Today I attended part of a web cast from Autodesk introducing their 2014  line of products. I have to say that they have an amazing breadth of tools. Some of the tools they have acquired are truly tops in their respective industries, like Alias, 3DSmax, Moldflow, and many others. It’s hard getting past my vision of Autodesk as being the cheap junk aisle of the CAD market. Products in the past such as AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, Inventor, and Algor have reinforced this notion. It’s a bit telling that all of the truly world-class stuff they have for sale is stuff that other companies have developed.

Part of the 2014 offering is that Autodesk has grouped tools into suites, much like Adobe. I recently purchased an Adobe suite, which while expensive, also saved me a lot of money compared to buying the individual components one by one.  Of the Design Suite, Mudbox, 3ds Max, and Alias look interesting. Bundling may or may not make sense, depending on how they price the bundles, and what percentage of the items in the bundle you would intend to use. Inventor must be included in some other bundle I didn’t see, but I thought it would make sense to include Inventor with this set of tools shown in the image. (Here’s a link to the Product Design Suite including Inventor. $9995 for all that stuff isn’t that bad – Inventor Pro, AutoCAD, ACAD Mechanical, Mudbox, Vault, Electrical, 3ds Max, Alias, and other stuff)

Also as part of this, Autodesk was talking a lot about cloud services. What troubles me about what they were saying was that they were assigning properties to the cloud that do not belong to the cloud. I know every marketing department does this for just about every product, but it just bothers me. They were saying things like you will be more innovative if you use the cloud, and you will get your work done faster on the cloud. Citing new accounts at the rate of 700k+ per month. (I’m at least two of those new accounts, and for me, having a new account doesn’t translate into actually using the software or paying for any services). The innovation things just bugs me. It’s obvious BS. Tools are just tools. Anything cool you do comes from you, not from your tools. If you develop sucky products with one tool, you’ll probably do the same with anything else you try too.

The one explicit example of using the cloud that stuck with me was one where it actually makes sense. Using cloud for rendering can make sense where you have an absolutely huge rendering job to do, and your local resources cannot handle it. For just rendering small jobs that you would normally do on your desktop, the cloud is no advantage.

The point here is that to Autodesk, this isn’t some vague thing off on the horizon that they won’t talk about explicitly. To Autodesk, these design tools are in the process of arriving on the cloud. I’d be interested to hear from Autodesk users who are actually using cloud services what they think of the value and the added risk, or any other comments they might like to share.

Folks are asking about this, but I’ve written about this in the past. I guess you only pay attention when it suits you. Without re-researching it all again, here are some of the things I’ve read that V6 will contain. I can’t provide links because this is mostly from memory, but it was mainly from a 3ds.com domain.

Some Form of Direct Edit

From the 2010 SolidWorks V6 SWW demos, we remember that V6 has some sort of Direct Edit. Don’t know if it is exclusively direct, or direct combined with history. History buffs prepare. Your options with history are going to become limited. Direct edit can be good. Direct edit can include parametrics. Losing history is not necessarily bad, but it’s not going to be your choice if you follow SolidWorks down the rabbit hole. Doing something that is not your choice is the main thing to object to here.

To start believing in the Dassault vision, you have to essentially jump off the cliff without a parachute, without a plan, and without even a promise. All you have to go on at this point is your positivity.  And possibly a pile of naivete. This is a company that hasn’t made a lot of great choices in the last 5 years. I’ll give them one chance in four of coming up with a scheme that I’m going to want to buy in to. In one of the comments “CAD Munkie” posited that V6 is going to be “CATIA ‘paired down’ with the familiar SolidWorks interface”. I’ll give you credit for a very positive imagination. But it’s hopelessly wrong. You’re going to get a Catia interface with a paired down Catia tool set on top of a Catia workflow. There will be nothing recognizable to a SolidWorks user about “Catia Lite”. That’s not to say that it’s bad, but if you really wanted Catia, you should have bought Catia.

