Tag Archives: solidworks

We Don’t Care If You Like Our Stuff

Posted on May 29, 2018 | 2 comments

Today I am reminded again just how remarkably tone deaf leaders of companies can be. This morning I get a “hurry it’s your last chance” email regarding PLM Connection and the Solid Edge University which resides in it this year. Now I don’t know if you can attend this marvelous event just for the SE agenda but I suspect not.

How Could You Refuse This Deal?

I like the limited seats comment too since I have experience that says it will literally be one room out of the dozens set up for the UGS side. So yes severely limited is the literal truth.

Now before you get all over excited and are frantically scrambling for your credit card in a frenzied burst of SE enthusiasm calm down and see what you will get for your dough.

The Whole Chillona

I completely resent the cavalier way Siemens has decided to treat it’s SE users and to clearly indicate once again that the red headed step child is someone they hide from themselves and the public. At PLM Connection they will sit in the isolation chamber down the hall in a room where it is grudgingly admitted that yes the DNA says Siemens but darned if we are happy about it. You UGS people disgust me with the way you scheme and maneuver to hide a product you are afraid of competing against. Unable to compete based purely on capabilities and pricing they sabotage the SE ecosystem and starve it into submission.

Can you believe they have the unmitigated gall to charge you full three day event price for one day of stuff that is pretty well useless to most SE users? I sure can and remember with extreme disgust dealing with these idiots and the PLM World mindset. They are God and you are the distasteful stuff on their shoe sole to be wiped off when hopefully no one is looking to observe this.

I do have to say though that in fairness to myopic management they have some justification for sending their Grindstaff smother SE henchman John Miller over there to do a job on SE and the University. As users the SE people were given a real chance under Karsten Newbury and Don Cooper to show the world and UGS/Siemens that there was interest in the SE University. For some years running users as a percentage that showed up was pitifully small and to be honest if I were over deciding to do these things and not dedicated to the idea of building a community I would kill it off to. Either the SE user base is FAR smaller than I think or for some reason the ones willing to show up percentage wise are far smaller than say SW or Autodesk.

In any case you reap what you sew and I blame primarily the UGS Cabal but users that don’t support anything should not expect to get anything either and by repeated years of no shows the excuse needed by Siemens UGS Cabal (Have you noticed I love saying this? These contemptible people deserve to get raked over the coals at every opportunity and since this is my blog I do so.) I suppose SE users are back to the 36 people total attendance at the premier Siemens software event. A towering monument to Siemens/UGS corporate stupidity that excels in back room skullduggery. I have to wonder how things could be if armies of corporate drones were not solely devoted to CYA and turf protection and useless make work meetings to plan the next meeting spent this same time and energy improving the product and growing market share to where it could and should be.

I notice with interest that Dassault has finally admitted that even though they would love for you to buy into their overpriced over complicated Catia ecosystem there are many millions of CAD users that have A, no interest in the cloud and B, no interest in spending tons of money for un-needed complexity that does nothing but make their lives more expensive, less productive and operates levels of complexity way beyond what they need CAD for. So this year they have reversed years of we don’t like you and want you to leave SolidWorks by agreeing to spend four times the money and buy what we like and not what you like. They have committed to the idea that SW users are a force to be reckoned with and respected and desired. Now time will tell the real tale but today they say this.

Siemens/UGS (you know what they are ;D) has never to my knowledge given more than passing notice of the cloud only as an ecosystem you would have to work in nor have they seriously thought about ending perpetual seats as far as I know. Unlike the complete fool Andrew Anagnost at Autodesk. Who in combination with hostile board members deciding that users are not customers but rather they are chattel to be extorted in ever greater ways and the concern is purely for how to forcibly raise more money from existing customers. The idea of mutual benefit as a business model has ended with these people but I can honestly say that is not true with SE since it is powerful design software that is improving and is still rent or buy and a darned good tool in the tool box in spite of the, well you know who.

But anyway the last five years have been interesting and from this software customers viewpoint a real exercise in corporate disconnect from the people who happen to pay their bills and salaries. It is not your corporate investors nor is it the stock market and mutual funds. It is people like me and companies large and small that hired you to make THEM more productive and they do not believe they exist just to make YOU fat and happy. Autodesk is learning right now what happens when you jettison this basic business principle going into their 13th straight down income quarter in a row.

May I recommend to you the best software you have never heard of? You won’t hear this from Siemens but I can tell you after years of use it is the best mid range MCAD deal out there. If you are silly enough to still be agonizing over what to do with Inventor and don’t want to be forced into Fusion360 I can say SE is a fine place to go. Being a Red Headed step child is not so bad when I think of productivity and this SE excels at.

As a snarky aside here I do have to admire Andrew Anagnosts ability to pare things down. He has eliminated 23% of Autodesks staff. He has eliminated profit margins and he is eliminating gobs of customers. One of his current fascinations is replacing people with artificial intelligence. I ponder the idea of considering his job and if Artifice could be replaced with Artificial. I mean could a robot do any more harm than he is? Plus they could hire an H1-B dude to program the new boss and what a wonderful world this could be.

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You Own Solid Edge And Don’t Use Synchronous???

Posted on October 18, 2017 | 2 comments

Just some random comments today derived from the Huntsville SEU I attended on 10-17-17.

One of the things I have pondered for years is why the user community for SE is so small. One of the larger CAD bloggers and I have discussed this and he say’s that SE’s market share is far smaller than they want to admit to. Who knows since getting a straight answer on many things from a software company is an exercise in futility and if you do get a real answer often you are forbidden to talk about it.

