What’s the Difference Between Solidworks 1995 and Solidworks 2022?

I’ve been quoted as saying “nostalgia has no place in engineering technology”. And I stand by that statement. You might think from the title that I’m headed for a self-indulgent stroll down memory lane, but at least from my point of view, that’s not my intent. Things change, I get that. Most of the time things change for the better, but not always. Things will change with or without my consent. It has always been that way. Your grandkids will one day complain about things changing.

Even recognizing that, there are some changes that are beneficial or useful in some way, and some that just seem like a a step in the wrong direction.

What is the difference between SW95 and SW2022? For those who have been around for a while and have seen the company at both ends, there is clearly a difference that goes beyond icon color. So how would you characterize the difference? It’s more than just the splash screen, number of features, or the year, or even the SolidWorks vs SOLIDWORKS obnoxiousness. Nor is it that Jon Hirschtick and John McEleney went from founders to competitors.

You might say that SW95 used the extensions *.prt , *.asm, *.drw, and didn’t have any sheet metal functionality. Or that in 1995 SW didn’t have the Toolbox functionality, and had not yet bought Cosmos for analysis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look a little deeper.

As you might expect, there are many differences, but I think we can limit it to two main differences between then and now. Not to be over simplistic, but those would be 1) the product and 2) the company. And of course the product is different because the company is different, so in the end there’s really just one difference.

SolidWorks 95 was created by a company founded by mechanical engineers. Remember the “By Engineers For Engineers” bit that we all went crazy for? The big problem they were solving was taking mechanical engineering technology from the mainframe (centralized on big expensive corporate servers or workstations) and moving it to the PC, accessible by smaller companies and even individuals. Democratizing CAD. In doing this, they had to dumb down some of the tools and concepts a little. They were taking computer based geometry from Pro/ENGINEER, SDRC, Unigraphics, and Catia and making it such that your average high schooler could run it. Even if they didn’t understand the design side of things yet, they could operate the software, make 3D models, and use that data to create 2D drawings.

SW95 of course was released at about the same time as Windows NT, the business/technical Windows OS, further democratizing technical computing. It was an idea whose time had come. People and small businesses bought into this idea enthusiastically.

Solidworks … seemed to understand human nature as much as geometry, engineering and computing

Yes, SW95 was a technological movement. It helped a lot of us move out of Flatland into more realistic representations of products. But in case you missed it, SolidWorks 95 also started a social movement. You no longer had to have the backing of a big corporate wart hog to do 3D CAD. Individuals who created products came together in a social way instead of a strictly professional way. SolidWorks World became like a rock festival. Never before had a CAD product – CAD – generated so much real excitement. Instead of coats and ties, you were seeing shorts and sandals. It really went beyond tools people used to get work done. People who shared a certain outlook on work and on life were being brought together by a tool that was now accessible to more people.

To be fair, the PTC company played a bigger role in SW’s success than they wanted to admit. Pro/ENGINEER salesmen were rude, condescending bullies who were shown the door and in some cases protective orders by prospective customers. They were used to winning deals because they had a great product, and an aggressive sales force. This is usually seen as a good thing, but there is such a thing as taking things too far. The Pro/E product was very rigid and required a lot of training. SolidWorks dispensed with a lot of the rigor, and just make it easy to use, even if that ease of use would sometimes allow you to get yourself into trouble. The simpler software gave users control over their tools and data. Solidworks sales and technical representatives were simple everyday Joes (like me) who were enthusiastic about a product that could get you out from under people and products like PTC was pushing. SolidWorks was simple. It was effective. It seemed to understand human nature as much as geometry, engineering and computing.

In 1997 SW was bought by Dassault Systemes. It was a little terrifying at first, but they seemed content to mostly leave us alone. And so it went for about 10 years.

Around 2008-2010 the SW CEO at the time, Jeff Ray started giving signals that DS was ready to start interfering. The short story was that SW was to be rebuilt on the Catia V6 platform.

There were a lot of implications that came with this. There were also a lot of compelling reasons for it as well. First, integrating SW into Catia V6 meant that we were moving to the cloud to take advantage of the Enovia database format. That would certainly be a huge change. Second, the move required dumping the Parasolid kernel. Parasolid is of course owned by Siemens, SolidWorks (and more generally Dassault’s) biggest competitor. A portion of every SolidWorks sale went directly to the competition. Kernel swaps in CAD are exceedingly rare because they are fraught with difficulty and error.

The proposed changes would essentially put a SolidWorks-like skin over Catia V6 code. Calling it SolidWorks in any way was a real stretch. Dassault must have known they needed to maintain as much continuity as possible to avoid losing a lot of customers, but you can’t rip out the most fundamental aspects of something and make it look familiar.

Just to spell it out, the proposed changes would essentially remove all of the aspects that attracted all of these people to SolidWorks in the first place – it would undo the revolution. It would take us back to the big centralized mainframe server, and put us back under the thumb of a big corporate entity. How would people who bought into this democratization idea react to such a 180 degree change in direction?

The changes never took place. Customers revolted. There were several ugly scenes (on this blog), even a certain half-inebriated SW VP physically chasing me down a hallway. Everyone was losing their minds. I think this was the sign that the internal transition was complete. Like that episode of Star Trek Voyager where Janeway and Tom Paris turned into amphibians.

Over the course of a couple of years, the sky kept refusing to fall. it appeared that DS was going to relent on these V6 plans. There were many conflicting and evolving stories that came from high up in the organization. After a while it started to sound like SW was going to go the route of Mechanical Desktop, which died a long, protracted, drawn out death as other products were introduced.

In hindsight now, it appears that during this interval of confusion, DS used the time to come up with a brilliant new plan – rename everything, and then just implement the old plan. No one will recognize it 8 years later. Even that halfwit Lombard must have moved on by now. V6 became 3DExperience. SolidWorks V6 became SOLIDWORKS 3DExperience. SolidWorks World became 3DExperience World. And now, everything is going to run on the 3DExperience Platform. Completely different from that old plan running on the V6 Platform. Of course it is. (need Sarcasm font).

Part of the problem is that 3DExperience is built on a huge vision. It includes, I think without overstating anything, everything. You can model biotech system with Biovia. You can model global systems with Geovia. You can aggregate net data using AI with NetVibes. 3Dvia brings 3D data to retail. Enovia is huge PLM, and there are other branches covering fields such as medical, marketing, retail, simulation and manufacturing. You can tow icebergs to Africa, everything is connected. It’s a beautiful vision. But it’s not one that I’m particularly interested in buying into, and I’m certainly not interested in getting shoved into it. As huge as the vision for 3DExperience is, it is antithetical to the vision that most early SolidWorks users bought into. Dassault is going to have a very difficult time switching people with one vision over to the other vision.

Despite a lot of bickering, there were several people I considered friends at the old company. They actually offered me a couple of different jobs over the years, one of which I should have taken. But most of those people left early on. I know a few people who are still there, but not many, and we don’t really stay in touch. I know everything changes, and I did prefer the way things were, but it has been time to move on for years now. As I once heard, engineering technology is no place for nostalgia. I’m sure the SW employees who remain have a perspective on the changes that is different from mine. The real difference between SW 95 and SW 2022 is that one was a company I could believe in, seemed to have values that I shared and a vision that I could relate to. And the other is just not.