Some Form of Functional Modeling

Functional modeling already exists to some extent in SolidWorks. Think about things like the Lip and Groove, the Mounting Boss, the Vent features… stuff you’re probably not familiar with unless you’re a plastics guy. Lip and Groove can be frustratingly slow.  Vent has a lot of variables, and if they aren’t all just right, the whole thing will fail. Functional modeling is actually a very cool thing that can do some things independent of history, such as place a hole, and no matter if you put material there later, the hole will always be a hole. It’s kind of like library features. I’ve used the Lip and Groove many times on a recent project. It’s nice and automated, but it’s very slow, and it’s not as robust as manual methods. It’s just a different way of working with features that do more, more automatically, but also fail more. Remember with automation you ALWAYS give up some level of control and flexibility, and still wind up doing some things by hand.

Functional modeling, just so you remember, came to Catia through the purchase of ImpactXoft, led by none other than Gian Paolo Bassi. It wasn’t an accident that he was made the VP of development at SolidWorks. Functional modeling can be a great idea, but there are a lot of great ideas out there. If you liked functional modeling that well, why didn’t you buy Catia or ImpactXoft instead of SolidWorks originally? ImpactXoft was aimed at plastics design, which is why you see these features targeting plastics in SolidWorks.

Database Filetype

The SolidWorks failed experiment in “dissection” I think may have had something to do with this. It at least bears some vague resemblance. The idea is that you can reuse any feature in your part, because it’s just an entry in a database that can be referenced anywhere you want it to. Huge departure from the “files on the hard drive” mindset, and it means that file management is going to be built in to your CAD. In the days of PDM, external files were referenced by the database, but in the days of 3DEXPERIENCE, everything is in the database. Again, this is not an inherently bad way of working, but what sort of investment do you have to walk away from if you have a current PDM system at your company?

So whether this is good or bad is entirely dependent on the implementation. The concept potentially could work well enough, but this could easily be made entirely unattractive, as you saw with dissection in SolidWorks. If you don’t remember, back in whatever year it was added, and turned on by default in the new version, users and CAD admin types were scrambling around trying to figure out what was driving their servers crazy at some specific time at night, 8 pm or 11 pm, can’t remember. This software was essentially a virus, and started taking over your computer at a certain time. Of course no one was even remotely interested in the results. Why would I want to save a sketch of a rectangular feature? I mean library features are useful enough, but many companies just don’t use them for whatever reason. So now you automate library features, and make them violate just about every IT policy in the books, and you have to wonder why people didn’t embrace the idea.

“But no, you’ll be able to search the database for anything?!?!” Google is God, so anything search based must be wonderful. Well, wrong. Search destroyed the help. I can no longer find something if I know what I’m looking for. Search offers a lot of (or you could say “mainly”) invalid results.  I can’t imagine searching for parts is going to be any better. People will have to learn to name files according to some predetermined system, and use descriptions, and all sorts of “clerk” type metadata. Most of the users I know don’t have any thing like that, even though it’s a huge best practice. So CAD will just inherit the clerical headaches that have typically kept companies away from adopting PDM.

Multicore Processing

I know this is a recent hot button topic promoted mainly by The CADCAM Terrorist, JB. By locating this database on a cloud bank of servers, you’re supposed to get better multithreading. CGM (Catia’s kernel) is supposed to be multithreaded because the data is so segmented into database entries. Who knows if this is true or not, I don’t intend to touch this topic with a 10 foot pole, aside from mentioning that you might see it touted as a benefit of V6 and the cloud.

Cloud

This is just info that I’ve heard from “sources”, but my impression is that some portion of V6 is exclusively based on a Dassault Systemes cloud. It could be the software or the data or both. And it could wind up that it will only function  cannot or will not be able to function outside of that cloud. There are a lot of problems with the cloud that you read about in the news every day, and have been pounded to death on this blog for the last 3 years. While there are a lot of advantages of the cloud, there are many more problems with it. Although I’ve been through these before, let’s just reiterate them for the people who think I’m “negative”: access from anywhere, access from any OS, access from any device, less overhead of software installation, less need for workstation hardware, “immediate recovery from crashes”, no data loss during crashes, never have to worry about service pack installation again, never have to worry about version issues ever again.

