SW and MS: Parallel Universes
Read this bit from Yahoo! news. Wow. Microsoft might have to cave in to users. Deja Vu all over again. Vista is a useless step backwards. There are no compelling reasons to move “ahead” into Vista, when XP does what you need it to do without upgrading your hardware. Another blow to those who seek empty change for the sake of needing more money.
Sound familiar at all? SW08 has bogged things down with (mostly) useless interface changes, and has obsoleted a lot of previously perfectly good CAD hardware. Who needs that? What compelling reason do you have to move to SW08? My customers still aren’t moving. I’m still doing most of my paid modeling work in 2007.
The adoption rate for SW 2008 I’m going to guess is currently in the 40-50% range right now, based on talking to a lot of user group users, and the 2008 release life cycle is well over half done. That’s dismal.
At this time last year, SW08 beta was available to customers. So SW’s 9 month cycle has slipped to 11, 12, 13… Users have been demanding this, so maybe they are caving in a little. Maybe Jeff Ray isn’t as utterly full of bovine ordure as that starched and spit shined exterior suggests. As I’ve said before, “the proof is in the pudding”. We’ll wait and see.
These software companies trying to horse around the user are clearly out of touch with their customers. They’ve got the cart before the horse. SW continues to claim that they are customer driven, but I don’t believe a word of it. They are driven by competition, and internally by career oriented politics. There is very little customer driven about this company.
C’mon, where’s that next big thing?
Matt,
I think you’re going a bit over the top with your comments RE: SW2008. early on you had valid reasons for its backwards steps with the new UI etc. And i agreed with them whole heartedly. And still do. They are valid and OBVIOUS flaws. But it is a step in the right direction. But i suppose this is the problem with SWCorp (lets not forget MS) now. Its half baked. INstead of taking steps forward in UI, ease of use, productive, pleasant etc Its two steps back.
Painful little idiocies that not only piss you off as a user but make you NOT want to use the software that you used to love. But as i said there are some nice things about SW2008 that i’ve found are great additions. They just never went all the way like limiting our custimizibility and oh so many things you already know about. I wont even get to them when it comes to the actual feature front.
But yes, although i wouldn’t be so harsh (perhaps i’ve given up the lost battle?), i agree. Very little customer driven going on here. I think the only *real* customer driven i’ve seen lately in any corporation is RED ( http://www.red.com ).
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Yeah, I’m probably a bit over the top. Now and then I just get stuck in a corner and can’t complete something I can visualize. That’s what’s so frustrating. SW is all about communicating stuff that’s in your head, and usually you can get what’s in your head into the computer. But sometimes it just refuses to do something.
I hope a lesson was learned with 08. The only thing ‘customer driven’ about 08 was the driving of customers to start looking at the competition.
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Amen, brother! Preach it!
I’ve been bugging them to slow down the upgrade cycle since 2004. I spearheaded an informal policy where I work that states we only upgrade every two cycles (works out to odd years).
As far as MS goes, I hope sooner (rather than later) a viable alternative pops up. Mac is finally starting down that path, but has a lot of ground to cover since their missteps in the late 80′s and 90′s. MS needs competition to be good. They suck a little more each year. The more they try to make PC’s into Macs, the more they suck.
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Yeah, doggie! Say it!
Both Solidworks 08 and Vista was not that bad,
in case of Vista,it is far more stabe and secure than xp.i like the new integrated search,Firewall (absolutly eliminates the need for a third party firewalls),built from the ground task scheduler (much more advanced than xp,able to start task with system events), resource monitor and many more administraive functions,image gallery,…
with 08, at least i have a tabbed toolbar which frees some space.
Solidworks has really done something wrong with a new release that has a low adoption rate. I just hate it when software has plenty of bugs but the new release does not address bugs and just adds bloated features. Of course the new version needs more memory and a faster processor. Maybe it will soon require a new operating system, and more memory, more processors, more exotic graphics card. They must think that we secretly want to spend a bunch ot time and effort to maintain a platform to run upgraded software that is worse than before.