CAD Insider

Solid Edge Gets Mentioned

2012-05-07T10:30:41-07:00

LAS VEGAS, NV (Siemens PLM Connection 2012), May 7, 2012 - Solid Edgers did mental high fives as Solid Edge gets mentioned on the main stage at the the annual user meeting for Siemens PLM product users.

Chuck Grindstaff, who replaced Tony Affuso as CEO, talks about "big data." He means the volumes of terabytes of large sets of data big enterprises have. Big enterprises like Siemens, a company of such enormous scale that its billion dollar PLM business is but a minor component.

Big companies like to deal with other big companies. It's natural. Like pretty girls cluster and talk about boys and make up, big companies can talk about big data and PLM.

Where does that leave Solid Edge? Picking up crumbs, I'm afraid. It's brief mention on the big stage is overwhelmed by big customers and big deals, targets for Teamcenter and NX.

Solid Edge really needs to bust out.

Fooled Again -- Autodesk Doesn't Buy SketchUp

2012-05-01T15:38:39-07:00

Following Autodesk is like chasing a jack rabbit. You think it will hop one way but it hops the other.

I have watched Autodesk for about 15 years. I’ve written much about them, their products. I live in its shadows. My neighbors are Autodeskers. All that, I still can’t predict their moves.

Never has this been more obvious than when Trimble came out of nowhere to buy SketchUp from Google (see press release). CAD insiders had known SketchUp was on the blocks. We speculated and came up with the usual suspects. Not one predicted Trimble.

Why did Autodesk not outbid everyone? I would have thought they’d do whatever it took to acquire SketchUp. Autodesk has been actively chasing the maker/inventor/hobbyist market, such as it is. The AEC community may not have jumped on SketchUp to create the built world, but the DIYers sure jumped on it to make whatever whirligig, gizmos, low-riders, furniture, or whatever crazy contraption that was in their head. It was easy. It was free. It spread like wildfire, reaching and saturating an unintended but huge audience. I attended a Maker Faire south of San Francisco and was amazed at the almost universal adoption of SketchUp. Autodesk had noticed, too, and they were not about to let this go unanswered. They had come out with great fanfare with its 123D product. They were chasing the same audience, but had devised a new product to do so. And spent millions. Like SketchUp, 123D was also free. (see Autodesk 123D, Autodesk Taking on Google)

But it takes more than throwing free product around to convert users. Think children from their mothers. SketchUp already had its faithful adherents. Lots and lots of them. This was clearly evident in its 3D Warehouse, a vast library of models, produced over the years -- all available for free.

I had to make a factory layout. Let’s see, should I make each machine in 123D, even if was free and easy to use (supposedly)? Or should I use models from the SketchUp library. I found Bridgeports, lathes, drill presses, tables, even a water jet cutter in the SketchUp library. In less than one hour, I had a reasonable attempt at a factory layout. In fact, every tool and machine I needed was there. How deep was this library? Out of curiosity, I looked for Adirondack chairs. There were dozens of Adirondack chair designs, for God’s sake.

Thousands of people had been at this for year… SketchUp had – without trying – gained an incredible head start into a market that Autodesk was publicly drooling for. So if I was Autodesk, I would have to wonder… do I want to spend millions marketing and product development and years to try to lure customers away from a product they have willingly chosen, invested time to learn, may be even love? Spend other millions for a website that purportedly has the demographics of makers/DIYers (see What Where They Thinking? Autodesk Buys Instructables) and end up with picklers and cupcake makers? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just buy the product everyone is already using?

Don’t ask me. I can never get it right.

Death Along the Hudson

2012-03-28T22:15:58-07:00

TROY, NY, Mar 28 - 2012 - Covering a conference leaves little time for exercise, much less sightseeing. So I often combine the two: sightseeing while running. And on this Saturday (really, who has the nerve to schedule a full day of conference on the weekend!) I make time by getting up early. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, "you can rest when you are dead."

I imagine running along the lush Hudson River valley, as the sun rises over the river, farmers markets, verdant hills, small towns with quaint bakeries, coffee shops. I need some inspiration because at 5:20AM, it's quite dark and cold.

The streets are understandably deserted. I run downhill on Hoosick Avenue until it hits the river and turn left towards South Troy and look for a running path. Isn't there a law that your city has to have a multi-use path and a pretty park if it has a waterfront? I see nothing of the sort. I settle for a sidewalks so rough and uneven that they seemto have heaved and crashed.