A couple of these are complete BS, such as the version issues and service pack. The reason they can make these claims is that there is ever only one active version of the software running on the cloud. But you can’t access it unless you are paying for it. So ALL customers are by definition maintenance paying customers. This right here is going to be one of the biggest reasons people bail on upgrading to V6. Remember SAAS, and ASP buzzwords from the early 2000s? Cloud is just a more sophisticated attempt at the same idea. Both the crash recovery ideas are things that have existed in SolidWorks for years, but many users just turn them off.

There’s so much evidence that this is where we are headed. Dassault has bought into the “Big Data” market with the Exalead acquisition. Big Data is what you are going to have when you have all your CAD files, and all product information in one gigantic Enovia database.

And the argument against? Bandwidth. Infrastructure. Bandwidth. Security. Bandwidth. Security. Lack of control. Two additional layers of possible failure (cloud server and infrastructure) on top of the local data/power/hardware sources for failure. Military/government contracts that prohibit cloud use. Cost. Legal liability when data is stolen or when productivity time is lost due to cloud failure. Again, refer to the last 3 years of blog posts and comments.

Summary

Do you see a pattern here? The pattern is that most of the advantages of V6 are aimed at very large companies, the kind of companies Dassault is used to selling Catia to. Someone who’s necktie is too tight has decided that SolidWorks users are just like Catia users. It doesn’t take a CPA to tell you how wrong that assumption is. How many single seats of Catia do you sell? Precious few. How many SolidWorks seats are sold to a 1 to 3 seat company? About half as I remember it. Huge difference in business practices, huge differences in needs. I don’t need more non-CAD functionality pressed into an over-automated retraining nightmare.

I find no reason to believe that using Catia is going to resemble using SolidWorks in any way. SolidWorks was based on Windows interface, and Catia didn’t come from those roots. I think you’re going to get a Catia interface, with a stripped down feature set. If you really wanted Catia, why didn’t you just buy Catia originally? The answer is likely that you didn’t want Catia, and that you still don’t want Catia.

If I have to make a switch, I want to be the one deciding what to switch to. I’ll do a comparison, cost and capability will be primary factors. Dassault is not even going to have software for me to evaluate in the next year or two. They are trying to play both sides of the market. To one side, the current V6 side, they brag about what they are going to do with V6, and the large number of customers that they will pull over from SolidWorks. On the other side, they are downplaying the changeover to SolidWorks users. This is why the video came from a 3DEXPERIENCE conference, and why it was so far away (Korea). I’m surprised it wasn’t also in French or Korean. You would never have heard that speech at SolidWorks World for obvious reasons.

And then cost. I don’t believe there is any way that V6 is going to cost you less than SolidWorks. I would be surprised to hear that it costs less than twice as much annually. Cost has also been touted as a primary advantage of moving to the cloud. Don’t be the chump that falls for that one. Remember that just an online view and markup tool (n!Fuze) was listed for $79/mo/license. And it replaced something that was free (3D Instant Website).

Here is a Face The Nation report that includes a panel of government types who are now saying things like “the US is being robbed every day”, “they are stealing the next generation of jobs”, “…a great pillaging of wealth”, “$250B – $450B per year…”, electrical grid, financial system, military and consumer product designs, and so on.

It’s 14 minutes long, and worth listening to. Networks are vulnerable, but cloud stockpiles of data are massively attractive targets that you can’t hide. Your company’s LAN and VPN are vulnerable, but these can be shut down and disconnected, which is the ultimate defense. But “the cloud” by its very nature cannot be divorced from design productivity. What are the benefits that can possibly outweigh this kind of downside? Putting pictures of your ski vacation on the web – that’s fine. You want people to see those, and if they are viewed by some guy in an Iranian bunker, who cares? But your product designs cannot be treated in the same way as vacation pictures.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I know one solution is to not make the problem worse by putting data in a place where anyone who wants it will know where it is. You can’t just roll your eyes at this kind of stuff, its really happening.

