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upFront.eZine |
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a publication from |
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Issue #490 : : October 10, 2006 |
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C o n t e n t s Readers Respond: Tackling
AutoCAD Below the Radar, and our other regular columns. |
Write the editor. Through Paypal donate $25 to upFront.eZine. Access nearly-daily CAD commentary at our Weblog: WorldCAD Access. |
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We watched Capote the movie last night on my improvised home theater system. It's the story of Truman Capote writing his last book, "In Cold Blood." The title describes the murder of a Kansas family of four, and it reflects Capote's own death wish: first he funds the murderers' legal appeals so that they stay alive long enough for one to tell his story to Capote; then he wants them dead, so that he can finish the book and start collecting royalties. Present at their hanging, Capote realized the horror of his own deeds, and never writes another book. Writers and editors are Capote. We feed off the misfortunes of others. Closer to home, if AutoCAD were perfect, none of us would have a job. It's a worthwhile endeavor to question your motives on an ongoing basis. - - - I was invited by Autodesk's MCAD division last week to their "world" headquarters in Tualatin OR USA. Beyond Inventor, some of the directions they plan to take will have an impact on other software from Autodesk, and perhaps on other software companies. Expect a report on this in the weeks to come. This week, I'll be at the IntelliCAD World Conference, being held in Kelowna BC Canada. Imminent breakthroughs include an ARx clone and the ability to read drawings from Architectural Desktop and Mechanical Desktop. www.intellicad.org/WorldMeeting2006/reginfo.asp Over on WorldCAD Access, I've been tracking the design problems delaying the world's largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380. The 21-month delay will cost EADS some US$3.6 billion. The first reports blamed the delay on a switch from copper to aluminum wiring, and that the CAD software (or CAD operators) didn't model AL wiring correctly. The German-made wire harnesses were too short when they arrived for assembly in France. A more recent report blames Airbus for running two versions of CATIA design software, which are incompatible with each other: V4 in Germany and V5 in France. Wiring design changes made in Germany could not be easily added to the master design maintained in France. Part of the difficulty in pinpointing the problem has been EADS' relative secrecy; another part has been the general media's lack of technical understanding. For instance, take a chuckle over this explanation from German public tv: "Software developed in Hamburg, for example, proved to be incompatible with that made in Toulouse," wrote JC, a Deutsche Welle staffer <www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2191995,00.html>. The blame now seems to be with EADS' failure to upgrade its CATIA 4 installations to V5 -- something that would have cost far less than $3.6 billion. Yet an industry insider explained to me that the German's reluctance to upgrade may be tied to CATIA 4 having more support through add-on software. As Business Week's Carol Matlack put it, "Use of incompatible programs takes the rap, but behind that is a management team cobbled together from formerly separate companies." <www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2006/gb20061005_846432.htm> In this case, it's not the software that's at fault, but the project's managers and their decisions.
Readers
Respond: Readers had their opinions and guesses about the unnamed CAD company and its plan to unseat AutoCAD as the King of Kad. I found the different approaches taken by letter writers fascinating. Read on... - - - "Who's using our town to try to get your feedback before they try to launch a new CAD system? "Give me a call next time you're in town. I'll buy you a
beer." - - - "One cannot underestimate the power of marketshare. Once you are a market leader, all of your costs per dollar-of-sales are lower than your competition. And, your profits are conversely larger than your competition. "The question is, how did Autodesk become number 1? Unfortunately for the Bellingham co-conspirators, those days are gone. Autodesk came out of the gate with a product that was so underdefined that everyone who ever took pencil to paper could claim it as his own electronic drafting system. That included facilities managers, circuit board designers, architects, mechanical engineers, and all the rest. "All of the revenue from all those markets quickly exceeded and swamped the market share of Versacad, Personal Designer, Cadkey, Turbocad, etc. etc. At one time Autodesk generated more revenue from forcing pirates to go straight than Cadkey made in a year of selling new CAD seats. Coincidentally, all of the above mentioned CAD products, and most others used difficult-to-break dongles that Autodesk was not burdened with during its formative years. That meant that anyone -- student, engineer, scientist, tinkerer -- could get their hands on a free copy of AutoCAD to use and learn at home. No one else had this edge! "Once real work was stored in the AutoCAD format, it was very difficult to displace them in a shop, even if that shop had not authorized the use of AutoCAD. This happened to Cadkey many times over. "Add to that a distribution system that was so predatory to its own dealers that they would rather give away a seat of