Speed is suffering as I pick my way around broken beer bottles. Throwing empties out of the car on Friday nights must be a local custom. Wait. Don't make snap judgments. Troy can't be all bad. It can't all be broken down, with everyone drinking and no one recycling. Maybe the next mile. So many auto parts stores. At least there cars are in good shape.

It's starting to get light. I see the cherry trees were in bloom. The few people that were out wished me good morning.

But every block brings more boarded up shops and business and houses in disrepair. A few convenience stores are open, their signs advertising lottery tickets shine like beacons in the emerging light. By the time I cross the Hudson into Waterford, I've sunk into depressing thoughts about dying small towns and cities, a malaise that has taken over, starting from my bike ride across the country, seeing boarded up America main streets in town after town. That was years ago. Before the recession. What hope is there now?

I manage to to eke out 11 miles, clean up. I am only too happy to be bussed to Rensaeller Polytechnic Institute. Its exquisitely manicured campus, the ethereal $30 million EMPAC center, the whimsical structures from imaginative minds that will never grace the local waterfront, conversations of rich kids from better off places...all of it helps to fade the images of what lurks out there.

Can we all stay here forever?

Glass Industry Gone But Glass Museum Looks Nice

2012-03-24T16:21:39-07:00

TROY, NY (SmartGeometry 2012), Mar 24 - 2012 - Like so many of our Midwest cities, Toledo, Ohio, was once a manufacturing center. It used to be called the Glass Capital of the World, according to the city's official site. Toledo wanted to pay homage to that industry and build an addition to its Museum of Art. There was only one problem: most of that industry had gone away. Its factories shuttered, its workers laid off. Undeterred, the city of Toledo went to China -- the country responsible for so undercutting and usurping so much American industries -- to create the glass panels. If there was any shame in having lost to the world's labor bully and then have to suck up to them, it must certainly have been overcome. The $30 million dollar Glass Pavilion opened in 2006.

photo from http://www.archdaily.com

I'm hearing all about this from Kiel Moe, Asst. Professor of Architectural Technology at Harvard. He has included the Glass Pavillion in his book, Integrated Design in Contemporary Architecture. Professor Moe tells us that Toledo even imported the engineering, as the glass panels were manufactured in Germany. We see the tortuous route the glass took as it circumnavigated the globe. If you have ever broken a plate transporting it from the sink to the dishwasher, you must marvel at the journey of the Toledo glass.

I'm sure the laid off factory workers and engineers in and around Toledo will have lots of time to visit the Toledo Museum's beautiful Glass Pavilion.

SmartGeometry 2012 - The Pig's Head

2012-03-24T13:53:46-07:00

TROY, NY, Mar 24 - 2012 -The conference was supposed to be about the use of parametric shaped geometry -- but the lasting image may be of a pig's head. Severed, bloody, stuffed in plastic. It was supposed to be appropriate for what it was resting on, a artsy butchers block, Zoe Coombes, founder of Cmmnwlth Studio, knows how to get attention. We were stunned into silence. Only much later at dinner, one of us deemed it vaguely pornographic, someone objected to her use of "orgasm," another deplored her use of Autodesk Mudbox... but all of us remembered her. Zoe went on to discuss the return to basics she is seeing among the city folk (her furniture studio is in New York city), was on the verge of condeming plastics, and so on.

Photo courtesy of Cmmnwlth Studio

Only when my brain was able to release the image did I realize Zoe was here because some of her designs, such as the butcher block, rely on complex shapes as can be created by tools used by generative component practioners, like Rhino. The Smart Geometry conference is like that: a variety of topics, sometimes dead relevant to its name, other times not, but often arousing. Right now I am listening to a painter and simultaneously seeing a clip of Robin Williams with a butterfly. Hmm.... that connection is not immediately apparent. But I did appreciate the bamboo bicycle (presentation about material science, materials being the theme of this years conference).

Image from http://kennyviese.com/

Why bamboo for a bike? According to Dr Hull, head of the material science at Rensaeller Polytechnic Institute (host of SG20112), bamboo can absorb the shock and vibration better than conventional material (metal, carbon fiber) which can totally beat up bike racers, for example those who race the cobblestones of the famed Spring Classic, Paris-Roubaix.

