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Issue #254: 19 June, 2001

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Inside this Issue

• At the Garden Party
  - First Keynote: Dick Morley
  - Second Keynote: Peter Marks
  - Third Keynote: Joel Orr
  - Random Notes
  - AEC Pundits Panel
  - Discussion Group
  - Technology Suites
• Plus regular departments

At the Garden Party

When I arrived, the garden party was already underway among lush greenness and quadruple swimming pools. The 40-acre hotel complex belied the surrounding dessert. "Take you to your room, sir? The golf cart is right this way." A local tells me people used to come here to get away from allergies; so many flowering trees have since been planted, however, that people now get allergies from living in Phoenix.

Image: A small part of the 40-acre Scottsdale Plaza Resort.

COFES 2001 (congress on the future of engineering software) <http://www.cofes.com> was held at the end of April in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale AZ USA. During the afternoons, the temperature reaches 99F (37C). Being from Canada, I was surprised the heat didn't bother me -- as long as I stayed in the shade. But I noticed the ears of many attendees turned blood red.

Image: Butter balls melting in the 99-degree heat.

If there was an underlying theme to the conference, it was perhaps, "How much of a future does CAD have?" During the 1980s and some of the 1990s, CAD software represented the bleeding edge for desktop hardware; now it's games that push the limits. Hardware vendors are (for the most part) no longer interested in marketing to the CAD community; users are reluctant to upgrade to new releases, since CAD software is finally good enough. Even the keynote speakers spoke of the malaise facing the CAD industry. Here, then, are some of the notes I took on my keyboard-equipped Palm III.

First Keynote: Dick Morley
"It's the Process, Not the Product"

Dick Morley <http://www.barn.org> is a venture capitalist. "Since retiring in the 1960s, I have been working half-time -- 12 hours a day [appreciative chuckle]. The only way to create wealth is to apply new (mutative) technology to the marketplace." Mr Morley provided the following guidelines for venture capitalists:

• Only invest three times, at most, in a company; typical investment is $150,000, but can range from $5,000.00 to $1 million.
• It takes ten years to become an overnight success,
• Need to have 100% of a narrow market.
• Three areas to watch: financial, technical, and marketing.
• Product needs 10x performance improvement; who cares about 20%.
• Where's the bumper sticker? "McDonald's sells franchises, not hamburgers."
• Know when to fold.

Standards are an embargo on change. Most CAD/CAM people are not interested in taking risks. There is no 'Nintendo for Dummies' book on the market. For the future, Mr Morley predicts:

• Parallel processing, not multi-tasking.
• Genetic algorithms.
• Three kinds of software: objects, agents, obsolete.
• Agents are a behavioral object

Mr Morley defines wealth as: choice, illusion of freedom, score, toys, power, and water. Money doesn't matter: always spend less than you earn.

Second Keynote: Peter Marks
"The Squandered Computer"

Peter Marks of Design Insights repeated that CAD/CAM is a stable industry not taking any chances. CAD/CAM is useful, but suffers from being a commodity. There is no difference between the offerings from PTC, SDRC, UGS, and CATIA.

The challenge is for the CAD/CAM industry to become differentiated and advance the state of the art. Today's point of differentiation becomes tomorrow's must-have. ROI (return on investment) is being replaced with ROK and ROL -- "return on knowledge" and "return on learning."

Third Keynote: Joel Orr
"Organismic Management and Technology Adoption: Why Is It So Hard?"

Joel Orr noted that "every organization is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets." Organizations get the behavior they reward. In organizations, we ask people to be bottlenecks. Bill Joy's Law: "Innovation will happen. It won't happen here." It is not broken because it is doing what it is supposed to do. "Slow kills."

CAD is just a step along the way to simulation, which will kill CAD. Software allows us to cheaply reiterate constraints. Two laws of business: (1) Never tell all you know.

Image: Breakfast and lunch were held under a large tent.

Random Notes

• Synchronized or asynchronized collaboration?
• Standards create a form of monopoly.

Image: One dinner was held out in the dessert.

AEC Pundits Panel

Q: When will building models become standardized?
David Wiesberg: "About two years after the problem is solved in mechanical engineering."
Kristine Fallon: "Users are now ahead of the vendors understanding interoperability problems."
David Cohn: "Look to BLIS."
Richard Buday: "Consider the legal implications of sharing designs this way."

Other comments: Web-based projects will happen when they become design-build. Most building projects are one-off, so there is no economy-of-scale (as there is in product design). This means that Web-based project management and e-procurement is doomed. Randall Newton: "We have structural inefficiencies that benefit contractors, and prevent Web.stuff."

Discussion Group:
Product Differentiation

Peter Marks noted that customers would accept a 10-15% higher cost due to product differentiation, which includes:

• Availability.
• Packaging.
• Performance.
• Ease of use.
• Assurances.
• Life cycle costs.
• Standards, sanctions, and social acceptance.

