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Issue #468 : : April 4, 2006 |
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C o n t e n t s Readers React:
Google Buys SketchUp Below the Radar and other regular columns.
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Write the Editor. Donate to upFront.eZine through Paypal. Access nearly-daily CAD commentary at our blog: WorldCAD Access. |
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Alibre makes MCAD software that ranges in price from US$1,800 to free. It's the free part that key to their marketing efforts. Alibre is not a CAD vendor, but a marketing machine that exploits the low-cost of the Internet. Kind of like trucks exploiting the free Interstate highway system to the detriment of trains. There's two ways to be profitable: have higher prices, or lower costs. Indeed, CEO Greg Milliken adapted a stategy from the book, 'Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth': impatient for profit, patient for growth. Alibre's decided to capitalize on a low-cost strategy of qualifying prospects. It takes this form:
1. Zero upfront cost. The free Alibre Xpress software is posted to numerous download sites. Most are free, such as FreewareFiles.com (1323 downloads) or MyZips.com (0 downloads); some, like CNET (96,236 downloads), require a fee for better positioning. Other sites, such as efunda.com, give the software to visitors who register. Several thousand downloads a week at little marketing cost and no hosting cost to Alibre. 2. Low marketing costs. The company places only small ads in print magazines. Instead, it prefers Google AdSense, which charges only for clicked ads. 3. Targeting of prospects. A traditional backend sales team uses opt-out email, direct phone calls, a corporate e-newsletter, and other means to urge free-downloaders to buy into training, add-ons, and upgrades.
When Mr Milliken visited the offices of upFront.eZine, he described a system that I can readily identify with: use the Internet to minimize expenses -- as well as the quick-to-profit, slow-in-growth strategy. (The reality is, he was itching to snowboard the slopes of Whistler Mountain the next day.) The mystery X-CAD promotion of last summer was a fun diversion for CAD editors, but more importantly gave Alibre access to 198,000+ registered users at little cost. If nothing else, X-CAD (since renamed Xpress) is a free MCAD viewer that reads STEP, IGES, SAT, Rhino, AutoCAD DWG and DXF, and raster images -- with 2D and 3D drawing and editing capability. The most-expensive version of Alibre, which costs half as much as the cheapest SolidWorks, includes sheetmetal design, design configurations, ALGOR DesignCheck, MecSoft VisualMill Basic, photo rendering, ModelPress Publisher, MSC.visualNastran Motion, SprutCAM, Machinist ToolBox, and server repository. Mr Milliken ended the visit by describing a new product that fits a niche not yet noticed by other software companies. You could consider it being the a form of... [Sorry! I can't tell you more for now.]
Readers
Respond: In ten years of producing this newsletter, I noticed that readers responded to the Google-SketchUp news even as the story was breaking -- perhaps a sign of the impact on news gathering from the near-instant communication through Weblogs. Here are some of their comments: - - - "I have emailed Google in the past requesting a CAD application that will make free and powerful CAD/drafting/sketching available to all. If it hastens the end of insular, head-in-the-sand world of CAD vendors, it would be a good thing. "CAD deserves more. It is bigger than current software vendors
and their small mindedness."
"At some point soon at least some of our built environment will be available in 3D in a future version of Google Earth(GE). It's already happening with GIS data, so there's no reason to assume we can't merge terrain, mapping and buildings into the GE mechanism. One-stop shopping, as it were, and this very much fits in with Google mission to be the purveyor of as much data as possible. "However, nature -- and software companies other than Microsoft -- abhor a vacuum and hate monopolies even more, so I wholly expect a bumper crop of Google Earth clones on the market soon. What will differentiate them is content quality, timeliness and accuracy; price will be secondary. "Free is nice, but when your business operations need accurate and up-to-date environmental information, you'll pay. The ideals expressed in the OSS [open source software] arena do not map to a mass 3D modeling contribution environment. There are several important reasons for this. "1. Open source software developers user the system they develop. They are software engineers working to make the stuff they use better, for themselves and others. Much of the world's OSS development happens in the corporate IT development environment: they take an Open Source OS or database, and tweak it night and day to make it run a line of business application, and send those changes/improvements back into the community. The same is not true for modeling the built environment. The users of Google Earth are not 3D modelers or AEC visualization artists. They are people, like you and me, who are interested in the fastest way to get to point B from Point A. Although useful for a ton of corporate needs, it's really "downtime" software. "2. There's no real incentive to model the prebuilt environment on your own. If it's built, it's built. No one cares that it exists, unless you need it to provide context for your design in progress. "SketchUp users are mostly AEC related, producing what-if scenarios for clients using the context provided by Google Earth. The money is always in 'what impact would it have if it WERE built'. "3. SketchUp users paid for the software, and are under no license obligation to contribute their finished built designs to a greater good. The model they created may not be even close to the as-built, and no one is going to bother to remodel the as-built without being paid. "4. SketchUp/GE plugin users are under no obligation to make sure what they do is accurate. In the Linux world, changes to the OS get funneled down to a few Linux high priests for review and possible inclusion in the next release. Google isn't going to do fact checking to make sure stuff like this homepage.mac.com/fumill/.Pictures/ZNO/ZNO%20v%20R4.jpg doesn't creep in. "5. The world is constantly changing at a pace that simply cannot be kept up by the 3D modeling community, no matter how big it gets. Building construction and demolition is all around us. New roadways and other civil works are constant, at least constantly getting in my way on the way to work. "In contrast, Google Earth suffers from a dearth of current maps. The 5-year-old elementary school next to my house shows up as a dusty construction site . We also need to get those spy satellites to work some overtime on the weekends. "Although pragmatic, I'm eternally optimistic. I guess
we'll have to get together in five years to see where this all went.