As I was leaving yesterday I thought about this and for the first time I think I have a partial answer to tiny community size. I like many SE customers came here on a search for capable software. Unlike SW where there was a huge community of advocates willing to sway you SE had to draw the attention of serious lookers purely by capabilities. Yes SW is of course capable. But for me when I was shopping I went to two SW events here in Nashville to kick their tires. Both times it just seemed clunky and counter intuitive to me and the sales team was offensive. Big room full of people both times though. I ran across SE while searching for best in class sheet metal and kept running across comments about SE. They would say things like not well-known or not as popular as SW but had a great sheet metal reputation.

So in spite of all the cajoling to adopt the market share leader and adopt the program with the most employment possibilities I was looking for what would best benefit this one man basically closed ecosystem shop. What would work the best and the easiest for what I did was my question. This is a common thread with many SE users. We investigated and made software choices independently and not from outside influence’s like peer pressure and aggressive sales shmucks. We came here not because of community but because of capabilities and therefore community was not important.

UGS and Siemens have not helped in this area much and the proof this worked for SW did not mean anything to them since they did not care much what SE did as long as it never threatened to many NX sales. Therefore no community for SE to speak of today because it has to start with an aggressive corporate plan that is adhered to for the requisite number of sustained multiple years of effort and effective planning and promotion. Never has happened although a serious attempt at this was made under Karsten Newbury and Don Cooper and subsequently shot down by the UGS cabal.

Out of 32 attendees in Huntsville I asked the question once again of how many were using Synchronous Tech. Only seven held up their hands. To me this is just mind-boggling and the single greatest differentiator between SE and the other major MCAD programs IS ST. I did not bother to ask why because I have heard this before and the answers basically boiled down to we did not have time to learn to use it. Did not have time to learn once something that would save you time from then on is how I see it but what do I know? To me the very first time I saw Synchronous in use it was like a whole new world of freedom opened up right before my eyes. I hated the shackles of traditional history based modeling and ST was like hey, I can throw away the ball and chain now and start walking without dragging this huge weight behind me. I had no idea this capability existed but when I saw it I knew it was for me.

When I first started in with CNC milling I found out quickly you needed a CAM program. You then needed a way to feed the CAM program. The choice was working off of 2D like many were doing around here or embrace the future right away with a 3D modeller and a CAM program working off of surfaces or edges. To me it was a no brainer and I went straight into 3D modeling and never did anything like Autocad. I regard the power of ST that resides inside of SE to be just as fundamentally empowering as that choice for 3D for CAM was. I for the life of me can’t grasp why anyone would not adopt ST for at least a significant portion of their work. This is a failure of SE and UGS and Siemens to clearly demonstrate and educate users to the power of ST to existing customers which then in turn become ST advocates and create new customers for SE, UGS and Siemens.

I guess that my curiosity level is far higher than the average employed user. They do not want to be bothered adding yet another bit of work to the mix that they will not get paid extra for I suppose and so they stay with the familiar and don’t learn the new. I can kind of understand this mindset since production still has to be met and learning new things can initially be quite time-consuming. Owner’s or employers see work is still done according to traditional expected levels of productivity never understanding how much better it could be. Siemens UGS etal have not bothered to demonstrate this in any compelling way so they might become interested and so the single most powerful productivity tool remains in the bottom of the tool box where it never sees the light of day. Here we are some four years after I first asked this question of a group of users and nothing has changed.

Anyway have a good one everybody.

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So, You Say You’ve Never Tried Solid Edge Synchronous?

Posted on July 17, 2017 | Leave a comment

So how do YOU want to work?

So choose, hammer or nailer.

 

Wandering through the SE forum today and ran across this. https://community.plm.automation.siemens.com/t5/Solid-Edge-Forum/10-Cool-Reasons-to-Start-Using-Synchronous-Technology-Today/td-p/420431

While I think the presentation is a somewhat corny and the items covered a bit rudimentary it got me to thinking of a few things regarding Synchronous Tech or ST as it is better known. For those of you who are not familiar with it ST is the very best direct editing method out there in the mid range MCAD program world. I forget that many have no idea of the power there and since I have been using ST since ST1 this power has become commonplace to me. I am accustomed to doing this and quite frankly any other way has become alien to me. I came here because I wanted to be freed from the shackles of straight parametric modeling and this is the simple part that opened my eyes just before the release of ST1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bk5-1sZ6cY

Using a straight parametric modeler and having no idea direct editing even existed back in 2008 seeing this way of working was a real epiphany. It was like a whole world of possibility opened up before me even though I did not know specifically how it was going to do so. In truth it was like the very first time I was shown how to make crude forming jigs for bending rods to make trusses with. It opened the door for all kinds of things that were far more complicated but based on the same principle. Both put power in my hands. Admittedly it was not until ST4 that the program conquered some serious problems but since then any owner of SE was crazy to not work with ST.

When I bought into Autodesk’s Inventor Pro HSM it was strictly for the machining program. CAMWorks for SE was a nightmare and I wanted shed of cumbersome tool path creation for simple intuitive and powerful which HSM was. Limited in what it would do but a world beater in three axis milling it was for me. But this machining program came with the CAD equivalent of CW4SE called Inventor and it was clunky and convoluted and difficult to use. So much so that after a few fairly serious attempts I just quit trying. After all why would I inflict such a cumbersome work flow on myself if it was not essential to do so.

In time this led to a conversation I had with an Inventor guru. He was asking me why I had bad things to say about Inventor when it had direct editing too. Which it did to some degree and I guess if it was all new to you it seemed just peachy. This was his problem and I had to explain to him that while both SE and Inventor had forms of direct editing SE’s was far more because of the intelligence that came with it, the range of things that could be done with it and the ability to work with imported files from other CAD programs when imported. I could work with them just like it was a native file. Inventor direct editing is just as sucky as their convoluted user interface and work flow. He was not interested in viewing the numerous ST videos on this topic would be my guess because after telling him about ST he never got back to me.

