Quality of Software - Survey

It's interesting that Jeff Ray mentioned some very high number (100-200 sticks in my mind) of customer visits that he made in the last year. Is he a slow learner? Do people lower down the ladder cherry pick the customers he visits? Do customers feel that speaking out about issues would be rude?

I know, from talking to people at SWC, that they make a fair number of customer visits. Why doesn't our pain get through to the people writing code? I suspect that a good part of the reason is that there isn't a mechanism to move that information and prioritize it. Perhaps SWC people visiting customers need to have a method for finding out what our worst issues are and how we would rank them, then a method of combining them all, like enhancement requests.

Jerry Steiger

I couldn't do that anymore if I wanted to. My last electric eraser died a couple years ago.

jk

This is another good list. I have to agree with the other guy who listed cosmetic threads as being bothersome. I find myself wasting a lot of time sorting out problems with them.

One other thing I would like to mention in regard to getting value for my subscription is the quality of our VAR's. I don't call for tech support very often. Most of the time when I call it is to report or confirm something I see as a bug. My old VAR got bought out by a larger company. I am beginning to think that their support people are specifically instructed to NOT recognize bugs. They argue and give bad excuses for what to me are inexcusable results from our software. Here I am trying to help make the software better and I get nothing but resistance. In summary I am paying for the priviledge of performing quality control and then get nothing but crap from the representatives of the folks that I am paying. This really sucks.

jk

Jon,

Another Banquerism, you make wild accusations then when called on to post examples or source material for your claims can't/won't because you made it up.

Tom

What lies Jon?

How can I answer when you won't specify what you're talking about?

Tom

If you are sincere & post specific problems you are having an experienced user will help you, they help beginners all the time.

Tom

No Jon, its a forgery, that makes YOU the lying scumbag.

As one of the Three Amigos that trekked to Concord in August of 2001 I can say that the receptiveness of the management to this forum has seemed to have gotten worse since then. Now it is abundantly clear to experienced users that SW is buggier and slower than ever. However, SWx appeal now is to a different audience than it had five or ten years ago. SW is selling more and more to management types in multiple seat sales where in the early days it sold to single seat users quite a bit. Bugs or no bugs, SW is easy to learn and slowness is masked by many new users with low expectations. And lest we forget, SW is a company that is in business to make a profit. Profit comes by selling. It would be hard to imagine SW selling itself as the software that has been 4% slower with each new release ten years running.

Second, I have seen people use SW for years, suffering with various problems either due to lack of knowledge of what the software could do or unaware of proper procedures. They suffer without complaint. In short, many people will simply refuse to complain due to lack of awareness or a willingness to make waves.

Third, SW has shifted where it gets input. Most of its input sources are now managed. This forum has been decimated by SW own forums, the blogosphere and other tamer forums. SW creates and manages focus groups. SW has hired away many of the top guns that used to populate the newsgroup. So while this newsgroup remains the only truly free forum, many of the heavy hitters have moved on elsewhere.

I will also say this. I have seen installations where SW has taken off and been used quite successfully and other installations where it has in all honesty flopped. While SW is easy to learn, it still takes some doing to get it to work well and this knowledge is not necessarily common or easy to come by. The choices people make, and SW provides many choices, largely determine the user experience in any particular application. VARs certainly can greatly influence this side of things and SW seems to have greatly improved the quality of VARs, at least in my area.

TOP

SW will eventually create a worldwide brainless utopia of prepared thoughts and affirming user groups and eliminate all defective free thinkers

this is easier and more satisfyingly righteous than eliminating defective software...

Do you have any actual complaints of your own?

That's pretty much my biggest complaint. I'm using 08 on an Alienware computer with Vista. It's the first time I've tried to use SW with Vista. Yes it works. And yes, it randomly just closes/crashes out of nowhere at least once every time I use it. It's really not that big a problem for me, I just save more often. But there's just something unsatisfying about having a brand new high power computer, brand new OS, and a brand new software release, that combine to make a package that is slower, takes longer to load, and crashes more often than anything that came before it.

What does any of that have to do with YOUR lack of any original response? Every complaint you've listed in this topic is a copy/paste from somebody else. You've become too lazy to even to have valid complaints. Do you even use SW08?

Wow, is that description referring to the democratic party in the US or perhaps all the sheep that populate the European Union?

Yeah, jonnie boy has worked on at least 3 different corners, holding three different signs?

Ditto.

Just locked up SW2008 again last night (had to close with task manager) because I selected Photoworks Studio while having an assy open. I can't use Command Manager because of the graphiics bug for 64 bit users and eagerly await the multitude of yet to be experienced bugs. The crinkly effect paper crap is an excellent example of what's wrong with the currrent SW mentality.

The discussion started after upgrading to SW 2008 where I discovered that it's not only slower but buggier and crashes more. From there my rants have included the failure of SolidWorks to address some bugs that have existed for years, lack of true functionality in Weldments (steel profiles missing, inability to resolve weld beads around irregular forms, no means of accomodating material cut size gaps, etc. etc.) Inability of SolidWorks to add to the Toolbox (it's been unchanged in eons), missing standard threads in Hole Wiz (UNEF, Buttress thread callouts, ACME etc.) Ongoing "Failed to Save" issues. Plate steel shape thickness changing arbitrarily in SW 2008, display issues I did not have before, The usual ongoing beefs from ages ago, no parametric link between a view label and it's scale for example. I could go on and on and have. The official SW response is that SW rocks and I'm on the fringe of users if I'm having this many problems.

It bugs the hell out of me that they add crap like the crinkly paper effect in SW 2008 and spend money on iPods for everyone at SW world but can't be bothered to add UNEF threads to the hole wiz or update the weldment profiles. It's clear where there priorities lie.

I myself have never had a true bug solved by SW, I get SPR numbers though which are real handy for nothing!

Matt,

I know your VAR would come out to your site for a 1/2 day or a day if you > Don, I feel your pain with the numbers of other users.

At General CADD. we strive to give the end user 1 day customer service often creating new versions, fixing bugs and adding features within days of the initial customer request. If your needs are 2-D you might give General CADD Pro a look over.