AutoCAD at cost, than lose the volume. Autodesk also offloaded all of the most marginally profitable duties to its distributors and dealers, including installation, hardware matching, training, and support. Autodesk was pure profit, while their distribution system was pure subsistence farming. "Meanwhile, the revenue from other-than-mechanical markets, plus all the sales of other-than-CAD products, allowed Autodesk to grow exponentially. Reread your marketing books where the experience curve is discussed to see what their cash and sales volume did to their sales-per-employee ratio. Autodesk could flood the ad space of all the relevant magazines, even at those publications' extortionary rates, while smaller vendors, like Cadkey and Microcad, could only afford one spread per quarter or so. "Bringing this all forward to today and your recent conclave, I wish all of these great minds and their army of cheap labor the most luck in attacking Autodesk over the next 12 months, and I wish the consultants and magazines that they employ to get out their message the highest degree of success in taking money from this group. "But, it smells to me like another Triumph CAD, or Trispectives,
or Ironcad, or Varimetrix, or ImpacXoft, or that company from Italy
that had the name-change contest, whose name I can't remember [think3].
Chuckling in New Hampshire." - - - "NEUTRAL [meeting place]? Tell that to Gary Rohrabaugh at SoftSouce! "I licensed my fonts for the IntelliCAD offering, so I know full well the problem with trying overcome AutoCAD's dominance. You can't offer a clone of AutoCAD without recreating every command, every file, format changes, etc. no matter how obscure. "The paradigm has to change. Google is doing it well with Writley and the spreadsheet; SketchUp is another success. Give me the essence of an app, without the featureitis. No one will succeed by simply cloning AutoCAD. "Why does LT sell 3x more than AutoCAD? It does 99% of what CAD users need, has nearly perfect file compatibility, and the same interface that has been learned over years -- a no brainer. "Why do these discussions even take place anymore? You've
got to approach the problem from a completely different direction." - - - "if anyone wants a beta Tester for This up & coming cad software Tell Them To give me call, i got 18 years or 37,000 hours doing 2d & 3d autocad primarily and 3ds VIZ & Photoshop "anything different with more robust 3d modeling capability would get my LifeTime loyalty for a new nota-autocad program "hay how about 'Notacad'? can someone Trademark This?? just joking but really seriously i would obviously sign a NDA for This "hay Thanks for all of your continuing (educational) effort" - - - "You make me very, very curious! Can you give a small hint?
I sell now many more BricsCads than AutoCAD LT :-)" - - - "I'm 54, been doing CAD for pushing 25 years now. I've seen and used and taught so many programs over the years -- CADvance, DataCAD, CADAM, CATIA, Personal Architect, Microstation, VectorWorks, the whole Autodesk lineup, TurboCAD, SketchUp -- that you'd think I could switch from one to another pretty easily. But a kind of scary thing has happened: since I've been using AutoCAD almost exclusively for the past decade, I find that my mind is stuck in that paradigm. My fingers expect those key sequences. AutoLISP code invades my dreams. My brain is in a rut, albeit a productive one, and doesn't want to leave. "Case in point: asked to teach Vectorworks to a theater design class. I'd learn it over the summer, how hard could it be? D*MN hard! Different paradigm, different relationship between 2D and 3D, different ways to organize information, different toggles. Too different. "Case in point: I've been using AccuRender inside AutoCAD for at least ten years, well before VIZ was around. Decided I'd teach myself VIZ and make animations easier. How hard could it be? You guessed it: D*MN hard. Different interface, different entity types, way more buttons and shaders. Too different. "(The only other program that I found I could use well was TurboCAD, since it has tried so hard to be AutoCAD without the command line. Same paradigm, same 2D-3D relationship: "Ahhh, comfort.") "So, what do I teach to tomorrow's designers? AutoCAD and ADT. I know them through and through. SketchUp might be more useful to them as a design tool, VectorWorks maybe as a production tool, but they won't learn them from me. So my advice to your secret group would be:
"Get 'em while they are young. My son has already done more with MAX/VIZ in a month in art school than I have done in the three years I've had VIZ on subscription in my office. His mind isn't stuck somewhere else. "The point is that at some point we find software -- a paradigm -- we are comfortable with, and to get good and earn a living with it we have to stick with it instead of skipping on to the next cool thing. "Ultimately, your group's challenge is not to write code,
but to get it into the hands of the next generation of designers
as early as possible and as cheaply as possible." - - - "Is the statement 'Autodesk has the #1 CAD program' to be
understood tin terms of marketshare or in terms of performance of
the products?" - - - "One thing that is always overlooked when this vendor or
that starts bashing the AutoCADs and Microsofts of the world is
one simple but huge factor: everybody is using it. "What if those hundreds of CAD startups all had equal or
near equal footing in the marketplace? Everyone would need to be
a jack of all trades and master of none." - - - "That's not UGS that you talked to then? I'm glad someone
is mad enough to have a go."
