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Issue #528 : : July 24, 2007 |
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In this issue:
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An Excerpt from Tom Peters Out of the Inbox, plus the other regular columns . |
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This is earnings week in the CAD world, when PTC reports on July 25 and Dassault Systems on July 26. (UGS is now part of Siemens, and Autodesk reports in August.) Dassault and Autodesk have not changed their guidance for financial analysts, and so we can assume they are not suffering they way PTC is, with its slowdown in sales. Indeed, Autodesk has given itself a very high standard of 15% increase in sales -- every year for five years. That's code for doubling of revenues, making it a $3.5 - $4.0 billion-a-year company by 2012. Still, ADSK shares stumbled $3 (6%) Friday when Citigroup analyst Brent Thill downgraded his recommendation from Buy to Hold. "A more attractive valuation, either in the form of a lower entry point or significantly higher forecast, would make us reconsider our 'Hold' rating." Heh: he says HOLD, and people SELL a million shares. He is looking for a lower share price ("lower entry point"), because he thinks the Autodesk share price has peaked. Alternatively, he's looking for higher earnings to justify a higher share price. The word 'secular' caught my eye, when he wrote, "Autodesk remains an attractive story, with powerful secular trends in 2D to 3D migration and global infrastructure buildout." Turns out that in the finance industry, 'secular' means long-term, like ten years. And that's the problem with the 15%-a-year promise: the ADSK share price will be punished should the company fail to keep up, as happened to PMTC earlier this month. It's brave making predictions five years into the future. Link: biz.yahoo.com/ap/070720/autodesk_mover.html?.v=1
It's the end of July, which means the staff of upFront.eZine gets to take their annual summer vacation. The next issue comes out in early September. In the meantime, the WorldCAD Access weblog will continue with sometimes-daily coverage of CAD news. With apologies to readers living on the other side of the Equator -- What have you planned for summer? First week of August my two daughters and I are off to our cabin on the shores of Galiano Island. Second week, a friend and I have a road trip to Bella Coola -- the only part of southern British Columbia I've never visited.
An Excerpt from Tom Peters "I note a steadily increasing drumbeat. A drumbeat of consternation around the issue of 'outsourcing.' "What is to be done? How can people cope with the specter of massive job shrinkage? My nutshell answer: Job shrinkage is inevitable. Whether because of outsourcing or automation (which, long-term, may be a bigger deal than outsourcing), you can't count on any job being there for you. What you can do is find ways to move yourself and your company Up the Value Chain. "A lot of yogurt has hit the fan. In the near term, globalization continues to be a mixed blessing -- a worthy end point, but messy and uneven to the extreme in its immediate impact. "And yet, there is the New Economy. "Would you change places with your grandfather? Would you want to work 11 brutal hours a day in yesterday's Bethlehem Steel mill circa 1935? Not me. "A workplace revolution is underway. Some call this shift the End of Corporate Responsibility. I call it the Beginning of Renewed Individual Responsibility. "The harsh news: This is not optional. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves -- as we did when we came off the farm and into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the whitecoller towers. "Free the cubicle slaves! Lifetime self-reinvention is in. The only fool-proof source of job security is your talent. Getting off the sidelines -- being a player -- is not optional." - - - When you read this excerpt from Tom Peters' "Design: Innovate, Differentiate, Communicate", how did it make you feel? a. I feel despondent. (I fall into category b.)
Books for Summer Reading The text above is from one of my summer reading books. Others include:
Nemetschek introduces Design2Cost, a way calculating costs by combining its CAD software Allplan with cost-calculation software Alltop and local construction expertise. The company has this dire warning for you: "Any company that does not strive for these [precise cost calculation] results will be left behind in the construction industry of the future." www.nemetschek.com Capvidia releases its new bi-directional STEP (ISO 10303-21, AP 203, 214) translator, available in all Capvidia products and as .dll libraries with API for third-party apps. www.capvidia.be/index.php?id=117 BlueCielo ECM Solutions updates InnoCielo View (formerly AutoManager View) for viewing, printing, comparing, and annotating 200+ formats of engineering documents. 30-day trial at www.bluecieloecm.com/products/icv Cimmetry Systems updates AutoVue 19.2 with new format support for AutoCAD 2008, SmartSketch 4.0 & 5.0, SolidEdge 19, Inventor 2008, and more. www.cimmetry.com/_products/features/autovue_19_2_whats_new.html CoCreate Software says its new customer count increased 30% over a year ago. The company did not release numbers. UGS PLM Software offers competitive upgrades to Femap with NXTM Nastran until 14 Dec. Users of Algor, CosmosDesignStar, Nastran, and Ansys DesignSpace can do seat-for-seat crossgrades with savings of up to 75%. Register at www.ugs.com/upgrade2femap Everybody now exports their CAD drawings in PDF format, but what about the other way around? ProgeCAD 2007 Professional convert PDF files straight to DWG format. 30-day demo from www.progesoft.com - - - 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:
Seminars & Conferences VSMM ’07 conference for Virtual Systems and Multimedia is Sept 23-26 in Brisbane, Australia. australia.vsmm.org/registration.htm
People/Companies on the Move BlueCielo ECM Solutions appoints Berend Reinink as vp of Services, Strategic Planning, & Projects. Mr Reinink is the company's former Manager of Professional Services. COADE appoints Binh Hoang as lead technician in Technical Support - Plant Design Solutions. Mr Hoang is a former trainer at Horn CAD and Drafter Center in Houston Texas. Autodesk moves its Manufacturing Solutions division from the nearly unpronounceable Tualatin to 5400 SW Meadows Rd in the more easily pronounceable Lake Oswego outside of Portland OR USA, home of the no-sales-tax. ISD Software & Systems opens a new subsidiary named "ISD East Europe" in Warsaw, Poland.
Market News Catalog Data Solutions reports that its Q2 sales in 2007 increased by 50% over last year.
WorthWhile Web http://people.bath.ac.uk/ccsshb/12cyl/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/business/yourmoney/22rwanda.html?ei=5088&en=83f0d24da11aabd1&ex=1342756800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
http://www.scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html
Letters to the Editor Re: Inventor Numbering Changing Between "Release 12" to "2008" "No surprise there. Autodesk had to change the naming convention.
Do you really think they would have marketed another Release 13?"
Re: Mainstream CAD Companies Should Spend More On Customers "By any reasonable measure, Bentley, UGS, PTC, and Dassault
do focus on the customers who already bought their products. The
difference, I think, may be that these companies charge those customers
handsomely for continuing support and maintenance, while McNeel
only charges for upgrades and new seats."
Re: Quotes "if you are looking for some kind of industry-related quotes ?? (and even if you are not) here are 3 Things That i came up with Too much Time on my hands = hypersensitive attention deficit
di-order o i almost forgot Cant Always Decide ( i vote for The last line of Text)
Re: Upgrades Preferred Over Subscriptions "I would love to see a world where customers treat their
own money like it's their own money for once. It seems the vendors
have done a great job of convincing everyone that vaporware [subscription]
clauses are worth spending on ahead of time, with no contractual
promise to deliver." Spin Doctor of the Moment . . . . . "I am pleased that Germany intends to promote additional
research and innovation for the next generation of the internet
and has taken care to do so in a way that will minimise any distortions
of competition." Notable Quotable
"This exercise does prove, though, that building great consumer electronics
products takes much more than lining up some smart designers and
efficient Chinese contract manufacturers. Designing for reliability
and manufacturability is an engineering art, and like any art, proficiency
comes from long and usually painful experience."
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