Running a user group meeting a few years back in Huntsville there was an SE dude there who was giving a demo. At the end of the demo two shocking things were made evident. One was that when asked who was using ST out of a room of SE users only one raised his hand. There were also three UAH students there and they were very intrigued with the idea of ST which their college instructor did not cover. Really? College students being taught SE but not SE ST? A college level course being taught to students who were theoretically being prepared to work in the real world and it did not incorporate ST? The professional users in attendance basically said they were all to busy to learn the new way. To busy to learn how to save time and become more efficient from that day on was my interpretation of the end result of their mindsets. Insofar as the college professor at UAH all I can say is tenured laziness bordering on incompetence since he could not be bothered to learn and teach the most powerful tool in the SE tool box. His students were shocked this ST thing existed and I was shocked they did not know.

To this day since I have been accustomed to the power of ST for so long, indeed it is the only way I have worked for years now, I forget that many for whatever reason have no idea what they are missing.

SE requires a different mindset to be successful and the biggest hurdle I have seen is people have to think in terms of manipulating faces or face sets rather than driving every single thing and edit with dimension driven sketches and planes. It was amusing to see die-hard parametric SE users slowly assimilated into the ST world. It was hard for some to let go of the old way which after all did work but when they were curious enough to finally try they to a man became advocates for ST.

So why if you are an SE user have you not made a concerted effort to learn to work with the greater efficiency ST brings to the table? Why would you prefer a hammer when on the shelf next to it is an air nailer and you already own the air compressor? For those in the Autodesk perpetual seat doomed to future slavery world and the apparent end of serious user innovations and improvements, why would you not be curious enough to at least try SE ST? Sold which ever way you want to buy it without Autodesk type belligerent threats to your future and the imports of your files will be far easier than you think. Indeed working with them when you get them into SE will be a true eye opener. I have had access to both programs the last three years now and I can assure you that once you leap over the learning hurdle any new program has Inventor will acquire its rightful place as the clunky offering from a company that has no regard for you as a user and customer. I chose not to further learn Inventor when it became apparent that it was inefficient since I had the luxury of having SE to work from. You give SE a serious try and I bet that will be your conclusion too.

I guess I could throw SW into this mix also but my experience with SW is VERY limited and I am commenting today on two programs I have owned and used in daily production. I suspect from comments received from past SW users and some companies that were SE users but bought out by SW using outfits and hating the new-found inefficiency SW is not as good for general MCAD. I believe from users complaints models can and will blow up with SW whereas in SE ST a proposed edit simply will not work rather than blowing it all up.

In any case SE ST deserves a long hard look from anyone who wants to become more efficient and profitable. At the very least look online for videos and have a look at what others are doing and think hard about how you have to work.

 

7-18 Update  From Matt’s blog today I find this.

“Synchronous Technology for History-Based Users

This was a book on Solid Edge, published using ST8 (~2016). It is 10 chapters long, in eBook (pdf) format with movies and sample files. It is free and downloadable, although you may have to give up some information to get it. You may find the book published under a different title. The book is meant to help users of history-based CAD understand why Synchronous Technology is a tool you will want to have.”

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The End Of The Road In Sight

Posted on February 14, 2017 | 6 comments

For those of you who have followed me for some years now here is an update on the future of this blog.

I received the two final codes today on my Hass VF4 and TL-2. Paid them off early and will type in the final numbers today when I finish this post.

The frequency of posts has dwindled significantly over the last year. Good things to talk about are far outweighed by the bad these last few years. HSM was the ray of light in a world getting darker until I decided it too was going to become a victim of corporate suit types whose interests differ from what I as a customer expect.

Bear with me here as these seemingly disjointed comments will lead somewhere.

I will be going to Dayton Ohio for a short job soon and hope to visit one of the old time SE users. He has been using Solid Edge 20 since it came out nine or ten years ago and has not felt compelled to move forwards. The shop has current technology CNC Laser and bending capabilities and they do just fine with software this old. They did not move forward because what they needed was not being incorporated into SE.  Now I don’t know exactly why but this guy is a sheet metal wizard so there are reasons. Personally I think the pinnacle of rapid improvement in SE was achieved at ST6 or 7 but then I am a complete direct editing guy and still to this day SE can’t do in Synchronous Sheet Metal all the things the Parametric side can.

So whats your point Dave? It simply is this. When you reach a certain level of competency in your software and when you have certain levels of capabilities locked into your physical plant what more do you need to function for many years?

HSM brought Adaptive to the world as the best then and now high speed tool path. I bought my mill with this in mind. It was the most profound advancement in milling since I have been cutting chips some fifteen years ago. But I do not see anything coming down the pike like this anytime soon. Nor do I need to acquire a faster spindle or IPM cut speed considering the cost to do so. Like many shops Fieldweld is not a production facility where the very last second saved is critical. So truthfully I can cut with current permanent seat software that will push my machinery to it’s fullest capabilities and never spend another dime.

Unlike subscription fools I can do this for the next ten years or so and NOT SPEND ANOTHER DIME. I can’t be made into a hostage nor can I be forced to work online. I have all I need.

