RANT: Is 2006 ready for the big time yet?

Those are both frustrating. Maybe I should be frustrated too, but by the fact that I've already discarded any hope of taking advantage of two items you mention: eDrawings and lightweight.

eDrawings is not only impossible to use at the beginning of a sentence with proper capitalization, it is also much less capable than SW at displaying non-solid entities. Therefore, I've given up using it for more than that. I shoud be frustrated with this still, but it's been around too long.

Lightweight has always been a cause of instability and strange behavior. It's much better with each release. At it's best, it mishandles all sorts of references. At it's worst, it cause bizarre memory handling and instability. I should be frustrated with this too, but I guess I've given it up as unfinished, since I can get along without it most of the time.

And that's the whole problem. These things are not complete in the sense that they don't really fulfill their intended purpose. But you already knew this.

"These things are not complete in the sense that they don't really fulfill their intended purpose."

So SolidWorks management has taken the view that they will control their costs of development to an appropriate level to "get buy", because lots of the 500,000 SolidWorks users will NOT upgrade every year.

In fact, everyone knows that SP0 though at least SP3 are always Public Beta Versions, and that is probably why some do not upgrade.

They won't "skip a SWks revision year and fix all the bugs", nor will they "double the programmers for a year" and fix all the bugs, so we get a functional mostly bug free 2007 SP0.

This sounds like a Ponzi scheme in reality. Tout the "number of seats sold", but they really must get close to 90% maintenance fee payment to make it a viable ongoing success @ Dessault, so in leiu of getting 90% of seats to do yearly maintenance:

This is a pop quiz: Which method does SolidWorks management solve the cash cow problem for Dessault to keep the President in his position--

1. Double the number of programmers and testers & intensiveness of testing or
2. Double the advertising dollars and sell more one time sale SWks seats?

I think it is obvious SolidWorks CEO has chosen #2 as being in his self-interest.

I think it is obvious Dessault has agreed with #2 as being in their self-interest.

Only customer pressure (and probably from their largest customers who start choosing not to upgrade) are likely to change the equation.

Bo

How about forming a SolidWorks Users Union...

We can collectively demand voted on improvements or else we ALL stop paying the yearly subscription to SW.

We did this a few years ago (2001?) As I recall, Mark Stapleton (Sporky) started a subscription boycott. It got the attention of SolidWorks management. Mark and two others (Paul Kellner and Ken Redman?), known as the Three Amigos, were invited to Boston to talk to them. They promised to do better, and did improve a bit. Now they seem to be getting out of hand again.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

SW seem to do things in their own sweet time and way whatever the messes they get into and no statement of regret, apology etc is ever forthcoming. I don't think trying to organise a boycott will be effective in changing any undesirable performance on the part of some errant SW employees. I think the upset at the moment is mainly about PDF bugs and sp3,3.1,3.3,3.4? and it is true this has been badly handled but there is not a lot that can be done about it other than make sure customer dissatisfaction is heard loudly through all channels. Contact you VARs and make use of the customer experience section of the official forum to make your opinions known if your work is really affected by this. Most likely you will only hear weasel words in reply but at least they hear it and it will filter up. At the moment they are still doing better than previous releases where every sp had follow ups. Clearly the work swapping over from Bluebeam to Adobe was not done in time for the sp3 and there are still bits being sorted now. It must have been a known inside the company that it wasn't ready for real use.For this SW deserve a good ticking off but in their defence perhaps they have some unpublicised issues with license agreements to deal with that have hampered their progress. As per usual they make everything much worse will poor communications. I had hoped we were making real progress in that area but it doesn't look good this time...my condolences to those on the sp treadmill.

Mark Stapleton (aka Sporkman), Mark Mossberg and I. The Three Amigos moniker originated with the SW receptionist.

For what it is worth, I did another alternate position view with a similar assembly and it appears to have hope of working. So what we may be looking at is a lack of robustness when faced with a less than ideal assembly. This doesn't portend well for new users or old users with bad habits.

Hi Jerry,

Just to set the record straight. Two of the now legendary Three Amigos is Mark and Paul as you named, I don't recall who the third person was though (such a long time ago in SW years).

Kman "we cannot insure success, but we can deserve it"

What will get their attention are some note worthy customers jumping ship to a competitors product, and that competitor advertising the fact that it happened.

Unfortunately most people have a substantial commitment to SW in financial terms, file types and also user knowledge so there would have to be something very serious happen for a company to abandon it for something else. It is still a good product but quality drifts astray too often....which is why I have suspended subs :o) As has been pointed out often before it is an industry wide problem though. I really hoped SW had put some energy behind the scenes into improving matters so I am prepared to cut them a bit of slack with the transitional PDF issues as a regrettable blip however if this continues into stuff ups in sp4 and all the way to a sp4.4 a lot of customers could be set back to thinking about the 05sp1 experience and the like. SW big wigs should take heed of the grumbles audible here at the moment. They/we don't need another loss in confidence in their ability to deliver sp that really do work.