SolidWorks: The Kernel Change

2012-02-23T11:14:44-08:00

SAN DIEGO, CA (SolidWorks World 2012) - I had to admit I was confused. Everybody was talking about how SolidWorks was changing its kernel – and all sorts of bad things were going to happen. “Everybody” being competitors of SolidWorks – and some CAD insiders. The merde was going to hit the fan, if you will pardon the French. All your SolidWorks models were now going to be worthless. Third-party apps would have to be rewritten. A conversion disaster lay ahead. Dassault, barely able to convert from one version of CATIA to the next, was heading for a disaster converting from Parasolid to the CATIA kernel. Dassault was steamrolling past voices of objection and caution, both external and internal. It was rumored that SolidWorks installed Gian Paulo Bassi as CTO specifically for this, replacing a noncompliant Austin O’Malley. Gian Paulo had already stated how SolidWorks would be using the V6 kernel the previous day. But here stood Fielder Hiss, VP of Product Development, stating quite unequivocally, SolidWorks is NOT changing its kernel. Period. End of story. He wasn’t budging.

Gian Paulo Bassi, new CTO of SolidWorks (in red) and Steven Wolf, journalist/analyst, at SolidWorks World 2012

I circled back to Gian Paulo to try to clear things up. “Is SolidWorks changing kernels or not?” It turns out they were both right.

SolidWorks plan is to have parallel products, one with the Parasolid kernel and one with the CATIA v6 kernel. “Let’s face it, the Parasolid kernel may have been the right choice 15 years ago. But the CATIA engine is more advanced,” says Gian Paulo. “Besides, why use a competitor’s product?”

Yeah, I never got that either. Parasolid is licensed from Siemens PLM, the company that competes with Dassault’s CATIA and SolidWorks with NX and Solid Edge. It’s like going to war with a country but at the same time selling them bullets.

So it would appear, after listening to Gian Paulo that the SolidWorks user is not in immediate danger of losing data, his beloved 3rd party apps, or other apocalyptic predictions promised by FUD-slinging competitors and cynics. However, the writing is on the wall. There is a definite move underway to wean from the Parasolid engine and bring SolidWorks back into the Dassault family with the CATIA kernel.

Though an obvious herculean task, Gian Paulo downplays its effect on the user. “Why should the users care?” he asks rhetorically. “I have gone through this before. The user sees no effect with a kernel change. He is dealing only with API’s, which will all stay the same."

"There will be a SolidWorks 2013 with Parasolid. And a SolidWorks 2014 with Parasolid. And a SolidWorks 2015. We will keep making it while customers still need it."

But the V6 kernel will be the engine of the future. It will be where the development will be. It is where Dassault’s heart is.

Autodesk University 2011 - Hits and Misses, Pt 5

2011-11-29T23:07:35-08:00

LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), Nov 29, 2011 -- For the 2nd day of AU, we were treated to a variety of presentations, from a morning keynote to (new this year) an Innovation Forum. Here are some hits and misses:

Hits

Sir Ken Robinson: "The Internet is rewiring our brains." There's proof that we read the New York Times print version slower and and retain more than with the print version. Sir Robinson thinks this is due to the distractions on the web page, like hyperlinks.

Just don't kill each other. "If we all live like Rwandans, the Earth can support 15 billion. If we all live like North Americans, it can support 1.5 billion." Thanks to Sir Ken Robinson, again, for recognizing the true cause of all our troubles is us, but who has the tact to not make us feel bad about it.

3D show and tell. Louise Leakey, descendant of the famed paleontologist Richard Leaky, who made 3D models of the bones of our ancestors so we can all have access to it. She may have used Project PhotoFly for it (now renamed 123D Catch). Teachers can make life size models of Lucy's skull and repeat 30 times that being buried for a million years does not turn bones to plastic.

Corporate conscience: VP Amar Hanspal appears truly saddened at the thought of a child getting sick every 6 seconds because of lack of clean drinking water.

Misses

What about that child? Consecutive VPs drool over booming middle classes in emerging markets and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China). One says we are all connected all that time. I don't think they have tried connecting a corporate office in Rwanda or a guest house in Kolkata.