Now this of course gripes the heck out of software companies like Solid Edge and Autodesk. Where for some reason I am to give money to them each year just because they have bills to pay. Where in Autodesk’s case they now want it to be involuntary and forced forever if you foolishly go there. The problem for both companies begins with the lack of desire to hire and fund enough quality coding to advance the product in ways that benefit customers enough so they WANT to spend more money with them. SE still offers permanent seats but incremental improvements and not ground breaking ones. I still recommend you get SE if you don’t have it. For those who have been here for some time though where is the new cheese?

Why should I pay for software that does not bring improvements to MY bottom line. I don’t give a rats hooty about SE or Autodesk’s bottom line. I care that what they have to sell benefits ME and compels me to spend money with them because my profits will increase doing so. These days appear to be over and I don’t expect Autodesk to do anything with HSM this year that will compel me to renew next year. I wish they would but don’t think it will happen.

As far as I am concerned if these software companies stop bringing new benefits to the table I need I don’t care if they survive or not. The answer to future innovation in Autodesk’s case seems to be to do away with big chunks of it by the creation of a chattel subscription model which I most earnestly hope fails in a spectacular way. It is a rotten and evil way to make money.

So, I think about all this and think about what I need and what interests me. Do I want to blog about companies that offend me with bad business models and a dearth of interesting innovations to talk about? Do I want to make videos that demonstrate software I no longer support financially for good reasons? The departure of Carl Bass from Autodesk does not help either and I think it is bad news.

Is it any wonder why private CAD and CAM bloggers have dropped like flies these last five years or so? We do this because we like the software and want to talk about it and the world it works in. A form of insanity I suppose to get this wrapped up in a tool but many of us chose to do so in years gone by. One can be offended for only so long before the love of the tool goes away and that is where I find myself today. In complete agreement with the many bloggers I used to read who quit blogging because they got tired of being offended and wondering when my time will come to. At this rate it won’t be to much longer.

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Solid Edge Free For New Startup Companies

Posted on November 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

One of the things I figured that Autodesk would force on the market place is a change in how people were exposed to software. Solid Edge has had a 45 day trial for SE now for some time. However we all know that up to a half a year is more like it to really really find out if a software design program is a good and the right fit for a company in many cases. I think there are exceptions to that at times. Direct editing was such for me years ago when I first saw it in action. A whole new world of freedom from parametric chains was there before my eyes and it took about a half an hour to make the choice for SE.

As a sole proprietor though and the guy who was responsible for it all I could make that choice. For many companies it is not so simple.

I have always advocated for outfits with multiple seats  to get a power user on to SE and see what it could do while leaving the rest of the design department to remain on the primary program. Sadly I have also had to recommend this to companies who have SE but do not model in Synchronous. The very idea that such a powerful tool exists for customers and most blithely ignore it has been a pet peeve for some time.

One of the truly forward-looking things Autodesk has done is making software available to startups and students for free. A whole army of present and future trained users is being created and a ton of startup companies are being accustomed to the usage of Autodesk products because of this. Yes I believe as does Autodesk this will create more market share for them over time.

You don’t think this is important? Have you read the history of Solid Works? Have you ever tried to get an SW user to switch to something else? SW did not have to offer free because at the time they were the first kid on the block to do outreach and community well and had a cutting edge product to boot. Times have changed and now it takes more.

Autodesk has been working on all aspects of this with students and startups and community in the only way left in today’s market which is free to try.

Solid Edge Free to New Start-Up Companies

 

Solid Edge the best software you hardly ever heard of is now entering into this area although you would never know it based on the buffoons in Marketing and Publicity over there. Announced at the SEU2016 convention and subsequently followed up with nothing.

While there are restrictions and some one year time frames you can try it for a year under certain circumstances. I wish they had made the trials as all-encompassing as Autodesk has done but since they haven’t I am pleased they are at least doing this much.

Solid Edge is much better than Inventor in my opinion. It is also better than SW except in some complex modeling areas. Their sheet metal is the best and so is direct editing both of which are mid range MCAD leaders in todays CAD world. Also and very important. My favorite hate it topics are cloud and forced subscription design (and machining) software. SE suffers from neither of these great big no-no’s. With the demise of permanent seats for Inventor Pro HSM this is a critical plus for SE.

It’s just a shame that CAMWorks for SE turned out to be such a dog and expensive to boot. This is the real fly in the oinyment with SE right now and it will cost you $$$ to get started and for SE Classic and CW4SE 3 axis mill and Volumill and 2 axis lathe your cost per year would be more than the subscription fee for Inventor Pro HSM. You can subscribe to SE by the way but not CW4SE as far as I know. I don’t talk much about SE subs because I would never do it and don’t recommend you do it either. You need to OWN it.

Yes you would have a permanent seat and could step off at any time as I have done and still work for years. But you add up the appx $20,000.00 to get the above package, assuming no discount that is the price by the way, and yearly fees more than the whole subs shooting match from Inv Pro HSM and it is another story.

This is another area where Autodesk will make its presence felt with other companies soon in another way. What is the cost of ownership + yearly costs? If you are committed to renewing each year anyway and you can stomach Inventor the subscription model at Autodesk is much cheaper and has that Lovely HSM attached to it. SE has that dog barker CW4SE and much higher total costs to use.

How much value new companies or companies considering changing software will place on the security of permanent seats VS startup and continuing costs remains to be seen.  For existing users of other software Autodesks subs model is not a good deal for sure since the heavy expenses have already been spent. It costs these guys no more or little more to continue with their permanent licenses compared to Autodesks subs and who would be crazy enough to jettison their permanent seats in this case?

I believe though that as Fusion 360 becomes better, and it will, the cost there of $1,500.00 per year for CAD and CAM everything will force the rest of the market to drop prices considerably or be resigned to losing market share until they become in many areas irrelevant. I intend to find out later this year for myself and what I have been told is that Fusion360 is much closer to the way I am used to working in SE than Inventor is.

