What?!? You Weren’t Invited?!? Crash the Beta Party
In the first page of Google search results for SolidWorks 2013 Beta, you get this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Beta_2013_on_premise_testing_event which turns out to be an invitation to beta “testing”.
The interesting parts of this invitation are the dates (June 27 – August 20, depending on location from Osaka to Sao Paulo), and what they see as the main topics:
“And many more!” I like that.
Here’s my problem with these invitation only beta testing events. SolidWorks (not just SW, but a lot of software companies) have this tendency to invite fans. Why invite skeptics? They might say something that isn’t positive. They might not verify that A) we’re going in the right direction or that B) we solved the right problem with the right solution or C) that the solution actually works or works correctly. It’s the sign of an insecure organization that they don’t want to look at what they do through a critical lens.
Another part of the problem is that they start asking questions after the work is done. Once Beta is going, it’s certainly too late to fix conceptual problems, and probably too late to fix bugs. You just can’t steer this thing quickly.
It looks like Jeff Mowry got his cynical wish! More File Management! 2D drawings, well, that’s CAD.
Jeff
From what the guy running it told me was that they sent out a lot of requests and had very little interest. SW even footed the bill for the hotel and food and snacks during the day. It was my first time down there so I really didn’t know what to expect and was just surprised of the lack of attendance.
@Josh
Josh, it sounds like perhaps not many invites were really sent. I’ve put in extensive time with customer input programs SW has had in the past, but haven’t ever received an invitation to Concord (not that I’m expecting such a thing). The bitter medicine of rigorous critical customer assessment is best taken before product releases—not after. Customers will be critical of errors, regardless—why not weed them out before they hit production? That’s what we do in regular product development, and the same rules apply for software.
Rick
They did fix one. I recently got confirmation that SPR491217 which was a graphics issue with the feature manager did get fixed in 2013 A1.
What was interesting was that for the whole week there was only 3 of us there for the full 3 days. There were 2 guys that came in for one day. So even though they sent out the invites no one came to it. My colleague and I thought there would be a lot more people.
Josh,
Did they fix any bugs that you reported?
I am still on SW2007. I am trying a borrowed SW2011. There are still the same serious surfacing geometry bugs; surfaces have wrinkles, tits, rolls and butt cracks, lofts still ignore profiles, sweeps get wings, curves are inaccurate. Sketching splines is even less controllable. Trim surfaces still flip and delete child features. It is bigger, slower and uglier. The glowing blue highlight makes it less clear what is highlighted. The files are full of shit and 1200X larger than necessary. If they don’t fix 2d splines there is no hope of good smooth surfaces.
Surface finishes are very attractive, but have a miserable interface. Knit has a leak patching feature that partly covers up the poor curve geometry, but has a backward user interface.
I sure hope that the parts of SW that I do not use are improving. If geometry is bad ther is no way of rendering that will fix the problem.
Yeah well genuine best wishes to Jeff if he has moved along from Dassault. Although he attracted some comment during his CEO tenure I think he got a rough deal at the end for being loyal to SW/Concord. Unfortunately though he is/was part of something that doesn’t exist anymore except in the pretence and fantasy of marketing…yeah so why not move on/back to the US. There are other opportunities out there besides being trapped in the zombie world of Dassault.
Be interesting to see if they manage to launch SWv6 this year or not. Its unlikely there is very much at all left in the SW development pipeline now especially if the cloud version is late having been reworked several times already to be somewhat useable. I think it would be a disaster not to have anything of worth to show for either ‘product’ line but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if that was to be the case. I think they know that and that is what the Pet Peeves pitch was about recently….a cover for having nothing although they tell us that that is *absolutely not true whatsoever!*…
Beta by invite ie an audience of very company friendly users is probably a way of concealing a very empty release from a more critical audience for as long as possible. 😉
Matt
My colleague and I went down last year to Concord for the 2012 beta. We got the invite through our VAR. I will say we didn’t go down as fanboys, and we told them up front that how we felt and what we thought was wrong or not working as it should. We were there for 3 days testing and filling out bug reports and we submitted some bugs that have been around for a long time.
At the end of our session there was myself, my colleague and another tester there and all of the development product managers in one room and they asked us what we thought. We told them straight up that we will never use Sustainability, the new machined part costing feature wasn’t even close to being ready and EPDM is no where near a real PDM replacement.
They asked what our favourite new features were, and we told them the ability to type equations into dimension boxes and the command search. We pretty much told them that it’s the little fixes of the stuff that we use everyday that matters, not a new feature that we will use 3 times a year if ever.
Now, did they listen? I don’t know, most of the time we were with some tech support guys that were running the beta testing and they even acknowledged issues that have been around for a long time. We never got any real one on one with the managers but my colleague did get some good face to face time with some actual coders explaining issues that he was seeing.
Yay! I wish I had less reason for my cynical attitude, but the hits just keep coming.
@Alex
Yeah, I ran into Jeff Ray’s LinkedIn profile earlier today for some reason, and was surprised to see that he seems to have moved on. Moving from Concord to Paris to San Fran. That’s a lot of packing and moving.
Hey Matt, have you heard these speculations about Jeff Ray ?
http://solidworkseducation.blogspot.it/2012/06/jeff-ray-ha-lasciato-la-dassault.html
(read after the England flag for the english text)
cheers,
alex