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Issue #570 : : July 29, 2008 |
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Write the editor. Make him smile! Through Paypal, consider donating $25 in support of upFront.eZine. Or else... We're trendy. We have a Weblog. WorldCAD Access. |
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It is time for upFront.eZine's annual summer vacation, where rest is taken during the month of August from this weekly newsletter. The next issue will land in your inbox on September 8. In the meantime, WorldCAD Access will continue to post nearly-daily news items at worldcadaccess.typepad.com Now available: Autographed copies of the 1,010-page "The
Illustrated AutoCAD 2009 Quick Reference" by Ralph Grabowski
-- for a donation of $29. (Outside of North America: please add
$19 for extra postage, delivered by surface mail.) Send payment
via PayPal to grabowski@telus.net or email cheque/money order to: The Executive The executive is slumped in his leather chair, black bags under his eyes. "Which city do I go to next?" he wonders out loud. "I don't even know." The two public relations attendants are also unsure. "We can look that up," they reassure him. From my vantage point, he's taken on considerable weight since I last saw him a year ago. His slump emphasizes the paunch. "You look tired," I empathize. "Not at all!" He straightens out, and declares, "I feel like I'm getting my second wind!" The two pr attendants watch, but say nothing. I feel like an actor in a dystopian movie. I wonder to myself if running a mature business has dulled him -- as it would dull me. He'd been successful with several startups. Now he's at the top of his field, and he has nothing more to battle. A man needs the risk of the battle. Or he becomes lost, paunchy, and needs two pr attendants to care for him. Last week, he cashed in some of his company's shares and made five hundred thousand dollars. PTC Disses Catia V6 During their Q3 conference call with financial analysts, PTC executives tore a strip off the closed nature of Dassault's V6 offering. Richard Davis of Needham & Co primed the rant with his question (paraphrased): "Dassault seems to be locking down access to their V6 software in terms of working well with other vendors. How does your strategy compare to that? What have you heard from clients competitively? Do they like that strategy? I'm trying to figure out if there'll be any plate tectonics with regard to marketshare." I say "rant," because PTC execs spent a surprising long amount of time answering the questions. PTC's chief product officer James Heppelmann was first in line with his response:
"If you look at [Dassault's] V6 strategy, there are a couple of fundamentals here. One is the idea of deeply integrating CAD with data management. That's a pretty good idea; we did that five years ago when we launched our Product Development System. "The second thing is the closed attitude. Dassault's strategy is, 'We're going to hide Catia files inside the Matrix database. If you want to use Catia, you'll have to buy Matrix.' You won't have an option, theoretically, to use another system. It'll be too closed for that. "You can imagine that just the principal of it being closed is quite irritating to customers, [as well as] the attempt to force secondary decisions through a closed strategy. "But I think the bigger problem is the massive performance implication. If you add one second to how long it takes to access a file, and then open a 10,000-part assembly, it takes 10,000 seconds [2.7 hours] more than it did previously. You're pretty much ready to throw the software out the window. Personally, I think it's not going to work technically. "Second, I think customers are going to reject it, because they're not really in a mood to adopt closed strategies in this day and age. Our strategy integrates things deeply, but in an open way. We give you a compelling reason to buy Windchill if you use Pro/E; we don’t force you to. "I think customers don't like being forced to do anything -- especially the big auto and aero accounts that have been a little abused by Dassault in recent history. They don't really want another round of it. "So I think the tectonics are that there may be a massive non-adoption of Catia V6. [There's] a massive vulnerability associated with that, when customers scratch their head about what's the future of their relationship with Dassault."