Alright, don’t start in on me. I’ve got a lot of misgivings about this software, just based on its name. First, Autodesk (or AutoCAD) to me means low-rent, underpowered software that runs best when its bootlegged. The name Autodesk also recalls the traumatic  experience I had as an early adopter of Mechanical Desktop 1.1. 360 in this case means cloud. So there isn’t much to like with 2/3 of the name. But Fusion sounds good to me. It sounds like they are merging technology, which seems right to me right now. I really like how Siemens has merged History and Direct into Synchronous. If Autodesk is copying from Siemens, and who could blame them for working from a great idea, then this Fusion 360 might not be what I typically expect from Autodesk.

First, you know they’re only marketing people, but you might expect them to get the priorities right. The huge font went to the cloud. The cloud should be a footnote in this story instead of a huge distraction from the real story. I think this is part where Autodesk is really missing it. Cloud isn’t the big draw that CEOs and marketing types think it is. If I were trying to sell CAD in the cloud, the first thing I’d mention was that it takes advantage of some great modeling tools. I wouldn’t even mention the cloud. CAD people don’t want the cloud, they don’t care about it. They care about modeling tools.

There has been a lot of controversy recently around Autodesk cloud announcements by Autodesk CEO and some other top level types. You can read more about this on Blog Nauseam, and Ralph Grabowski’s site, both places that tend to focus on Autodesk products. The discussion has centered around whether or not Carl Bass said/believes that all Autodesk tools are going to be cloud tools EXCLUSIVELY. It seems they’ve backed off of that, and everything will be available on the cloud, but there will also be unspecified desktop tools. This dance seems more than a little familiar. A CEO comes out with a brash and possibly stupid claim, and then everyone else is left scrambling either not saying anything or trying to do damage control to regain control of the message. All you need is one crazy, ambiguous statement. Just ask Jeff Ray, now picking cotton in some software backwater.

Anyway, to me, the most important stuff I’ve read about Autodesk Fusion 360 has been from Evan Yares. The first thing I like about what Evan says is that he’s realistic. There are limits to cloud capabilities, mostly imposed by connection bandwidth, and that there is much more to this product than just an internet connection.

The first thing that you have to notice with this is that Fusion 360 is a mechanical modeler with T-Splines built in. This is what SolidWorks could have been. So just to be clear, you might design a conveyor system, or you might design something organic without pulling your hair out. This is the system I’ve been asking for that combines NURBS and mesh-style modeling. If this interests you, I’d really recommend reading Evan’s two part article.

As much as it pains me to praise Autodesk, this is a product that looks interesting because of the modeling technology. To me, it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing if a more reputable vendor were to offer something similar (like if Siemens bought Geomagic/Sensable). If we could only convince them somehow to shut up about the damn cloud.

Fusion 360 isn’t available yet (are all these cloud apps going to be released on the same day?), but you can sign up for beta, which isn’t out yet either. Autodesk’s incomplete cloud app that isn’t delivered yet sounds like Dassault’s scaled down “conceptual modeler” that isn’t delivered yet. Despite Mr. Bass’ best efforts, Autodesk has managed to create less of a PR disaster than Dassault, and they have offered some details.

So, this is one of those things that I’m watching with great interest. I’ve put my name in for beta, I’d love to get my hands on this. For all of Dassault’s bluster about bringing its customers new technology first, they are going to be dead last in the post-history era among the big 4. Even the deaf and blind PTC has an offering in this space.

This is going far beyond just a few curmudgeons upset about someone fiddling with their CAD software. If it was ever just that.

Remember when Apple aficionados used to be sanctimonious about not getting hit by viruses? If you’re a crook, do you knock over a thrift store? No, you go where the money is – like a bank. Apple users don’t yap about viruses so much now that they are more popular, because they are seen as more of a target.