At the very least and under limited conditions SE is taking a swing at the plate and if you are shopping they deserve your consideration. They are the best mid range MCAD modeller for my world and may well be for yours to. While I am not a current customer of SE it is the only program I use for modeling and I fully recommend it.

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People WAKE UP! The Cloud Will Kill Your Company.

Posted on November 2, 2016 | 11 comments

I am watching all the hacking going on with Crooked Hillary’s evil empire and the Washington Swamp being exposed. One would think career criminals of her stature and decades of experience would be clever enough to hide the evidence or communicate in secure ways. But this got me to thinking of other things today. Before you go further though something completely entertaining. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/11/02/bleachbit-mocks-hillary-clintons-cloth-or-something-server-gaffe/

Data that needs to be secure can only be kept secure when it does not go online. There is no doubt about this and anyone who is serious about it knows this to be true. Yes I know the human element can steal data as an inside job but that gets to be much harder to do and the perps run serious risks. Online is a shopping cart for bad guys and I would guess most never face any jail time or risk when doing so. There are a few things I want you to Google here. Try Googling “Chinese build stealth fighter with stolen info”. Now try “Dell made in China server boards have back doors”.  Now try “Huawei backdoor proof”.  Then go to “US military bans Lenovo”.

I know you have an inquiring mind or else you would not be here reading this post. So I want you to go and do some research for yourself to the best of your ability and tell me what you come up with regarding the jeopardy of online exposure to intellectual property. That silly stuff that just happens to make your livelihood  and your companies profits possible.

I want to be on record as stating that I see no way for a company that forces you to work online with a CAD or CAM program as being interested in your security. It is impossible for them to guarantee this and indeed they will not. Read the T&C for anything that forces you online from server farms to your favorite software. Tell me what you see. Do it with your own eyes and don’t accept the words of marketing or corporate officials who have a vested interest in you not knowing how bad it really is.

If you are silly enough to be spoon fed “online is secure” falsehoods and subject your future to it you deserve what you get. For those with a bit more sense it is high time to start looking into doing things in a secure way and make the companies you deal with either keep you off the cloud to work or guarantee your safety and cover any provable damages you may well incur because of what they made you do as a condition of software usage.

If they don’t isn’t it high time you give your money and future to a company that understands your future is more valuable to you than their’s is?

 

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Autodesk And The Future

Posted on September 22, 2016 | 4 comments

Last week at IMTS it was my privilege to attend the Customer Advisory Board for primarily Autodesk CAM products namely HSM all flavors and Fusion 360 the same. Delcam lives in a bit of a different world and hardly anything regarding them came up and I don’t recall an actual current Delcam user there.

I took three pages of notes on things I found relevant or interesting and still have not settled upon how to word what I saw and heard. The meeting gave me pause though and I find myself rethinking what the future holds and why for CAD and CAM. This will take three posts so bear with me and read them all. If you have not figured it out yet I am not a Twitter type individual and I believe many things can’t be covered in a few paragraphs unless you wish to do so superficially. I want to know and understand and I assume you do too.

There is a dividing set of paths regarding industrial software coming up and two directions people will take. The first which is where I reside and intend to stay is permanent seats for the sake of user control and security. About security. I heard the oft repeated tedious straw man argument that surely since we all do banking and purchasing online, that we trust our money online, the same must hold true with the intellectual property that resides in our designed products. I had to explain yet again why this is most emphatically NOT true. It goes like this.

Every month you receive a consise update on all your online financial activity and you can verify everything that has transpired. If there is fraud and you catch it within a reasonable time frame, and you are given tools to do so with monthly statements, you will be made whole. This week I had to fiddle around with my credit card company while purchasing some stainless steel funnels. Money was going to an unusual place and they wanted to know it was me before they approved the transaction. This happens more than I wish which tells me that financial transactions online are way to porous to threats and this irritation is one of the tools to combat fraud. But you can be made whole here for damages.

Your intellectual property goes away and there is no finite way of auditing what it was and when it was that I know of. Plus what is the value? The cost of R&D plus marketing plus tooling and raw goods and wages and all that stuff needed to bring a product to the end-user. What is the value of something where inspiration may only strike once in a lifetime? Add into that the potential which may not be possible to calculate until there is a history of sales to predict by. Trivial things like Hula Hoops or Pet Rocks sound really stupid until you realize that the person who did it became wealthy off of it. And that in this day and time the Chinese knockoffs can get your product to market quicker than perhaps the original designer could who had to jump through the legal and governmental imposed whatevers whereas the thief in China did not. China is not the only threat they are just by far the worst one.

So once a month or more your financial transactions are comprehensively scrutinized and if you have to go online with your intellectual property it is a crap shoot and the best you can do is best practices to stop hacking. Financial things are covered and not one company involved with online intellectual property from the server farm to the software author your ISP and the internet backbone will do the same for the life blood of your company. Read the EULA or T&C of any one of those outfits and see for yourself. I did and you won’t believe how little faith they have in the online security of the services or products they sell to you.

One of the “exciting” possible future things was the idea of Blue Tooth communication between PC’s, smart phones and CNC equipment. Yes you too can stand in front of your mill with your smart phone and edit your CAM program on the fly and update your workstation file and on and on. Made to appeal to the lazy side of people this wonder would allow instant communication and CAM plan updates blah blah blah. I do that quickly now with my workstation and USB Flash drive which is all of maybe eight feet port to port. We won’t however talk about the little blue tooth receiver planted in the weeds next to your shop that also receives all your lazy man’s time-saving of seconds or a few footsteps. The real-time savings of course accrue to the dude who got your CAD and CAM data and did not have to do anything other than record it. He will surely be excited. But yes I guess the cool factor was there for those who like this sort of stuff.

