PTC STEALS YOUR OPTIONS AND SELLS THEM BACK TO YOU!

Not really. What are you talking about specifically? I think that as far as I've seen, they've added functionality, though certainly not as much as they should considering the price points of their competitors.

Two examples:

Custom Explode States (not the default explode): up through 2000i2, you had to own Advanced Assembly Extension to make them. Added as base functionality in ProE 2001.

Pro/SURFACE (basic): Was sold as a separate module, though NC customers received it free. Added to base functionality midway through release 2001 (2001440 to be exact).

Not a whole lot, to be sure, but I haven't seen them actually take something away. I wish they would flatten things out, make Pro full-featured except for NC, Mechanica (full motion, thermal, etc not piecemeal), Behavioral modeling. They ought to include Intralink, mechanisms, AAX (inheritance, copy geom, simp reps), and ISDX and still price it around $5000. Then they'd have something to brag about, especially if they got maintenance cost in line with Solidworks, et al. And I don't mean percentage-wise,but real dollars.

"Pete" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com... : "Douglas McDowell" wrote in message news:... : > Does anyone else get the impression that PTC intentionally removes : > functionality from progressive builds, then later attempts to sell it back : > to the customer as an "UPGRADE". : > This may seem like a rant but, its not. : > I want to know if other users have had to buy back what they used to own. : : Not really. What are you talking about specifically? I think that as : far as I've seen, they've added functionality, though certainly not as : much as they should considering the price points of their competitors. : He may be talking about Mechanica. Since they started moving its functionality into Mechanism Design and Design Animation, it isn't enough to own a license of Mechanica from years ago. The old customers aren't being given to new modules. They must, as McDowell points out, upgrade their licenses, that is, buy the new modules.

: Two examples: : : Custom Explode States (not the default explode): up through 2000i2, : you had to own Advanced Assembly Extension to make them. Added as : base functionality in ProE 2001. : : Pro/SURFACE (basic): Was sold as a separate module, though NC : customers received it free. Added to base functionality midway : through release 2001 (2001440 to be exact). : True enough, if you are one of the people chosing between SW, SolidEdge and Pro/e Foundation, the new stuff they are bundling with Foundation II makes the choice of Pro/e more attractive than it would be if they were offering the kind of package the older customers got who are still 'buying' what the newer customers get included in the base price. PTC's licensing shell game makes it next to impossible to even figure out what you're getting for the money. Then, there was the build up for Wildfire when VARs were offering what seemed to be fantastic deals, HP even practically giving you a computer for the price of a Foundation license. And, if I'm not mistaken, including 'extra' stuff, like ISDX II, BM, MDX, Mechanica. Would I be surprised if this wasn't a stable deal, that it didn't continue into the future, that it, when it came time to pay maintenance on the next rev? No, I wouldn't. All the license chicanery might not even be PTC's doing. There's still the VARs to consider. Does anyone even know what happended between Rand and PTC? Did the IBM/Dessault combo just make them a better deal? And then what's happened to all the licensing arrangements when Rand's stuff gets shifted to someone else. Anxiety over licensing questions seems, at this point in time, to be perfectly natural.

David Janes

We've been a PTC customer since Pro/E version 2. In that time, certainly PTC has added functionality. From a manufacturing viewpoint, most advancement has been fluff. Windchill...who needs it? Photo render.... who needs it? We do more than publish pretty pictures. We bought ICAM to post nc programs because NCPOST is weak. We bought Vericut because what you get with NCCheck is weak. Pro Man in general is difficult and buggy. Its better than it used to be. Years ago they sold it when it didn't work. Admittedly, of late I'm miffed because a couple of years ago we combined all of our different packages into one. Thus making license pools possible and reducing the overall cost of maintenance. We are still trying to get back the abilities we lost in that "deal". We've lost Pro Program functions. We've lost editing of merged part functions. ( a build problem, we had it

2002310 but not in 2003090) I think PTC is trying to herd cats. They have so much stuff out there they can't fix 1 without screwing up 2,3,4 and 5. I don't think there has ever been a build of pro that didn't screw something up, while trying to improve something else. I take that back, Pro18 to 19 because nothing changed. Here is the latest: I requested a license pack last week for a planned roll out of Wildfire. I installed the license pack and poof... none of my NC Advanced floaters work. A little digging reveals that the license pack includes license codes for NC Advanced 2000i Ver. 21. The 2001 license pack worked ok. The NC Advanced codes were Ver. 23. For this I pay 10's of thousands of dollars in maintenance. I'd much rather have dependable software that evolves slowly, than buggy crap that changes faster than my wife's mind! How long have you been using Proe? Perhaps not long enough to see how much productivity is lost from build to build when the stuff you used to be able to do is lost or just moved. I'm glad you are happy with PTC. Thanks for your time. Doug

Doug,

We've been customers only since 2000i (1999). Why weren't your NC licenses upgraded to 24? Are the off-maintenance or did License Management screw up?

