SolidWorks is on a Roll

1,700 Attendees at User Conference Get Glimpse of SolidWorks 2002

03/11/02

The mood was festive at the fourth annual SolidWorks World held in Las Vegas last month. About 1,700 people attended. About 40 percent of them were customers, 35 percent SolidWorks dealers, 15 percent third-party software or hardware partners, and 10 percent employees. Yet SolidWorks leaders don't appear to be taking their success for granted.

At a Tuesday general session, Jon Hirschtick, founder, former CEO, and currently an executive vice president of Dassault Systèmes, said SolidWorks' greatest challenge lies ahead. The company has proven itself a successful startup in the CAD business. Its next challenge is to retain its leadership by continuing to improve its products.

Hirschtick said that in the early days of CAD, about three-quarters of each user's mental effort was devoted toward making the CAD system do what it is supposed to do, leaving only one-quarter for thinking about product design. With today's SolidWorks software, he believes that roughly half of the user's energy is applied toward mastering the CAD system and the other half to designing products. That's still not good enough, in his opinion. He hopes that future versions of SolidWorks will allow users to devote three-quarters of their thought to product design and only one-quarter to mastering their CAD tool.

On Wednesday, Dave Corcoran, SolidWorks' vice president of research and development, showed some specific improvements that customers can expect in SolidWorks 2002, the next release. Those that received spontaneous applause from users were:

• much faster production of drawing views of complex assemblies. (Existing SolidWorks versions can take up to half an hour to generate views of thousand-part assemblies.)
• the ability to create multiple independent bodies in a single part file. (Multiple bodies are useful as an intermediate step in creating certain types of parts.)
• automatic generation of design tables from part models.
• drawing templates with user-defined preset views. (These can be useful for creating families of similar drawings.)

Corcoran also apologized to users for what he termed “too many quality mistakes” and said that development procedures have been changed to improve reliability. He thanked the customers for using SolidWorks software and acknowledged that when engineers use a CAD product, they are placing their trust in software developers.

The frank humility of SolidWorks executives stands in sharp contrast to the hyperbolic boasting of most other leaders in the CAD industry. Speaking before an audience of analysts, reporters, resellers, and customers on February 12 in Boston, PTC's CEO Richard Harrison claimed, “No other company knows more, does more, or cares more about helping companies win with superior products than PTC.” Autodesk Inventor and Solid Edge managers have told prospective customers that their products permit “single-day productivity.”

Engineers who buy and use costly software prefer not to be treated like marks at a carnival. They'd like honest assessments of what software technologies can and can't do and realistic plans for future developments. SolidWorks growth in 2001 was double that of the CAD industry average, illustrating, perhaps, that straight talk plays better with customers than baloney.

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