PTC ceo Richard Harrison added: "I think it is already happening. Has [Dassault] announced a Matrix win in the last two years? "Our Windchill business is exploding, and I think Siemens PLM business is strong as well. Both of us are feeding off of the Dassault base. We're in their biggest accounts, and many accounts are going directly from Catia to Windchill. "So I think V6 [lock-in] is a reaction to the fact that they're getting clobbered out there and Matrix has become difficult. It was misused for so long I think it's been difficult for them to repair it. Before they acquired [Matrix], it was in disrepair. "We're going to continue to announce a lot of deals where we're managing Catia files; I think this strategy is going to cause them to lose business. I know Volkswagen, in the body area, is going to manage Catia files with Siemens Teamworks. "It's a reaction to the fact that they're losing market share and they don't know what else to do about it. Windchill is going to do $420 million in revenue this year, and Matrix is doing $100 million. We have a lot of experience in managing CAD files directly in a Windchill database, and Jim just told you technically [V6] is not going to work."
Link:
These news items were posted during the last week at the WorldCAD Access blog < worldcadaccess.typepad.com>:
And the following items were posted to the Gizmos Grabowski blog last week at worldcadaccess.typepad.com/gizmos/ :
Letters to the Editor Re: Oce ColorWave 600 Press Preview "I've gone through a lot of articles on the Oce CrystalPoint announcement, and I've found little of much value. I read Oce's materials on this printer, and it makes me wonder what the writer was on. The Web page www.oce.com/en/about/Technologies/CrystalPoint.htm talks about 'silk shine' (fine matte finish), non-toxic waste (true of most inkjet ink), 'solid in, solid out' technology (phase-change inkjet), 'gel' (viscous), and 'crystallization' (drying.) "Phase-change inkjet -- also called 'solid ink' (or, for that matter, 'hot melt') -- has been around for a while. Here is a nice article on it: www.imaging.org/resources/web_tutorials/solid_ink.cfm "So far as I know, the head technology used in the Oce printer is not fundamentally new. Because I didn't have a chance to actually look at the heads, I can't be certain. There are a number of OEM manufacturers of printheads that can handle solid inks: Spectra (Fujifilm Dimatix), Xaar, Hitachi, Konica-Minolta, Seiko, and Toshiba-Tec. It would seem odd to me for Oce to make its own heads, for what is arguably a low-unit volume product. But who knows? Maybe they do. They've got a few patents on inkjet heads. "In the past, wide-format phase change inkjets (such as the Tektronix Phaser 600) mostly used 'blocks' of ink, which had to be loaded through a complex mechanism, and which added quite a lot of mass to the carriage assembly of the printer -- causing extra cost and limiting throughput. It seems what Oce has done here is to cross a gumball machine with a pachinko machine, to make a feeder that drops balls of solid ink into the printer carriage on an as-needed basis. A simple and elegant idea -- but not entirely new. Howtek used ink pellets way-back-when (see www.freshpatents.com/Keying-elements-for-solid-ink-loader-dt20080626ptan20080151025.php). "Oce apparently has some extra-special ink (see www.google.com/patents?id=y5iYAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&dq=7084190), and interestingly enough it does contain a material that is crystalline. However, crystallization of the ink on the paper (at least, according to the patent) is a 'bad thing,' and something they seek to prevent -- which makes the brand name 'CrystalPoint Technology' rather ironic. "The problem with using balls of solid ink is that users may not want to pay the price Oce wants for the privilege of using their ink. The ink used in phase-change inkjets is, for the most part, a known technology (see, for example, http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5620508, www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6020399.) It would be pretty easy for third-parties to remelt generic solid ink into little balls. They might not work as good as Oce's little balls, but they might work good enough. Chances are that Oce, to preserve their ink monopoly on this printer, sells the ink in cartridges with a built-in ink counter chip. "Bottom line, for me, is that this is an interesting printer,
but it had better be pretty awesome to justify its purchase price,
as well as the price of its consumables and service contract."
Re: Spin Doctor of the Moment "You quoted Debra Chrapaty of Microsoft saying, 'We
have some new innovations up our sleeve'. Ah, the very best kinds
of innovations." - - - "Keep the newsletters coming, they're great."
"Keep up the great work!"
Spin Doctor of the Moment "It's a good 30- to 90-minute experience."
Notable Quotable "I don't read novels! Why do people think that reading a
book means reading a ****ing novel? You finish reading the book,
and you think, 'Well, that's over. There's four hours down the drain.'
At least in non-fiction you might pick up some information you can
trust."
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