All that being said though I think that in many ways Fusion 360 and the people who use it are going to be a big influence on the future. Far more profoundly than I thought possible before I met actual users and why they were there and what they were doing with it. I still sit and think of this each day and wonder just how much of what I have taken for granted will reside on one fork of the path and just how much over time will migrate to a way of operation that is wide open to security problems as I see it. Which leads to the question of just how many small guys need that security? That need that security at the permanent seat or full-blown design and machining software price? That would not be able to start a business with really scarce capital unless software was cheap.

The numbers of people who are actually using Fusion360 after downloading and not an aggregate of downloads and not used + downloaded and then used like many report as the valid number is huge. No I am not allowed to state the number we were told but if that number is true it is staggering. I see no reason to doubt it either by the way.  I was impressed with the Autodesk staff present compared to the ones I have met elsewhere with other companies for the no BS blow smoke up your rear attitude they had.

Autodesk is I think the world leader in aiding startups to begin and prosper with relevant software. They generate huge armies of students that know the products and do not have to be trained nearly as much since they have the basics from school. Solid Works (not Dassault’s nightmare Catia however) does this second best but waaaay behind. Siemens UGS has no clue how far behind they are and I think of Solid Edge and how you can’t find anyone to hire 99% of the time already trained. Well maybe only 95% but who cares. Solid Edge is incredible design software compared to Inventor but you would never know it since you can hardly find users of it plus the only integrated CAM product for Solid Edge namely CAMWorks is not user friendly or reasonably priced. UGS and now Siemens are to blame for this. Autodesk lets you use full-blown seats of sadly now subscription only software for FREE if your company makes less than $100,000.00 per year.

The idea that I first had about the Autodesk Juggernaut steamrolling the competition a couple of years ago was most thoroughly reinforced last week.

At IMTS a few things I found of interest. CAMWorks was set up in a smallish sized booth with not much traffic I could see. Gee I wonder why? Mastercam had a TON of sales demo dudes and as far as I could see way to many of them twiddling thumbs. They were quite proud of finally adopting the ribbon bar and organizing their GUI better many years after most of their competition did. The new Mastercam has been well received though by local users I know so this is a good thing for them and their long suffering users. Esprit had a high volume demo stage but I don’t think there were high volume sales being generated. Vero was there and did not look to be a hopping joint. Autodesk had a number of sales guys, maybe to many I don’t know you tell me but they also had lots of constant traffic especially for HSM and Fusion 360. Delcam not so much and since the price of Delcam products can jump up to $80,000.00 at times I can see why not. CAM competitors to HSM and Fusion need to be very afraid for their future.

Haas from what I was told was busy from the beginning to the end. You had to force your way through their booth. I went there Friday afternoon on the last day of the event and was stunned at the traffic. There was no other machine tool builder there I could see with even a reasonable sized crowd to compare with what Haas had. Of course I am a Haas guy and a buy American first guy if possible and love American manufacturing success stories that profile how ingenuity can thrive even in the communist state of California. Hey Haas, get a move on and go to North Carolina where you will be appreciated for the jobs you create instead of being an “enemy of the environment” and “capitalistic swine oppressor of the working class”.  Or Tennessee perhaps near by my shop would also be nice 😉 We like jobs here and no state income tax and we Tennessee Deplorables keep the socialists confined to college campuses and liberal newspapers few will read.

Coming up in the next week or so two related topics. The future with Fusion 360 and why it matters and the culture I found associated with the Autodesk employees I met primarily on the CAM side of course.

 

Update 9-23-16

Speaking of security. So today Yahoo is caught and forced to admit that up to 500,000,000 users may have been compromised. No that number is not a typo. This started in 2014 and is just now public knowledge. Unlike financial monthly statements which provide auditing capabilities the intellectual property of all users at Yahoo was jeopardized  for up to two years and none the wiser except for the crooks and perhaps Yahoo since I assume they must have had some knowledge of bad things going on. If they did not that is even worse and this is a prime example of online peril if you are forced to go there.  Can you picture AWS in this situation with your data? They can and that is why their T&C absolves them of any liability where YOUR stuff is concerned. How I love the cloud, let me count the ways.

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Geometric The CAMWorks Author Bought Out By HCL Technologies Ltd

Posted on April 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

For what it is worth http://schnitgercorp.com/2016/04/04/geometric-acquired-hcl/ will take you to information regarding this. What ramifications this will have for Solid Edge integrated users in particular I don’t know. I suspect the uptake of CW4SE (CAMWorks for Solid Edge) has been very poor for obvious and well documented reasons. Whether the new bosses will consider this market to be worth pursuing any more may well be in doubt. Will new owners change old rules? Are the obligations between Siemens and Geometric/CW4SE binding after the buyout? Would Siemens actually even care if Geometric walks away from this anyway since it takes potential sales of Cam Express away from the UGS remnants inside of the corporate beast?

I have mixed feelings over this. CAMWorks if it could actually implement the underlying premise of its program to be usable without consuming vast quantities of it’s customers time just to set it up and keep it running right each year could have been really revolutionary in it’s power to streamline the effort to create CAM programs. Whether this is even possible to do today with existing math skills available to Geometric I don’t know. It has not been to date. The program as it exists if you try to use it without setting up the Tech Data Base takes far more effort than should be just to get a plan out the door. Either case means huge amounts of time wasted in the end to do the same things as HSM with Autodesk takes to do and time is money.