Remember when it was safe to store your stuff on-line? It was safe pretty much because it wasn’t widespread enough to be seen as a lucrative target. Plus, now we know that there are people who do bad stuff purely out of the badness of their hearts. They aren’t looking for any monetary reward, they just like doing bad things. <cue ACDC Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap>

The more widespread the cloud becomes, the more it is seen as a target, the less secure it becomes. If you put a pot of gold in the cloud, someone is going to figure out how to loot it. It’s just that simple. CAD data is a huge jackpot for corporate espionage. Putting it in the cloud will just make it that much easier.

I think the cloud is great – for stuff you just want to give away. Like this blog. Like social media stuff. I use cloud stuff for things where I think it’s appropriate – stuff I don’t mind losing or giving away.  Backing up to the cloud? No. But I back up my blog on my local machine and NAS. And even so, this blog has been hacked at least twice. Charles Culp’s blog has been hacked, the SolidWorks forums have been hacked a couple of times – basically if you put it on-line, you can expect it to get hacked. I don’t know why things would be magically different for CAD data.

We have Wozniak, of all people, sounding the alarm about ownership in the cloud, this being reported here by a couple of commenters already. This is just one of the founders of the digital age talking common sense about real concerns. Why take your data, give it to someone else, and then rent it back from them, especially when they will offer you no guarantees that it won’t get hacked.

And then there was this poor schlep Mat Honan (a Gizmodo editor) who was massively hacked this past weekend, and lost all the data on his iCloud, iPhone, iPad, and Mac Book Air, not to mention, Twitter, a related Gizmodo Twitter acct and who knows what else being compromised. Was his case really all that much different from any other reasonably connected netizen? It just shows, if someone wants it, they are going to take it or destroy it. To pretend that you’re going to develop a hack-proof, fail-proof system is fooling yourself. And if you’re planning on doing this for customers, you are not giving them any comfort at all. No one in their right mind would sign an agreement that gives a corporation all their stuff, but doesn’t hold the corporation responsible for keeping it safe.

I’m not saying that just CAD in the Cloud is a bad idea. I think keeping any work on the cloud is a bad idea. “Oh, but Salesforce.com…” you say. Yeah, they’ve been hacked a bunch of times. This stuff is in the news constantly. I’d rather deep fry a turkey than put CAD data in the cloud.

Someone commented here last week about the fact that CAD in the cloud is probably appropriate for companies with multi-national design teams. Well, yeah. But that’s not the core of SW’s business. The little guy is the core of SW’s business. The people running DS think all customers look like Catia customers. We’ll see how right they are. Plus, the multi-national design teams are taking a risk. Is it a smart risk? Is it a necessary risk? Is it a risk you gain anything from? The fact that they are pushing SolidWorks users in the direction of Catia users says to me that the folks at DS are out of touch.

Ralph Grabowski wrote a month ago on another blogger who wrote why he thought SolidWorks had to kill off their existing highly successful product. Read it at this link, then c’mon back.

First of all, I get it. SW was old. But I really don’t believe in the all-or-nothing approach. Abandoning what has been the best mid-range modeler is lunacy in my estimation. If you want to do something revolutionary, figure out a way to gracefully enhance your product in a meaningful way without abandoning it.

Vajrang Parvate, SolidWorks Director of R&D takes his negative campaign to the streets. He apparently doesn’t have anything positive to say about the company he works for or the product they develop, he just takes potshots at anyone who criticizes SolidWorks (or Apple). How Soviet. This guy is all the proof you need that the company is not what it once was. SolidWorks as a company used to handle things with more class. Hey Vaj, spend a little more time talking about your software, and a little less being so thin-skinned. The criticism must be hitting close to home.

I know a lot of people think I’m crazy, but I’m not. My mother had me checked, as Sheldon Cooper says. People more level headed than me are now writing more about the abandonment of SolidWorks current product, and about real problems with the DS hail mary pass to the cloud, betting everything on one crazy blind toss into the ether.

