You can blame Ralph for this post as my jaw dropped when I read the following in his latest ezine. But before we start in here is a picture from a secret spy camera somewhere in a Siemens parking lot as a Marketing or PR guy is driving in. It is kind of hard to tell which department he belonged to as they all look the same.
Here is Ralph’s latest. A great read all the time on many topics and you should subscribe.
http://www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-820.htm.
“Re: What I Learned at Solid Edge University 2014
Thanks for attending Solid Edge University and publishing your article in upfront.eZine #819. I work in marketing for Solid Edge and just a couple of comments from me that may be of interest to your readers:
The Solid Edge Apps web page that you refer to is a new resource to help our customers find the most commonly used Apps by category (Analysis, Manufacturing, Standard Parts etc.). We are adding the most popular apps into this area right now and you are correct that there are just 30 or so listed here right now. At the bottom of the page is a link to “All Solid Edge Partners” and it is here that you can search on the 500+ technology partners whose software works with Solid Edge.
Great that you were impressed by the Create Sheet Metal from 3D Part capability, and we would agree we should have featured this more prominently in our marketing materials for Solid Edge ST7. It is featured in the “Fast and Flexible Part Modeling” video on our Solid Edge ST7 web page.
– David Chadwick, mainstream eng global product marketing
Siemens Industry Software Limited”
SO Dave, this Dave the user and not the marketing whiz-bang, what did you learn today reading the above quote from the esteemed Mr Chadwick? What I learn is that once again these people can’t be bothered to do their jobs. There are a number of reasons for this which I know but will not go into at this time. Any one of these, or all of these or maybe even some new monumentally idiotic reasons I may not be aware of apply here.
Suffice it to say that once again with a known convention date that presents a once a year opportunity better than any other by far to promote SE these guys fail to fix yet another website problem. LOOK HERE at all of our partners, 500+ of them!! Don’t you love it when you go there as Ralph did and see 30 some listed right now? And of course right now is heading into two weeks after what should have been a hard must make it deadline. I wonder how many of these are here from last year first off and secondly if they were at all worried about this there would have been more than 30+ even if they could not get them all in there. AND that number would grow rapidly each week until they were all there. Of course I digress because that happens elsewhere and not here in the land of never-ending meetings to decide web page colors. Clearly Mr Chadwick was not worried enough about this to do it in a timely fashion so the year’s best opportunity squandered again. For crying out loud my church just finished a web site and the links work and it is populated quite well and one person did it with a part-time effort in a few weeks. How is it that when Siemens M&PR get ahold of these simple things they never see the light of day?
You guys better wake up and realize that the brand you are making for yourself in the public eye is one of superior product and bungling navel gazing M&PR. Also known as the best software you’ve never heard of. Look people I have a serious question for you. How many times do you have to walk face first into closed doors before you begin to realize that opening the door first gets you farther faster and in much better shape? It will also allow you to take that big red clown ball off of your noses which is another great benefit.
OK I know this is hard for you all to understand but let me spell out why this is important to users who BUY your product. The larger the market share SE has the more we as buyers benefit from increased work that will come our way as a natural and inevitable consequence of growing market share. I said this FIVE YEARS ago and find it nearly impossible to believe I am STILL saying it to people who STILL don’t understand this. Oh, and you guys as a company will make more money too although I guess this must not be too important or else Siemens would be cleaning its dead wood out left and right.
Would one of you with some gonads please reply to this post and explain this situation to me? I want to try to understand this continuation of absolute and I fear deliberate evasion of duty to your customers and corporation to do what they and we have hired you to do. Really, I want to know.
From yet another secret spy camera purportedly in a Siemens M&PR meeting room where important decisions are made.
A rather simple and elegant answer to determining what gets done. The Siemens gray color-neutral darts are labeled with cool to do M&PR stuff and the blindfolded guy whips it to the dart board which is invariably in the upper left quadrant of the selected wall as you face it. The tally guy writes down what makes it according to the points each dart gathers and this sets the agenda for the next meeting where highest scoring dart gets forwarded to a subcommittee for further study. This happens again for all the other darts until they all make it through the vetting process. Any darts that miss completely are discussed in another series of scheduled meetings where darts are labeled accordingly and launched with great hopes and expectations that these will graduate to the points category thus proving to themselves the great progress being made.
I, as Ralph did, read that “500+ apps” bit of nonsense on one of the press releases and then immediately went and counted all the links myself. It was an easily refutable piece of bluster that should never have been written- though it has been edited to a more appropriate (though still misleading) ‘500+ partners’ in some places.
I also wondered why the ‘flatten anything’ ability didn’t get more press…BUT there were a bunch of high visibility additions such as Keyshot and 3D sketching that, if I took off my small sheet metal shop hat and put on my Solid Edge marketing hat, probably got the attention they deserved. By the way, that’d be the professional marketing hat- not the multicolored one with the spinner and squirting flower. 😉
Hi Dylan,
I think it is a good release from all I see. Do you think we could get the Siemens guys to wear the professional marketing hats someday? Amusing that this marketing guy wonders why flatten did not get more press.
Having been hands-on with it, I can say that it is the little things that really made this one awesome for me. Improvements to the sketch environment, keypoint snapping, visual indicators, and cursor are all totally under the radar in the marketing releases, but they are SO good it makes it painful to go back to ST6 sketching, which immediately looks like a time capsule in comparison. It struck me in the same way as how the 2005-2009 ‘retro’ Mustangs, and especially their headlights, all instantly looked like silly children’s toys the moment the new body style debuted in 2010.
These little things are not so little when they involve actions you have to take many times a day. I have wished at times for yearly releases to focus on things like usability over cool new stuff for this reason.
In regards to the flatten….I’m one of the guys, along with Sean, to name another, who has now for years been answering the question “How do I flatten this multiple curve surface?” with “Do it in Rhino”, so the significance of this feature does not escape me. I’ve actually run it through some simple trials with some shallow-draw parts and it worked very well with the addition of some common sense…but looking forward to pushing this and seeing what can be added/improved!
Flatten was one of the things that took some SE customers over to NX where it did work far more often. Keep me posted on this as I am interested.