Talking with Madison today from Ally PLM and I have reconsidered some things here regarding Geometric. Now I do not regret for one minute the things I have written this past couple of months for I believe it was material in spurring Geometric into doing some long overdue things. It is kind of funny in a way. Here is Madison being a peacemaker and bridge builder between a company that does not understand why they are being criticized so severely and a customer advocate that wonders how they could be deaf for so long. But I wish her luck and won’t stand in the way of potential progress for after all it is all I ever wanted anyway.
As an aside here. Is it any wonder why so many of the private CADCAM bloggers have dropped off the radar these last few years? There are darned few that are not employed by VAR’s or software companies now. It is a reflection I think of what users think is the regard software companies have towards their customers. In order for you to want to write about something when you are not paid to do so you have to be motivated or inspired by what is going on. For better or worse. Inspiring stories quite frankly are few and far between today and come chiefly from Autodesk from this writers perspective. Solid Edge is the best MCAD tool for me and it just works superbly without problems but it is dominated by a bureaucratically straight-jacketed company I don’t much care for. (Autodesk, please buy SE to eh!) No inspiration no posts no reasons to get excited anymore with visions of dynamic futures and epochal changes in capabilities. That door has closed for them for now. I hear rumors of exciting things for 2015 for SE but I will believe it when I see it since I can’t see Siemens getting behind SE in any big way.
I also hope this CW4SE episode can help to create an oversight agency within Siemens/SE to make sure things never get to this point with any integration partner again. At least there is a guy actively working on this there now. The question I have here though was someone asleep at the wheel regarding partners or were the budgets dictated by Siemens responsible? Or was it the idea held by the CAD guys at SE that they were the only thing of importance and all else was an interruption? I know there was resentment towards things like CAM integration that took away talent from purely SE CAD things and diverted it towards integration. It is strange to me how this mindset even exists in a software tool that is supposed to be a PART of a unified manufacturing system. Not separate, above or beyond it. I just don’t understand and since I am not in the planning meetings I can only conjecture based upon what I see and hear and regard in the actions or lack thereof companies take.
It appears there may be at this time a desire from Geometric to make things better and hopefully right over time. And that they perhaps now understand that time is not forever and at their convenience and the customer will get what they get when they get it. We do have choices and it is our money after all not theirs so earn it. Per my promise to Madison and in hopes there will really be change in Geometric’s historical MO I am going to pull down my unhappy customer posts.
This past year has been one of serious disappointments with the Siemens side of SE and CW4SE. It is my hope for the New Year that 2015 will not be a repeat of 2014. Certainly with SE once you regard it as just another tool with poor marketing that just happens to be best in class at what it does there is a lot of good stuff here to use. I expect to use SE for the rest of my career and don’t see anything on the horizon that can beat it for what I do for a living. You 3D swoopy curvy modeller guys may disagree but for my food manufacturing equipment design it is the cats meow.
Perhaps Geometric will have turned a corner here going into 2015 and make things work right. It is a lot more fun to write about good things and let us keep out fingers crossed.
In the mean time because of complications I have also become a customer of Inventor HSM. Life goes on and choices have to be made as I have done. But I still would like to see it all work out for the SE CW4SE integration even if I do in time elect to move completely on. The idea of a complete manufacturing system within a common integrated software backbone is so important and it would be nice to see the first one for SE actually work out.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 
Blogs are becoming unreliable, kind of like CAD software. My thoughtful comment vanished after pressing post comment. I am sure that WordPress will be right on it.
Hi Rick, you have been sent my email so one way or another I will get you on here. The whole internet seems broken to me and some sites work well with Firefox and others with IE. I do WordPress and EBay with Firefox as it works where IE won’t and Siemens works better with IE. But you are right, it seems as though reliability is down across the board in many ways.