There are a lot of end users and prospective users out there who still don’t have any idea about the severity with which the SolidWorks world is about to change. Even at CAD conferences I get asked if its really true that SolidWorks is going to change kernels. It’s true there is a way of looking at it where SW is not changing kernels. But that’s an incomplete story.  Kernel change is not what this blog post is about, you can read about that in a lot of other places. In the end, SolidWorks is going to try to sell you a kernel change, and the new software would be more aptly named Catia Lite than SolidWorks [anything], because it will be built on Enovia V6, which is what Catia is built on.

The real point of this post is that SolidWorks may already be dead, and no one knows it. Jeff Ray was maybe a little too effective in letting the cat out of the bag that it was intended to be killed. By the time he said that publicly, it was already  fait accompli. And I’m thinking that what appears to be a recent development of renewed interest in SolidWorks by employees looking like they are asking questions is not in fact a resurgence, like I originally thought (hoped), but indeed a preparation for burial – an embalming, possibly better seen as a “mummification”. Let me explain.

The reference to Jeff Ray “killing” SolidWorks is well documented across the web, and comes from Jeff actually discussing how to kill SolidWorks with a next-gen product before the competition did that for them. The next-gen product was intended to be this still-nameless development project referred to as alternately SolidWorks V6 or maybe more descriptively, Catia Lite. This was all public, and the only thing you can dispute about it is if he meant literally to kill SolidWorks, or if it were more of a metaphor for developing great stuff. In either case, Jeff was first “promoted” to a previously unknown position in France, and has since been promoted right out of the company. Or as we used to say in the Navy, “transferred to CivLant Command”.

Several people have commented on the lack of meaningful CAD-related development in recent versions of SolidWorks. There’s a lot of fluff, and little that interests guys like me. The most ambitious development projects in the last several years has certainly not been CAD or geometry related. The reason for that is not difficult to guess – they are working on something else. I don’t care what they say about the size of the development team, or the number of enhancements, the proof is in the pudding. Very few CAD or geometry related enhancements.

But in the last couple of weeks, I started to feel a little more optimistic. Don Van Zile, a guy who I had a lot of respect for as a user, turns up with a SolidWorks name badge and starts asking for pet peeves on the forum. Although skeptical that anything would come of it, I thought this was the most optimistic thing that I’ve seen from SolidWorks in a long time. I thought that maybe someone in France heard that customers weren’t crazy about moving their CAD to the cloud, and maybe they were hedging their bets somewhat and maybe reverting to develop the current SolidWorks a little more.

But no. That’s not what it is. If this were a real effort, they would have put some senior people in front of users to try to regain confidence. No one is doing that. They’ve got someone new and expendable. Nothing against Don, but Don is not controlling this situation. In fact, common consensus seems to say that SolidWorks is not controlling the situation.

I think that SolidWorks is simply interested in fixing up the software for long term storage. They want to really make it something to be proud of before switching it off. This is like Service Pack 5 for the entire SolidWorks software. Making the corpse look as good as possible before laying it to rest permanently.  Embalming, mummification. Is this off-the-rails-crazy? Is it really? The future is the cloud, DS makes that clear. The desktop is going to vanish. They believe this. They are working to make it happen. The only people they have to convince are the people writing the checks.

Is it really possible that Dassault would really kill off SolidWorks? I didn’t think so originally, but the more time goes by, the more I think this is the way they are headed. I’d be willing to bet that development for CAD/geometry will continue to slow. It sounds stupid to a guy like me, but it looks like Dassault is really going to put the whole basket of eggs in the cloud. This will happen until they see a general downturn in DS mid-range money and someone yanks the reins from the suicidal maniac running the team off a cliff, or maybe I’m just dead wrong and they really win. I would guess they are headed for a PTC style implosion in a few years. I’m not sure if the Catia business is going to snuff it in the same way, throwing it all to NX. I don’t really follow that side of it well enough to have much opinion there.

Is it still reversible? Probably. I mean, it’s reversible until it isn’t. I would think they could recover from this sort of blunder until the general CAD public becomes aware. You can’t steer something this size, not quickly anyway. By the time you see concrete signs that there’s a problem, it’s already too late. If SW V6 ships next year, it might take a while for customers to understand that they are being pushed in that direction, and that the cost to move is going to be more than just maintenance.

