I arrived in Orlando after a quick 2 hour drive Sunday night The hotel was a spread out “ranch style” resort where our room was a mile away from the checking desk. After almost being run over by golf carts and finding my room I was about worn out and went to bed to get ready for Monday.
The keynote morning session was superb. After some lively music and light displays, Jeff Ray the COO welcomed us and gave a few quick facts abut SWW 2005. This year there were over 2200 attendees (compare this to about 5000 at AU) representing over 80 countries.
While the overlying theme for the conference is “The Power of 3D”, over the next three days the major themes would be: community, the future and the power of 3D tools. Today’s theme was community.
Jeff went on to mention the various voting kiosks located around the conference allowing users to vote on wish lists and suggest new features. He mentioned that 2005 was the most thoroughly tested release to date and that they were VERY proud of their beta testing programs. They also recently added a VP of Customer Service, Richard Welch. His only performance metric would be the happiness of the customer. This is a position that ADSK could sorely use.
Jeff went on to speak about 3D Content Central (50k transactions in Dec 2004 alone) and their 3D Partstream.NET application. Misumi, one of the event’s major sponsors provides all 6.1 million of their parts in SWX format, yet another sign of the power of the 3D Partstream application. Again, this is an avenue where SWX is sorely beating ADSK at getting their product built into vendors and other markets. I posed the question “where is ADSK’s response” several months ago. So far I haven’t heard…
Jeff’s other proud moment is when he stated that to date 32,000 ProE users have signed up for Edrawings downloads. I’m curious as to the number of IV users as well.
Perhaps the highlight of the speech was when Jeff introduced Solidwork’s newest customer. Orange County Choppers (of American Chopper fame) recently purchased a seat to do analysis and wheel design. After a video of the Tuttles at work, Paul Sr, Jr and Mike Tuttle walked onto stage to a standing ovation. After Jeff challenged them to design a bike for Solidworks, John McEleney, Solidworks’ CEO rode the SWX designed chopper onto the stage. I must admit it was a nice looking bike.
After a brief interview with the Tuttles, McElenery asked what lessons Paul Sr. had learned about CosmosWorks (FEA) when designing the fixed rear end of the SWX bike he broke up the crowd with the reply…“Blue is good, red is bad”.
Ignoring the fact that this is probably only one seat of SWX (and is probably mainly used for CNC wheel design) this is
enormous publicity for Solidworks. This type of notoriety will only reinforce Solidwork’s “name recognition” in the industry and to the public in general. ADSK has a LOT of catching up to do in this vain.
He continued with the notion of the power of 3D. In a recent survey Solidworks noted that over 51% of models sent to machine shops are in some 3D format. I question this number (seems a bit high) but do agree with the general comment that users will need to migrate to 3D or be left behind.
To aid in this transfer, SWX 2006 will be introducing a lot more tools. While they are going to cover them in depth over the next three days (and I’ll post them here) the single largest one in my opinion is DWGgateway.
DWGgateway is an AutoCAD plug-in that will allow you to open any version of a DWG in any version of AutoCAD. So for example you only have R2000 and someone sends you a R2005 DWG? No problem, DWGgateway will open the 2005 DWG. This to me is a “Series killer”. I for one saw no advantage in upgrading to any version of AutoCAD past R2000. The only reason was so that you could open other peoples’ drawings. With the release of this FREE plug-in that hurdle is taken away. I was simply blown away at this product. For more info
www.dwggateway
They also previewed Edrawings for Apple. Something that DWF users have been asking about for some time.
John showed us some other improvements in 2006 but I’ll save those for another (more detailed post).
John closed with a slide he first created in 1996. He said that he has never changed it because he feels these items still hold water. It was the points that SWX needs to improve to stay ahead of the market.
1. ease of use
2. reliability
3. large assembly performance
4. large drawing performance
5. add value and innovation
If these 5 items are not addressed in each and every release, he feels that they are not doing their job. Clear and concise goals that I feel are not being followed by some other CAD vendors.
After this morning session I had 2 classes. Ed Eaton, a SWX surfaces guru tried to teach us “blockheads” a bit about surfacing. The second class, another surfacing class, I felt was a bit abstract but both classes were of high quality.
Overall it feels as if SWW has a bit more “energy” than AU. The company and the users seem so much more excited about the product than at AU. That’s not to say AU was a “worse” experience, that’s not true. It’s just different.
I do wish however they had some public internet stations as my wireless network card is not working and posting this via my phone (as a modem) is a bit slow.
More tomorrow…
Read the Day 1 Review Here
Read the Day 2 Review Here
Read the Day 3 Review Here
Read the Day 4 Final Overview Here
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