Random comparisons. The number of microprocessors produced last year was greater than the grains of rice produced

And why are we doing this? Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski holds up a petri dish full of E. coli bacteria that smells like bananas. Because we can, does that mean we should? I try to remember any experiment with nature that hasn't backfired.

Autodesk Strategy is No Strategy: Autodesk University 2011 - Hits and Misses, Pt 4

2011-11-29T21:52:31-08:00

LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), Nov 29, 2011 -- Maybe for the millionth time Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, is questioned about the strategy of giving away software, or making it really cheap. The analyst who asked this question at the media Q&A session no doubt considered such a strategy suicidal. It was much easier to understand an Autodesk that sold AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit or some other vertical product that sold for thousands of dollars and provided huge margins. But now Autodesk is as likely to brag about software that is downloaded by the millions but sells for 99 cents. Worse, the apps from Autodesk Labs are all free.

Carl danced around the question and did not directly answer it. The polite analyst did not press the issue. The timidity of our industry's press usually bothers me. It took me a while before I realized that in his own way, Carl actually was providing the strategy.

I remembered reading about Google, which on top of all its popular success has also achieved immense financial success as a publisher. Almost all its revenue is derived from advertising, something that did not initially occur to its founders and is missing from Google's business plan. All Google originally wanted to do was to become wildly popular, i.e. make something so good, so useful, so indispensible that people get hooked. The financial success that followed was a a happy accident.

Autodesk is a very profitable company. Last quarter it made about $550 million, almost all of it from its professional products. $70 million of it was profit. That is a lot of money to experiment with different products for consumers with the hopes that one, two or more will be a runaway hit, creating millions -- maybe billions-- of devoted fans who may do anything from pay a buck or two to upgrade to a professional product. Who knows?

No strategy appears to the Autodesk's strategy for now. Ingratiate yourself with the public, then wait for money to fall into your lap. Popularity first, profit second. Like Google.

And Now a Word From Our Conscience - Autodesk University 2011, Hits and Misses, Pt 3:

2011-11-29T00:19:23-08:00

And Now a Word From Our Conscience - Autodesk University 2011, Hits and Misses, Pt 3:

LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), Nov 28, 2011 -- The mad rush to put professional tools in the hands of non-professionals was given a face and a voice Monday afternoon when Autodesk CEO Carl Bass excitedly told of an inventor who flew his "aerocopter" to a height of 3,000 ft. "I don't even know if this guy was an engineer," says Carl, who was on the panel of judges for the contest in which this device was featured.

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass wants to empower all those who want to design.

Clearly, Autodesk wants to empower individuals with software. It is making software available to all who want it, a lot of it is free or cheap, a lot of it runs on cheap tablet PCs. It's a way to reach way to reach people who may never have been Autodesk customers before. I get that.

But it make engineers like me cringe. If you are a Professional Engineer, you have even sworn to protect the public. But how do you protect the public when you are not even in the design process? When the inventor has the tools to design an aero copter and the tools to build it, how do you protect the public from itself?

Carl admires the inventor who risks his own life to commandeer this aerocopter. Should such endeavors be regulated? Carl does not think so. He's a Libertarian. I am reminded of the Darwin Awards, in which someone rigged his lawnchair to dozens of balloons and tried to lower himself down to earth by shooting the balloons with a BB gun. See Darwin Awards.

What a dope! It's funny. Unless the dope falls on your head.

Autodesk University 2011 - Hits and Misses, Pt 2: 10 Billion Mobile Computers

2011-11-28T23:01:29-08:00

LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), Nov 28, 2011 -- Autodesk wasted no time in declaring its desire for the consumer market. Only a few minutes into the media presentation, VP Chris Bradshaw, who is prone to reminding us that the computing power of his iPhone eclipses the computers of my youth, went on to say the half of us in the room who are now on iPads were representative of the world at large. He sees the rush to mobile computing not abating until there are 10 billion of these devices. Never mind there are only(!) 7 billion people on the earth. That just means that we'll all have more than one. As proof, he asks the assembled media how many of us had more than one mobile computer, meaning a laptop, tablet PC (like iPad) or smart phone? Most of us were guilty as charged.

And on these mobile devices will be many DIYers, hobbyists, artists...in other words, non-professionals. Non-designers. Non-architects. Non-engineers.

Autodesk's Chris Bradshaw sees a promised land with 10 billion mobile devices