Ok, we’re all sick to death of CAD in the Cloud. I know. I’ve been sick of it for as long as I’ve been writing about it. But what if it suddenly made sense? What if someone developing a new tool were upfront about their reasons for developing CAD in the Cloud, and they sounded like good reasons? Would that spark less hostility and mistrust?

Jim Foster from the startup To3D issued a survey a while ago just asking some questions of CAD users. This was mentioned in a post about influencing the future of CAD. The results of the survey are available, and now he’s also explaining a little behind the thinking of how he came to start developing a new CAD system that works from a web server.

Keep in mind, this is early on for this experiment. I don’t think anyone is making any money from this yet, and I don’t think they have a tool that does even as much as SW95 did. Cloud isn’t even the main reason for this software to come into being. Read the article and decide for yourself, leave some comments. Jim is a decent guy, the creator of PDMWorks, and a former SW employee. It’s not some nameless, faceless, bureaucratic money siphon trying to lock your company in to stuff it doesn’t need. It’s a few guys you might know trying to solve real problems.

Evan Yares started writing interesting articles on his own blog some time ago, and then recently shifted to writing for Design World, a publisher that I flirted with a little and didn’t decide to continue with. The guy in charge of Design World came to me and asked me what I thought of Evan as a replacement. I told him I was a little flattered to be replaced by a guy like that, and that Evan would be in an entirely different class. In a good way. Which for Design World was I’m sure happy news. Not sure how Evan feels about a ringing endorsement from Matt Lombard, but it probably won’t ruin his career.

Evan seems to have a reputation as a CAD industry bad boy, according to some people, but I’m not really interested in rehashing the past.  I’m liking what he has to say more and more. I don’t always agree with him, but I think in general he has an understanding of things that other CAD industry employees or other CAD press wonks don’t share. He seems to simultaneously cut through marketing BS and end user superstition to communicate ideas in a thoughtful and insightful way. I’ve referred to several of his articles from time to time, and I’m gonna do it again.

First of all, go check out Design World’s 3D CAD Tips site. There is a great range of articles covering topics from hardware to software to CAD business, interviews, and commentary. Pick up the RSS for 3D CAD Tips, and have Evan’s words piped directly into your brain.

Evan’s latest article that got my attention was called “Cloud CAD is Really Difficult“. With this article, I think he shows that he’s willing to have an opinion, unlike a lot of CAD writers. He shows that the question of CAD in the Cloud has many faces, and that all of those faces are complex issues on their own. In this article he just addresses creating the software. Not delivering or using it or securing it or selling it or preparing a network on which to use it. Just creation. Go ahead. Read it.

CAD in the Cloud, for whatever reason or reasons, turns out to be a very polarizing topic. We’ve seen it here on this blog numerous times. People who advocate for the cloud 9 times out of 10 are selling something. No where have I heard of this being more poignantly demonstrated than by the almighty Mike Payne (founder PTC, SolidWorks, Spaceclaim, etc.) at this year’s COFES, according to Deelip. Read this article. Mike Payne reportedly stood up to defend a cloud presentation against a skeptic in the audience, and the internet connection at the hotel proceeded to fail.

Mr. Payne, by the way, is now the CEO of Kenesto, a company with one of those products that you can never figure out exactly what it does. They do, however, have a web demo – a video of Kenesto in action. You’d think a guy like Payne would know what he was doing by now, and you’d think that a web-based company would know how to present itself on the web. Follow this link and watch the video. It sounds like it was recorded on a 1970′s cassette recorder, and is so full of dead air (well, dead that is if you don’t consider the sound of the motor on the cassette recorder as sound) that you quickly forget why you’re sitting there in an (almost) silent room.

A startup can do better than that. Hell, I can do better than that. How is a company that can’t execute using today’s technology going to usher in tomorrow’s technology?

