It should be no secret to my readers that I despise marketing departments I have been exposed to. Primarily the Siemens/UGS/Solid Edge and Autodesk flavors. Monuments to disconnected reality these marketing babble speaking jargon warrior paragons espouse their nonsense and never seem to realize how shallow and patronizing they are to real customers. The ones that know from experience what is under the hood.
The latest entrant to a select group of company shills would be Richard Runnels with Siemens. Now Richard may be a nice guy in person but his job description means he writes and puts lipstick on whatever his overlords tell him to. They pay him to be a reality distortion machine and he has to produce. Corporate executives for some reason feel compelled to pretend their customers are pretty dense and patronize them on a regular basis. I think the average CAD CAM software user is above average in intelligence so the disparity between what is said and what is done by big shots does not go un-noticed.
Have a walk through corporate verbiage and read the sad tale for yourself. Siemens has been on a mission for some time to set back the potential for Solid Edge sales. It is perceived as a threat to NX sales and the NX side has won the war against SE for all intents and purposes. The stripping away of the SE community which was renewed under Karsten Newbury and Don Cooper has come full circle back to the rotten days SE languished under EDS then UGS auspices. Yep the Red Headed Step Child is back.
But as Richard says we spoke and they listened. It is what marketing people do after all. Put lipstick on pigs and pretend what is up is really down or vice versa. I will say there are a number of events and based upon this perhaps it might do some good for sales overall IF it is promoted and a concerted effort is made to get the word out in a timely fashion. Once again it appears that it will be the VAR’s who will have to assure this as Siemens’ marketing will have to have way to many meetings to decide numerous important things and will run out of time before the events arrive to do anything. Well besides futile and useless meetings that is.
It saddens me however that Siemens never really got behind this University concept and the only major SE event will be killed off. Back to the days of 36 actual SE attendees at PLM World as I personally saw in 2009 I suppose.
It would be nice some day if these people would just be honest and say “we decided not to do this anymore because it is not important to us and we don’t care if it is to you”. Instead you get another talking head marketing expert putting smiley faces on bad things. The real sad thing here is that SE is genuinely going to have some real significant improvements this year. And Autodesk is doing what they can to shove customers away. But SE Red Head tradition rears its ugly head again and Mr Richard et al will see to it the anonymizer is the only PR thing for SE that will work well.
In any case there will be a number of local one day events where you can go and I recommend you do so if you have any interest in SE.
I use SE for my daily modeller. I have had access to Inventor Pro for two plus years now and it is only used to place parts for HSM. If you are an Inventor user and unhappy about the way they are going may I suggest in spite of Siemens marketing you attend one of these events and meet actual users. They are the ones who can give you the real lowdown on how it works for them in the real world. I am a big fan of SE and believe it to be the best mid range MCAD program out there.
Tip of the hat to Cincinnati Matt for the Community College idea.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 