The parsimonious behavior of the Geometric people I have had to deal with makes me wonder though if a new owner/boss could change things. Is it possible that HCL would be willing to put serious money into making CAMWorks truly be what the glossy promos say it is in reality? Time will tell. It would be nice if this new arrangement would end silly things like provable user problems being dismissed as “being done by design” and “improper cad files creation by users” when it is supposed to be integrated with a program like Solid Edge. Which by design frees you from having to do things a certain way and just right to arrive at a correct and definitive end result. Improper cad design never was defined for us by the way but it was a good alibi. With a new source of potential money comes a new source of potential commitment to acquire the right talent to solve CAMWorks problems if they desire to do so.

The track record of buyouts results for companies I have had to deal with generally have not been good. UGS buys out Sold Edge and the step child thing goes into full swing. Siemens buys out UGS and then after a period of hope the step child thing goes on and in addition to that the gutting of SE developer talent then goes into full swing. Not good for SE users. HSM and Delcam are acquired by Autodesk which I thought was a real part of a master plan to conquer the market for mid range MCAD to be combined with manufacturing in a way no one else was doing. Then come the onerous burden of subscription only for all new customers chattel mindset. VX now ZW3D was bought by the Chinese and has pretty well not advanced much beyond what it was five years ago and indeed compared to it’s competitors is slowly falling behind.

Of course I no longer use CW4SE but I still would like to see it live up to it’s promises as I would like to see any program I have had to deal with achieve. First and foremost I am an end user and what I talk about are things that I have to deal with personally and each affects my bottom line. Unlike 90%+ of all blogs out there with CAD and CAM as a main topic I am not employed or paid by anyone but myself so I am free to write as things unfold in the real world in my shop.

It would be nice to see HCL get behind Geometric and fix both flavors of CAMWorks. I have become very cynical about the trends that software companies are taking towards users though so I doubt much will change. I can see a huge percentage of small and medium size shops soon deciding to just step off the pay each year bandwagon for things that just are not bringing new features that are worth it. Most certainly these permanent seat holders which are I bet 95%+ of existing users are not going to go subscription either. So just like many shops around here we can and will work just fine for the next five years or more and give none of them any more when these companies offend us enough. Unlike Autodesk, Siemens, Dassault and ZW3d most small to medium size businesses can do fine without having to pay anymore to them for some time. I wonder if they can however thrive if WE don’t send them the money they have been accustomed to receiving.

Treat your customers like crap long enough and in time someone a bit wiser will seek them out and take them from you and once gone wont be back.

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Amazon AWS Peril For All Associated CAD CAM Program Customers

Posted on February 11, 2016 | 2 comments

Today I talk about a topic of growing interest as more and more software companies attempt to coerce customers into the online subscription model or online products like Fusion 360 which rely on web server farms to work. What started this was reading a most excellent article by Ralph Grabowski. http://www.upfrontezine.com/2016/02/byol-bring-your-own-license-frame.html is the link and you need to go there and read it before going further.

On 2/7/2016 10:02 PM, Ralph Grabowski wrote:
> As for being worried about the security of storing your firm’s proprietary IP [intellectual property] on remote servers that you do not control, well don’t, says Mr Brown. “Concerns about security and performance are starting to dissolve. Amazon AWS focuses on data center security, and has hundreds of people concerned about security. Contrast that to the efforts in most private data center, and the contrast is dramatic.”

I get so tired of the continual misrepresentation regarding this cloud security. https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ will take you to the current legalese regarding how confident Amazon is regarding complete and total security for customers. Of particular interest.

Section 8.1 gives Amazon the right to turn your stuff over to any regulatory or governmental agency. It reads in part “We may disclose Your Content to provide the Service Offerings to you or any End Users or to comply with any request of a governmental or regulatory body (including subpoenas or court orders).” I assume it also means without subpoenas and court orders is how I read it since any does mean any. So the ChiComs want a look at your intellectual property they can have it. Or a corrupt individual from say the Obama Whitehouse or Justice Department or the Clinton Foundation.
As corrupt as this current version of the federal government is do you honestly think your hard work would never be for sale for a “campaign contribution”?

Section 10 Disclaimers is fun to. We are not responsible for anything of note or worth. You went here to bad so sad.

Section 11 Is exceptionally delicious. The evasion from any repercussions from use of their products and statement of their complete confidence in what they offer in this section is particularly heart warming.

I think Amazon is the largest online server entity of the three mentioned and without going to the other two I bet it is safe to say they do the same T&C thing as Amazon. I don’t know about any of you but section 8.1 is particularly troubling and means anything you have with Amazon can be had for the mere demand of a faceless and unaccountable to you bureaucrat who can then profit one way or another from your property. Do you see any other way to interpret the very words Amazon put there? It means to me any foreign government where Amazon can be legally bound by their edicts has to surrender upon demand your stuff.

It takes big brass balls to stand there and say how safe Amazon AWS is and then hope like crazy that no one reads the fine print. You go there you deserve what happens to you and I can’t think of a bigger wake up call than this cavalier treatment of customers by Amazon AWS T&C. Any CAD or CAM software that demands you use this paradigm to work with deserves to lose you as a customer. Their contempt for everything you have worked hard for except the money they demand from you is staggering.

Question for you Amazon guys. How many of the hundreds of people you have working on security are actually lawyers figuring out how to not make you liable for the ecosystem you have created?

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My How Time Flies!