Payne seems to be spiralling out of relevance. He went from PTC to SolidWorks, to (???), to Spatial, to Spaceclaim, and now to Kenesto. Decreasing relevance for the past decade anyway. Of course this is all post-retirement. I think people are going to discover at some point that the “inevitability” of the cloud has its limits. CAD is a special case among business software. Part of the cloud mantra is that the cloud will save your infrastructure resources. But ironically, it is going to require that we double or triple our infrastructure’s resources in order to use it for something like CAD. Cloud for storing bootleg music and movies? Hooray. Cloud for writing blogs? Hooray. Cloud for sharing pictures of your friends blowing cookies in the backyard? Hooray. Cloud for storing your company’s most sensitive data, and live editing giant files? Don’t buy it.

Although SolidWorks hasn’t been considered a technological backwater for some time, I fear the day is not far away when even Dassault will start calling it that. Pay close attention to how DS describes the current SolidWorks product today. Today they want you to believe what you have always believed: that SolidWorks will always exist. When SW V6 hits, their tune will change.

They need to play this one carefully. They will want to sell you the new software by making you understand that the old software is now obsolete, but of course they can’t say that the old software is obsolete. I think people will be confused by the message, because SolidWorks will likely be saying one thing, but meaning the exact opposite. Like nodding your head and saying “no” at the same time, that kind of lying takes practice.

Do you remember the days, say 1999, getting ready for the Y2K bug, and watching internet marketing explode? There were a lot of people who invented new stuff, and anything they could do to connect any product with the internet in whatever way possible was considered marketing brilliance. Of course we all know how that turned out. The bubble of “irrational exuberance” burst, and ideas that had more exuberance than substance quickly fell apart. Connecting CAD to the web made real sense only in some limited ways. We still have a Web toolbar in SolidWorks, with all the usefulness of a coccyx, as a reminder of that time.

So there is a lot of reason to be cynical about the feeding frenzy developing around marketing the cloud and mobile technology. Mobile phones have been an incredibly successful market, especially if you count tablets as big phones you can’t make calls with. They are all just mobile computers. We’re supposed to have quad core devices in the 1.5 GHz range by the end of winter. It makes me sick to think of wasting all that mobile compute power on angry birds and facebook.

Even these devices use primarily local apps, and local data.  Why? Mobile devices are putting very powerful processors right in the palm of your hand, with the local processing power far outstripping the remote data transfer rates, even at 4G speeds. Maybe more important than the power of the hardware are the monthly data quotas. Cloud is going to be limited to “stuff you want to give away”, and applications for widely distributed data, as long as the data isn’t that big. Stuff like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – all stuff you put there because you want other people to see it. That’s the point, and that’s the strength of the cloud.

The main limiting factor for going mobile with CAD (besides the hard data limits) are the display and the power source. You need a display large enough to do real work on, which is going to require a “sit down” sized power supply (wall socket). Even if we get mobile projectors, batteries cannot keep up with the power requirements we can invent. Power consumption on mobile chips is coming way down, but again battery life is still the biggest complaint about smartphones, especially ones with fast data transfer (4G) and big screens.

What’s the intersection between CAD and mobile devices? It will probably start with viewers and markup. There have been some 2D sketchers available for some time. I think SolidWorks is missing a huge opportunity by not having a mobile version of eDrawings already, especially in light of n!Fuze being such a dud. Siemens Teamcenter already has a Mobility app to give you mobile access to product data. CAD developers need to stop ignoring Android.

I personally think that CAD and a touch interface are going to work well together, once we get tablets/touch monitors into the 20″+ range that can sit in your lap, or at the level of a desktop keyboard. Over a year ago, I linked to a video of someone running SolidWorks from an Android using a remote desktop app linked to a pc. It’s crude, and certainly not the way anyone will want to spend 8 hours a day. But it does give you crazy super powers from anywhere with bars (cell signal bars, that is). While I’m a big believer in touch interfaces, I really dislike gesture-based interfaces, its a lot of silly motion that you often have to repeat to get the device to understand. I still want to touch an interface element of some kind. The combination of touch and direct edit will be sweet indeed.