One of the reasons I allow “pingbacks” (links to blogs that link to Dezignstuff which show up in the comments) on this site is so I can see when other blogs link here. And another good one just came in.

Evan Yares from 3D CAD Tips wrote an article that all SolidWorks users need to read. Evan and I use different language and different tone, but I think we are saying the same thing. He described SolidWorks 2013 as the start of “maintenance mode” for SolidWorks. I called it “SP5 for the entire SW program”, “embalming”, and “mummification. Anyway, I just thought it was important to point out Evan’s article. And the idea that it’s going to be years until V6 is ready to take over from SolidWorks.

Evan says “you don’t need to worry about DS SolidWorks forcing you to transition”, and that is probably literally true. But whether they literally force you or not, they are going to try to sell you the transition. Maybe that’s just toying with words – force/sell. It’s not a big scandal, it’s just a fact of life. SolidWorks will die, is dying, and like I said previously, may have died already. Jeff Ray’s words come back in paraphrase, “when the pain of staying on old stagnant software is too great for them to bear, they will switch to another software”. Whether they switch to Catia Lite or some other package altogether is what remains to be seen.

Here’s something you might not hear every where. A reliable source sent this information to me, and asked not to be named.

According to the source, the version of SolidWorks V6 shown at SWW2010 has been scrapped. There is no word from the source on if it will be cloud based, local, or both, but it is based on CGM and Catia V6. The original SWV6 was developed under the leadership of Austin O’Malley, and the new stuff under Gian Paolo Bassi.

The only bit that’s really new here is that the old version was scrapped. This seems to explain why it is taking so long to develop it, with the need to do the work twice. It’s good to know that there are some standards in place, that there is indeed maybe a limit to how bad the software can be and still be shipped to customers.The fact that they scrapped it means that maybe they are looking at their product critically, which can only be good news. It doesn’t ensure that the outcome will make anyone happy, but it means they have some sort of standards.

We’ve heard some other things too, that will help fill in the gaps. We’ve heard that this SolidWorks V6, or more accurately Catia Lite will be made from little modular bits of Catia. We’ve heard that this is all connected through Enovia (platform, database, file management, etc…) And we’ve heard one little bit of info from an older source that sheds some hope on the situation:

“The second aspect of V6 is that we have invested a lot to create an architecture that can be run locally or online.” Bernard Charles

This means that there is at least the possibility for them to do the right thing (offer a local version). It doesn’t mean that they will do the right thing. In fact, based on history, I would expect them to offer the local version, but make it inaccessible. So Catia Lite might be available on your local network, or even local machine, but doing that might require an additional $100k investment in infrastructure and maybe double that in consulting.

One of the things that hasn’t been discussed is Mr. Bassi. Mr. Bassi has been linked to such CAD software as ImpactXoft and think3. Neither of which were big commercial successes, exist today, or were even what you’d call mainstream. RIWEBB, his last venture before joining SolidWorks, had this on their website before it was taken down:

So while the source earlier didn’t confirm or deny that Catia Lite will be cloud based, Bassi’s most recent work has included “web enabled solutions”. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that would be part of why he was selected.

I only got to play with ImpactXoft a little bit when they tried to recruit a SW reseller I was working at to sell the software, probably in 2002 or 2003. It did some cool stuff, like functional modeling, which you can still find demonstrated on YouTube. Some current SW features use this, like the plastics features for mounting boss, and some others. I think it’s a no brainer to expect functional modeling in Catia Lite.  You can also expect history-based modeling to go away, according to public statements.

SolidWorks built its reputation by making software that engineers could relate to and use. I fear they are throwing it all away on some crazy vision of “3D Experience”, spending time modeling CAD software after games, phones, and fads rather than just continuing to make stuff that people like and use. There is such a thing as updating the software without throwing away your current success. Swapping out SolidWorks for a Catia-like stranger … I’m gonna go out on a limb and say trying to make SW users buy this is gonna be a tough sell.

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.

I got a note from a friend directing me to a site that has been source of good information and opinion on CAD industry goings-on, GraphicSpeak. This time the author is Stephen Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe has been around the industry a long time, and is well qualified to speak on the topic of product development software.  He’s a consulting analyst with Jon Peddie Research, in which capacity he wrote an article for the GraphicSpeak blog.

I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Wolfe one time. We shared an elevator at a CAD conference a few years ago. We talked about some topic I don’t remember, although it was important to me at the time. I was impressed with the insight he offered to a stranger who accosted him in an elevator.

I’ve only written about him once before on Dezignstuff, which was in reference to some comments he made at a press conference in Barcelona asking that a FEA demo’s boundary conditions be made more realistic. He’s not just a press guy, and not just another industry wonk. He’s a real engineer, and one of the few guys in the industry who deserves real respect. At least to me.

Real info from real Catia V6 users has been hard to come by. There has been very little that helps SolidWorks users to get a real vision into what the “next generation” product is going to look like, or how it will be to work with.So when I read this article entitled “Is Catia V6 over the hump?”, I knew this wasn’t just another hot-headed knee-jerk reaction. Anyway, you need to read the whole article, and I’ll add some comments here.

This article sees things mainly from an administrator’s point of view, which is valuable, because that’s where most of the work will be if you have to switch. Notice also that Wolfe mainly avoids the cloud issue. The cloud should really just be a solution for people who need it: Companies with widely distributed design facilities need it.

Although SolidWorks and Catia don’t have much in common right now, if you plan to move forward with the “next generation” of SolidWorks software, you are going to be affected by the current state of the Catia universe. It is well established by now that the “next generation” of SolidWorks will be announced in 2013, and will be based on the Enovia V6 backbone (database) and the Catia CGM V6 geometry kernel. This means of course that the “next generation” of SolidWorks will look much more like Catia than SolidWorks. Next generation SolidWorks may not have the same problems that the current version of Catia has, but the article spells out the difficulties of DS customers who are changing from V5 to V6. I would be willing to bet that customers changing from SolidWorks to V6 have even more problems than V5 users.

There is very little good news in this article for SolidWorks users. Your subscription money for the last 4 years has been going into this V6 project. I’m all for forward movement and improvement, but I also realize that design and manufacturing cannot just gut their process whenever the CAD vendor has a new idea. CAD providers have to find a way to make their changes within their customer’s processes. Making the switch from what you do today to what DS is asking you to do next year will be more of a disruption with less benefit than switching to some other brand of CAD.

To me the jury is still out on the whole “database” thing, but it sounds a bit awkward. The fact that users had to suggest a “work space” area is worrying, because that would seem to be something very basic that should be baked right in. The file sharing bits and “copying” and “propagation” are again awkward. It may be true that the database approach has some real benefits, but it is also going to have some real drawbacks. Dassault might have done better to make this a research project rather than trying to force-feed this as a “next generation” line of products. They are using an aircraft manufacturer to debug the software. I’m surprised that Bell and Cessna agreed to be the guinea pigs, they must have received a big financial incentive, otherwise, the risk would just be for someone else’s gain.

There is a lot of doubt coming from people who are at the sweet spot for this software: Complex product, complex organization behind the product. How is Dassault going to take a system like Catia and transform it into something it was not originally meant to do for organizations that are not in that corporate sweet spot, when it does not seem to be able to deliver success for optimal customers? I think this “next generation” of SolidWorks threatens to upset the entire apple cart. The more I see of this, the less I think it is going to thrive in the wild. The idea that DS thinks that this type of product can be fed to typical SolidWorks users shows that DS doesn’t understand what the SolidWorks product and company used to be, nor SolidWorks customers.