more efficient modeling. But that’s just my personal belief. Should I be scared in case it fails, probably. Should I be scared if it doesn’t deliver on the promise of giving us more efficient tools, probably. Am I, no. It will hurt the SolidWorks brand name and in the long run, my job too since I have invested a lot of time in learning the ins and outs of the software.
But still, even though I’m working for a reseller, I’m excited to see what they come up with 😉
“nFuse, they love it!” – Dassault
🙂
Dassault is calling Post3D a lab experiment from which they got sufficient information, which is why it no longer exists. See http://www.3dvia.com/forums/topic/post3dcom
But in watching the promotional video, I see no mention of it being a lab experiment, nor does it warn that the site will be shut off once DS has sufficient information.
@alex
Alex, well, yes, I may be wrong about some things. It happens. But I won’t be the first person that’s happened to. This (ranting against Dassault) started a few years ago as a way to get some believable clarification. It obviously hasn’t worked.
There are some things that I’m not wrong about.
1) SolidWorks as a company does not exist in the way it used to exist. Jeff Ray was the beginning of the end, and Mr. Sicot put a cap on it. This may be an emotional judgment, but its one that I hear most old-timers repeat. Besides the fact that the old guard SolidWorks employees are gone or leaving. Change can be good or bad, but so far I’m not seeing the good part of this change.
2) The SolidWorks product is not the focus moving forward. Dassault has said this Catia-lite V6 whatever it is will be the future.
3) Most of the V6 initiative, as relates to mid-range (SolidWorks) products, have failed.
Totally agree. This is why I claim they don’t understand this market. I think they may think they are NOT killing it, but improving it. Jeff Ray was fond of saying that customers don’t really know what they want until you give it to them, or some variation on that old Henry Ford quote. It’s an excuse to do whatever you want and call it “customer driven”.
Thats interesting – particulary now its been taken down.
screenshot cached page:
[img]http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Capture.PNG[/img]
Matt-
Funny thing came to mind when I watched the 3DPost…it’s all based on SecondLife…maybe that is what they are really after- as second life!
I think you’re just upset about Dassault in general. Perhaps you are right…But what if you are wrong? I mean, how can you be so sure? There are millions of subscribers large and small around the world who buy and use Solid Works as their main CAD platform. If I am not mistaken, Dassault’s total revenue coming from Solid Works in year 2011 was near $1/2B, CATIA sales were only about half of that. Why in the world would Dassault “kill” their cash Cow makes no sense to me…?
I have high respect for you and your expertise, but I think you might be wrong on this one…
Matt,
Looks like 3Dvision removed the page that you linked to. Too scared, I take it. Hmmm… Google cache still has it. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vYjAGQcfZ58J:www.3dvision.com/wordpress/2013/01/14/the-sky-is-not-falling/+http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/2013/01/14/the-sky-is-not-falling/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us