Mr Marks uses amoebae diagrams to chart the above items, using the range of 1 is junk, 10 is excellent (which no product attains). At 5, people start to wonder about your product.

Technology Suites
BLIS
http://www.blis-project.org

The IFC now consists of over 400 object types, and many more subtypes, involving 60 software companies. Project BLIS is a subset of IFC v2 now testing with 30 applications, of which eight will ship this summer. BLIS now uses XML, and the IAI has since adopted it as well. (The original IFC file format was based on STEP.) A free IFC viewer shows 3D objects and properties.
Timberline appreciates BLIS because it creates a standard that works with all CAD packages. The estimator no longer needs the CAD package because Timberline includes the BLIS viewer. At the technology suite, members of BLIS demo'ed several apps exchanging data. As they passed data between them, the applications extracted the data they needed out of the BLIS file. More impressive, the apps added data to the BLIS file without overwriting existing data.

Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/business/manufacturing

There were two contingents from Microsoft, complete with joined-at-the-hip WaggEd handlers. One contingent was for Visio; the other contingent tried to explain ".Net" to attendees in under 45 minutes. Stuck in my mind is the PowerPoint slide that shows a product matrix rectangle covered with the names of Microsoft products, except for a tiny square in the upper-right corner labeled "Partners (CAD, etc)."

PlanetCAD
http://www.planetcad.com

PlanetCAD was keen to show off PrecientQA v4.1 with a common interface between all the CAD platforms it runs on -- Pro/ENGINEER v 18 - 20, CATIA v 4.x, and Unigraphics v 15, 16 and 17. The purpose of PrecientQA is to ensure that 3D CAD models conform to 300 standards for design practices, including VDA-FS. Modules known as DesignQA, GeometryQA, DriveQA and CertifyQA check each design before it is entered into a PDM (product data management) system.

Graphisoft
http://www.graphisoft.com

I spent a pleasant 3/4-hour with Al Moulton, the new president of Graphisoft USA, talking about the the last 15 years of the CAD hsitory. A problem for Graphisoft USA is that they were led for the last three years by a staff member from head office in Budapest. Culture makes a difference, and the energetic Mr Moulton plans to re-energize ArchiCAD in North America. Part of that involves taking back some of the momentum stolen by Revit in the parametric single-building model market.

Image: Phoenix from the air.

My apologies to Bentley Systems and PTC. I had tech suite meetings scheduled with them, but the overlapping breakout sessions caused me to miss out. The #1 complaint about COFES was its similarity to a three-ring circus. Too much going on, from the 7:30am breakfast to the end-of-dinner at 11pm -- and dozens of parallel sessions between. There were breakout sessions -- too many -- all running at the same time, as well as "tech suites," where vendors waited in hotel suites, to tell their story or demo an advance in software. Organizer Brad Holtz made no apology: We want you to go away feeling full, he proclaimed. Full we were.

Image: Passengers waiting in Los Angeles airport.

PTC says it is the first to ship a mechanical CAD package -- Pro/ENGINEER 2001 and Pro/MECHANICA 2001 for the 64-bit Sun's Solaris 8 Operating Environment. The advantage of the 64-bit CPU is "four billion times more address space than 32-bit ... allowing model designs of virtually unlimited size, scale, and complexity."

Nemetschek has announced that Allplan FT v16.2 will be released in June with a focus on speed, intuitive handling, and improved user interface. One new feature matches a 3D model to a bitmap. http://www.nemetschek.de

SolidWorks is shipping subscribers The Super Service Pack that includes Smart Fasteners, break-out section views, cam follower mate functionality, and Pro/E file export.

SoftSource LLC announced that its VDraft CAD system (US$250) now supports AutoCAD 2002 drawings, and goes back to v2.5 (further than AutoCAD itself). A free, 30-day eval copy can be downloaded at http://www.vdraft.com

GEOMATE announced that GrafiCalc v2.0 (US$195) incorporates behavior modeling technology that allows users to automatically solve mechanical engineering problems requiring optimization against shape, fit, and position. http://www.graficalc.com

UGS released i-Man v7, its collaborative product lifecycle management software. http://www.iman.com

A hardware retreat: The Register reports that Apple's Cube is no longer. "The Cube's much-touted near-silent, fan-free operation proved to be untrue for anyone who bought the version with an ATI Radeon graphics card, which included... er... a fan."

Palm plans to split itself into two companies (hardware and software) once it's back to being profitable. - pdaGeek

OVer the next 6 months, Xerox will end its line of small- and home-office inkjet and xerox products sold by retail, which contribute just 3% of its revenues. - Reuters

Continuing its monopolistic stance: "Because MSN does not support third party e-mail software, if you are using an application other than Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, you will no longer be able to send e-mail once we have rolled-out our new e-mail system." - Microsoft

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