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SW2005 Beta Testing Boycott

Nick

Sorry Nick to raise your blood pressure - , re-reading my post I was not clear with my words.

Quote from my previous post "Which would they have done? I don't know - but either way the productwould have been better. The downsides to these two options are :- "

I should have said " the downsides for Solidworks to these two options are :- "

and thinking on it some more these downsides are really marketing considerations. Short times between upgrades plays well when trying to keep ahead of the competition and makes new sales, so SW does not want to delay these and lose in the marketing war with competitors

Reliabilty and core features are 'expected' by new customers so if a salesman starts to stress them you begin to get suspicious. A sales technique is to never mention to the customer anything about features of the product that the customer, in his possible naiviety, already assumes is a given feature. We are so accustomed to reliable mechanical machines in our everyday lives that we assume software is reliable as well !!. So SW never mentions it as it hopes we assume its software is as reliable as the mechines we work, with such as lathes, milling machines etc. I just wish SW was a Japanese company or at least had Japanese bosses :-) - By the way just got an American built 6yr old Honda and it drives like new! If SW started to trumpet how reliable SW was now and getting better, possible customers would say " you mean it was not reliable before. Hold on a while before I issue the purchase order Mr Salesman - I just want to check out this 'reliabilty' issue you have just raised " and the sale is lost. Glum sales man - no bonus reached this month - note to myself - better not mention reliabilty again.

So if SW2004 was reliable and stuck to its core features but at the expense of new 'bells & whistles" because these budgets were reduced, then sales men and marketing men would not like that either.

So they went for the third option which was free bug testing by users.

Perhaps I am a cynic or as I heard recently but can't remember where " A cynic is actualy an optimist who does not want to be disappointed again"

Regards

Jonathan Stedman

Reply to
jjs
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heh.

just had a really funny image of joe dunne doing jumping jacks every morning before starting one of his QA meetings!!

i suppose there is some truth to that.

but suppose the salesman could point to the newsgroup and challenge the prospective customer to find one negative post about SW quality within the last, for example, 6 months to a year.

or even a no-crash guarantee (maybe refund 1% of purchase price for each CTD). Granted, with a SW approved system (vid card, drivers, etc), and could not be attributed to hardware failures. Or even just 1% for each repeatable crash?

I would take that offer seriously.

--nick e.

Reply to
Nick E.

Hey, there's always real-estate... "improved performance" or "great view of the ocean" same thing right?

- Eddy

Reply to
Eddy Hicks

Jonathan,

Thanks for being mature and coming back with some good opinion to debate rather than immediately get your panties in a knot as some have. Stick around. We need more people like you here.

I have to agree with you 100%. I would also say that if the shoe were on the other foot and I was running the business of selling SW I would tap into the user base for free Beta testing as well. I mean why not get the best people in the world to rigorously test your software at a very little, if any, cost to the company? I know a lot of people get excited about seeing new features, and some hope that their long-term problems are fixed, but I as some others have here as well, are over the excitement because we really don't feel like we have received much of a return on our investment in the past. But, if I was running the business and really cared, I would be listening to my users more closely and giving them what they want. I believe this to be the reason most are upset. They say they listen to their users and that is what sets them apart from other CAD companies, but sometimes we don't think we are heard. I think I would try a little better to get people motivated and give them a better incentive. Especially with the fact that lately things haven't been too smooth.

Reply to
Jeff N

Care there, your straining my sarcasm meter.

Nick E. wrote:

Reply to
joe(usenews)

can i ask a question that isnt quite solidworks related

Having used pro e on 2001 and solidworks i found that pro was mighty reliable to a degree, however having not been exposed to this beta testing malarky i was wondering if pro e users get to beta test and report bugs as opposed to just having what ptc comes up with(i have heard some good things about wildfire but then i have heard som horrendous things about it and now it seems wildfire 2 is getting some abuse too)forced down their throat. The big problem i saw with pro at a clients offices recently was the software and windchill compatability ,it was screwing the data base up and ruining months of work.

now if pro users do get to beta test and it still comes up as a bad cut of software then there is something wrong much higher up the food chain(same applys for SW)

this brings up two conclusions IMO if pro isnt beta tested as solidworks is by users like us and is not quite what it should be we can think ourselves lucky that we kind of get a say in whats wrong and can catch a lot of the mistakes before its released meaning our favourite(used loosly)software is better than the other apps (a good thing)

if it is tested and still comes out not very good then i think somewhere people will have to make a stand and say to the big boys that if we are paying for crap we arent going to pay what your asking or find an alternative (i think the only place big corps like this will listen is if you hit em in the pocket)

BTW you may need to read this a few times to get it to make any sense

Reply to
mikemcdermid

In my experience, it really is no different from PTC to SolidWorks.

Just recently, ProE (actually, pretty much any PTC product) had a Y2K- like bug in which it would stop working on Jan 10, 2004. PTC, did get a fix out, but 1.) implementing the fix was painful (manually finding dlls, replacing them, and more) and 2.) they did not catch every single related issue.

We also had a problem in which all columns in a family table (the ProE equivalent to design table) would disappear. This would leave you with all your configurations being the same as the default. BIG problem when all of your bolts and nuts, etc. are driven by family tables.

Remember all the grief SWX received (and are still receiving) over user interface constancy, especially when they started moving dialog boxes to the property manager? ProE (especially WildFire) is 10 worse in this respect.

There are lots of other issues as well. Like I said, I don't think ProE is any different than SWX.

Reply to
Arlin

Funny. I can't wait to see the slow down that this creates. I may need to up spec the computers I requested for this year.

Ken

Reply to
CSWP

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