A summary of CAD industry news you may not have read elsewhere, or that I found interesting: - - - GTX Corporation updates GTXImage CAD Series v8.8 with color reduction and color separation tools. www.gtx.com GiveMePower speeds up some functions of PowerCAD SiteMaster Pro 3 by 10x. The software runs on devices with Mobile 5.0, CE 5.0 and CE .NET 5.0 PocketPCs, PocketPC phones, and CE tablets. 30-day trial from www.givemepower.com Formation Design Systems announces v12 of Maxsurf naval architecture software. New features include bi-directional data exchange with Rhino; enhanced hullform parametric transformations; and automated generation of girth expansions and stringer plots. www.formsys.com SolidCAM debuts SolidCAM2007 R11 with a new module for high-speed machining of molds, tools and dies, and complex 3D parts. www.solidcam.com QuadriSpace now supports SolidWorks 2007 and outputs 3D PDF files 50% smaller than before. www.quadrispace.com Pinion Software updates Pinion Receiver 4.0 technical rights management software with native support for PTC Pro/E files and new CAD viewer apps. www.pinionsoftware.com Sivan Design this week introduces CivilCAD 2006. www.sivandesign.com UGS announces Version 2 of Teamcenter Express, data management software for small to mid-size manufacturers who use Solid Edge, NX, CATIA, AutoCAD, Inventor, or SolidWorks. www.ugs.com/teamcenterexpress CCE ships EnSuite, which combines visualization and translation into one application. It converts all data formats, including 2D, 3D, parametric history, and features. www.cadcam-e.com/EnSuite Month after month, Alibre keeps advertising discounts on its CAD software -- this month, it's $500 off Alibre Design. www.alibre.com Release 4.00 of RealCADD, 2D CAD software for Mac OSX and Windows, is available with Universal Binaries for Mac OS X (native for Mac Intel and PowerPC. Other new features include PostScript export and attraction surfaces. www.realcadd.com - - - These news items were posted during the last week at the WorldCAD Access blog <worldcadaccess.typepad.com>:
Magazine/eZine/Weblog Updates Terry Miller has written a tutorial on AutoCAD's dialog control langauge, called "Getting Started with Dcl Dialogs" at web2.airmail.net/terrycad/Tutorials/MyDialogs.htm
People/Companies on the Move Teksoft appoints Domenic Lanzillotta as vp of worldwide sales, and Greg Dare as director of marketing. Both were formerly with Surfware.
Market News RAND Worldwide acquires i-VEK Technology's Autodesk-related business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Brand New CAD Books/eBooks "SolidWorks for the Sheet Metal Guy - Course 3: Unfolding"
"AutoCAD LT 2007 for Designers"
"IntelliCAD: The Un-AutoCAD"
WorthWhile Web http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2006100801442692
Spin Doctor of the Moment "We simply bludgeoned consumers into submission."
Notable Quotable
"This was a Pizza Hut,
Copyright 2006 by upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved worldwide Article reprint fee US$250.00.
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