I recently started a discussion about an article written by Steve Wolfe. I'm met Mr. Wolfe at a number of CAD functions (mainly COFES) and for the most part I found his insight worthy of listening. All of that changed last week.

In an article found here Mr. Wolfe said:



In my original post I stated that has to be one of the dumbest statements I have ever heard. And I'm sure even the Solidworks and PTC guys are level headed enough to agree.

To universally make a statement that tasks performed by one section of users (e.g. Autodesk users vs Dassault) are "relatively unimportant" is not only shortsighted but quite honestly offensive to all the engineers and designers that have put their blood sweat and tears into countless desgins and products built on Autodesk products. Some might see my use of Inventor as a sore spot in the discussion. Quite the contrary. I would feel just as strongly if the article had read that designs built with Solidworks or PTC or even Alibre were "relatively unimportant". Several of my Solidworks peers have agreed with my take.

It's like saying that pieces of literature written by manual typewriter are "relatively unimportant" compared to those written on word processors or by hand. The tool is simply that. A tool. It's the user that mkes the products important or unimportant.

I wrote Mr. Wolfe expressing my dislike of his article. His response was anything but apologetic and was quite frankly even more inflammatory and disrespectful than his original article. I posted my reply (not his email) in the previous thread.

There is a pretty heated discussion going on at Deelip.com on several threads: here and here where Evan Yares has stepped in as the lone defender Mr. Wolfe. To Evan's credit he is fighting a battle that he did not create, however he made a few dumb (in my opinion) statements that has drawn him in as deep as Steve.

The purpose of this post is to ask Mr. Wolfe to either a)defend his position or b) apologize for his comments.

To write an incendiary piece like this and then leave it to fester with no defense form the author just reduces the credence his future works will hold, Anyone can write ... it takes a good writer to be able to defend his work.

So what say you Mr. Wolfe? I promise to keep my and other people's comments civil. I will make every attempt to not allow name calling or personal attacks. Let's see what you have... come defend your work. Or offer your apologies.

You must register for an account to post here. I will gladly approve your account once created. Or feel free to posts over at Deelip's blog...

http://www.deelip.com/?p=790