I can't say that I'm ecstatic with PTCs product bundling or software quality. I've been running Pro/Man for 17 months and have created more than 120 SPRs. Do the math, it's about 2 a week, but there are maybe 10 important ones outstanding, the rest were fixed. Not that I should be doing their QA, but if that's what it takes to program our ProE parts.........

License Management screwed up. This is the first time I've had a problem with a license. I'm lost as to how they managed that. I recently ran across some info concerning "Pentagon", that leads me to believe that a lot of our problems stem from our relationship with Pentagon.

As for shitty software.............. I'm not going to do their work for them and pay maintenance to boot. If they want me to debug their software, they'll pay me to do it. Don't *^%(^$%$ release this crap until you're sure.

I don't think anyone would have suffered if PTC delayed the Wildfire roll out until W2. W3, Wx.... What come after Wildfire? Smoldering Pile?

Any one else having problems opening wildfire files in 2001? I thought this was a big selling point behind Wildfire1, the ability to read W1 files in 2001. So far we've not been able to do it. Build a model in 2001 and save it. Open that model in W1 and save it. Now try to open that model in 2001. You have never been able to go back but, it seems someone is advertising that you can. Perhaps that is one of the features that will be available in W2. Along with all of the other stuff that does'nt work right.

Doug,

Model a part in Solidworks 2003; save it. Open it SW 2004; save it. Try to open it in SW 2003. Repeat the above process, substituting the name of any MCAD product for SW. Being unable to open objects from newer-generation software is not unique. And when you think about it, not unexpected. For example, 2001 saw the introduction of the inheritance feature. How in the world would 2000i2 know what to do with this feature if it appeared in the model tree from a 2001 part? Hell, until MS Word XP you needed to install a special filter to be able to open different generation Word docs (backwards), for example a Word 2000 document in Word 97. And you had to install a filter in Word 97 to be able to open it in Word 95. I think a solid model is several orders of magnitude more difficult and complex than a text document, so you can see my point.

I don't like doing PTC QA, but if that's what it takes to do my job, I'll do it as best I can. The alternative is to not do my job, so that answer's a no-brainer.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas McDowell" Newsgroups: comp.cad.pro-engineer Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 3:10 PM Subject: Re: PTC STEALS YOUR OPTIONS AND SELLS THEM BACK TO YOU!

The problem is that they have to get it out there for the users to 'debug' so they can release the load. How long do you delay something to get the last 20% of the bugs out?

Have you enabled the config.pro option required to allow 2001 to load a Wildfire model? Also, they have never claimed that the features would be re-created in 2001. It comes in as a lump solid. You can add new 2001 features to the lump and they are supposed to come through when you open the file Wildfire again. This wasn't designed for model sharing, but for using existing NC creation routines that people had in 2001 that hadn't upgraded to Wildfire, yet.

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--snip--

What is this config pro option called?

BTW, at the user group meeting and at current WF training this 'feature' was lauded as the first time since v18-v19 since this was possible.

The word at PTC is that it will never be possible to open files from a new release of Pro in an older release, i.e. Wildfire back to 2001 or Wildfire2 back to Wildfire 1.

Now what I've been told is that they will support the ability to open newer files in older datecodes of the same release, i.e. open a Wildfire 2003410 model in Wildfire 2003320. I never realized that this was an issue, as I've rarely gone back to a different datecode after upgrading. Sometimes I have gone back one datecode if I found a show-stopper in a newer one, but compatibiliy problems never manifested themselves for me. However, it apparently has been a known issue which they have addressed.

Regards Peter Brown

They're not giving us any gifts when they make that statement. There are few hard and fast rules in commercial software, but compatibility between datecodes is an assumed requirement. File incompatibility between datecodes is a SEVERE error.

Dave