It will surely be interesting."
"Google is building the virtual earth, which will eventually contain links to all the data they have on us. "Perhaps they bought SketchUp because their current in-house tool isn't sufficiently adequate to rapidly build the buildings they are trying to include within the virtual cities in Google Earth? "What does their search engine do, in 'earth' terms? You can get local and global data through a search query in text format. Now, throw in the same query algorithms to satellite and graphic data, 3D buildings and features, Web site locations, email addresses, etc -- and then return the Web site, products, advertising, downloads, etc. to the searcher, all packaged through links to the location in Google Earth. "Worth money? In the long term, YES! I am going to put a
deposit down now -- for the billboard on the side of my virtual
Google Earth home, before someone else does!"
Editor's Note With the release of AutoCAD 2007, I've updated the "What's Inside? AutoCAD 2007" PDF book with a new chapter on translation to AutoCAD 2004/5/6 and a new appendix on resources -- along with several corrections and updates. The updated 118-page ebook is available for US$15.90 from www.upfrontezine.com/wia7 A summary of CAD industry news you may not have read elsewhere, or that I found interesting:
CADLock ships CADVault for AutoCAD, digital rights management software that controls who gets to view drawings and how. In this new version, the DRM is stored in the DWG file; and now only selected layers and selected elements can be locked, allowing recipients to add content in the same drawing. Free eval from www.cadlock.com/CADVault TurboTools releases a direct link between their CablEquity software and IronCAD V8 for electrical design. www.turbotools.com First it was upgrade to 3D for free. Now CoCreate cuts in half the price of subscription licenses on all its software. Offer available to suppliers and related companies of CoCreate customers until October 31, 2006. [I can see offering free upgrades, because then they make money on the required subscription. But cutting the subscription income in half?] www.cocreate.com UGS (well, D-Cubed) updates some of it component software: v49.0 of 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager and Profile Geometry Manager. [This may be near-meaningless to you, but D-Cubed software is the brains behind most MCAD software.] www.ugs.com/products/open/d-cubed/latest_releases.shtml GibbsCAM now has a SolidWorks-to-GibbsCAM transfer add-in for exporting 3D models to develop efficient CNC programs for machining. www.GibbsCAM.com CD-adapco's updated STAR-CD now handles polyhedral meshes, which are said to be more accurate and faster than tetrahedra meshes. www.cd-adapco.com Informative Graphics's new release of Brava Enterprise content server provides near-universal — viewing, annotation, and secure publishing of hundreds of office and engineering formats. www.infograph.com Camtek's latest CAMFlow Director includes automated feature-finding, knowledge-based feature machining, machine kinematics, toolpath simulation and CNC code generation. www.peps.com Dassault Systèmes announces ENOVIA V5 Collaborative Enterprise Sourcing (CES), which embeds i2 Technologies' sourcing technology. The software ships later in the year. /www.3ds.com VISTAGY releases FiberSIM 5.1 software for designing and manufacturing composite parts. www.vistagy.com/products/fibersim.htm Bentley Systems expects to ship the XM Edition of MicroStation V8 in late May. [I thought it was due out last November?] www.bentley.com VersaCAD customers who purchase Premium Service now get a free copy of solidThinking Forma (worth US$495), a NURBS-based solid modeler. www.versacad.com Also from Tom Lazear, I learn that UGS has repackaged Solid Edge V18 in three levels: Foundation, Classic, and Express.
- - - These news items were posted during the last week at the WorldCAD Access blog <worldcadaccess.typepad.com>:
And at the Gizmos Grabowski <worldcadaccess.typepad.com/gizmos/> Weblog:
Magazine/eZine/Weblog Updates Helmers sells off two Supply Chain magazines; Desktop Engineering magazine is safe. Michael Smith is setting up www.aeccadexchange.com for exchanging construction details free. The Application Reference Material site < www.mediabrains.com/Client/HearstBCI/LM1/lm/rsdefault.asp > is an online resource for product literature, application notes, and design kits.
People/Companies on the Move think3 hires Anupam Asthana as Head of Engineering Services for coordinating contract engineering projects in India. He has worked with automotive OEMs in research and development and partner companies of PTC and Dassault in India and outsourcing of engineering from companies in US and Europe.
Market News IGE+XAO Group of France reports Q2 revenues of e5.4 million, up 8% a year ago. The company produces electrical CAD software.
Spin Doctor of the Momement "PANTONE 368 is ... a symbol of growth, is invigorating and revitalizing, and breathes new life into a brand, in addition to drawing attention to it." - Quark's description of the hue of green in its new logo.
Notable Quotable "I frankly care nothing for Utopia or Oblivion. They mean only that the futurist has exhausted his personal ability to confront the passage of time." - Bruce Stirling, 'Shaping Things'
Copyright 2006 by upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved worldwide Article reprint fee US$250.00.
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