Posted on February 1, 2016 | 2 comments

I was reading the Novedge aggregation today and was reminded how things can change. It is hard to imagine that at this time four years ago when SW World 2012 was going on it was with amusement I regarded SW user futures. Idiots with Dassault were frothing about the cloud and producing vaporware after vaporware and boasting of those achievements. It was quite amusing. Over on the SE side of things we had rapid product improvements of tremendous utilitarian value. Leadership committed to positive changes and the Universities looked like they were going to grow to big events in short order.

At that time Autodesk was not on my radar and quite frankly I did not seek much information on them. I had seen a few examples of Inventor work and users. Without fail when I took their models and edited them in front of them with SE easier and faster than they could and the old eyes bugging out thing invariably happened. To me Autodesk was a company that did not much register and the chief competitor to #1 which I believed SE deserved was SW not Inventor.

As an aside here. Inventor does not offend me as much as it used to. But I still find way to many complications to simple part creation compared to the purely Synchronous editing and part creation I by choice have been using for some time now. With SE for instance I can draw a circle on the end of a cylinder and when I click on it extrude remove on either side of the circle and darned if I could find a way to do it in Inventor this weekend. It may be there but even if it is why are the methods of doing so hard to find or convoluted? In SE you click on it and straight forward simple intuitive commands pop up. Some of the issue is me not spending the time to learn Inventor and some of it is the weird or counter intuitive way Inventor wants me to work that prevents my desire to want to learn. I have yet to decide which is the bigger problem. HSM which was not configured by the people who decided how Inventor was to work is so well thought out and logical it reminds me of SE on steroids. So I lean towards some cubical guys who wrote code for a living and did not design parts for a living being the problem and not me. Anyway.

So SW World 2016 is here and hardly any bloggers talk about it. The few that do most are employed in one way or another by either Dassault or VAR’s selling Dassault and most of the true independent bloggers who were there because they loved what they used to earn a living with are long gone. People like Devon Sowell and Matt Lombard who were passionate and independent have either quit in disgust or been subsumed into the belly of one beast or another. SW has alienated most of those with passion and love of the product who were willing to talk well of them or indeed at all. SEU comes and goes and the same thing. You who have been readers for years think back about how it used to be and Novedge was cluttered with commentaries from “fanbois”.

Autodesk as far as I can tell is the same and the blogs I have run across so far most are all affiliated with VAR’s or Autodesk. By the way, any blogger who is not or even if you are I guess send me a link to your site and I will have a look. I am searching for sites of interest to provide links to. But my main point is that the whole CAD industry has largely alienated itself from users who were willing to spend uncompensated time on their own to talk about something they felt passionately about. Through stupid things like Dassaults desire to kill this SW thing they can’t quite figure out how to stab to death yet without causing undue harm to themselves. Through the stupidity of Siemens UGS taking SE a killer design product with a future and instead of making it so smashing it into obscurity once again because some political back stabbers from UGS just don’t happen to like it.

Now we have Autodesk trying to force users to be chattel subscribers only and long time passionate CAD CAM users hate that kind of corporate money-grubbing suppression and so this great forward-looking thing Autodesk was a short time ago becomes just another neccessary evil to people who don’t have permanent seats but still have to use these tools to earn a living with. Of the three major software companies out there I ever run into I still hold out hope for Autodesk to change its mind as being the last great hope for forward-looking design build software that would acknowledge that the success of its users is just as important as the authoring company. ProE who? No comment as I just never run into anyone or any file from them. I know they are out there and that is it.

Quite frankly I think the whole face of CAD CAM is changing and not for the better. My last big hope is that somehow Autodesk recants from their book-keeper chattel model and goes back to offering seats and subs for whomever and letting the buyer be the chooser as to what is picked.

Is it not amazing the difference between SW and SE? One company driven by a visionary multi-year plan dedicated to the idea of growth and community and utilizing the two to work together toward a common goal of market domination. Look at SE which has been around just as long and as far as I am concerned is superior for 90%+ of all MCAD over SW. Relegated to sucking hind teat forever by capital venture company flipping people or ignorant individuals afraid of competition who happen to work however for the same corporation. Siemens is too bureaucratically ossified to be able to fight counter productive things so these guys who sabotage overall corporate profitability get away with it. But look at SW! In spite of internal Dassault interference it still reigns supreme and it is a huge testimony to those who drove SW for so long before Parisians decide to “improve” upon it.

Hats off to SW today for the legacy it has. They have earned it and I wish the users the best and hope it all works out to their benefit.

Update today 2-1-16
Entering into the first full week of the end of new permanent seats for Inventor Pro HSM we have an announcement from Dassault SWW 2016 today that there will be no end to permanent seats for SW. I have no idea how this is going to work with HSMWorks for new customers. At this time Delcam products still offer permanent seats and talking to a sales rep last week Autodesk has no intention of ending this. Solid Edge of course is offering permanent seats along with rental, you choose.

Personally speaking I think someone(s) somewhere inside of Autodesk started a policy that will backfire. One has to remember though something I learned first hand when I knew Karsten Newbury. The person in charge does not have free will to just do whatever they want. There are conflicting opinions and agendas and back stabbers and people of authority who will oppose you for whatever reason. I am certain the same is true for Carl Bass. What I am hoping is that this has been allowed to go on because opposing it would have meant fighting a big chunk of mercenary upper management that does not understand buyers can and will buy from others if you force them to. You do NOT own them. This whole chattel serfdom thing is not the same philosophy I perceive as coming from Bass who has spent so much time assembling a manufacturing ecosphere and is himself a chip maker. I think a turf war was big enough that he was forced into saying OK. But my hope is that he is standing there with a pink slip in hand once these plantation owners are proven wrong and out the door they do. Gonna be real hard to make this stick when your major opposition is going to shoot you down through the concept of customers are first.

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