random thoughts of late with no particular coherence...

actually..about things that are wrong with SW thinking...

Belief 1.Keeping up with the CAD Jones and making a marketing splash
every 9 months is necessary for business sustainability and growth.
Likewise is it important to build customer loyalty with clubs and
conventions and pull in company friendly users and identities at
street level to build trust, buzz and camaraderie.


Users will choose to use software that is widely used/supported, has a
good tool set and delivers consistent quality for a reasonable price.
They make a large commitment in training and equipment and aren't
liable to stray away once committed even though they might drop off
subscription.
Most users are very well educated and make informed considered choices
and don't need or want selling to.
They want the facts good or bad.They want the whole picture not whats
flattering or warm and fuzzy.
They are all too aware that time is money and that looking after half
finished software is costly and time consuming.
While it is nice to get progressively improving capabilities just
having it work and be consistent is actually more important.
Living in fear of installing the next SP or waiting to see what
happened to some other smuck is an indicator that the software is
certainly not of a standard for professional use.
Its a poor standard for no other reason than SW management have
decided thats good enough -it has a seat belt so were not going to
give you air bags...and besides no other company does so why would
we..
No amount of feel good bonding sessions are going to offset the
reality of ownership and negate obvious deficiencies.


Belief 2.Adopting non CAD solutions like MS office tool ribbons and
picture style icons makes a better product and means the product is as
cutting edge/modern as possible and also demonstrates a proactive
adoption policy on the part of senior management.

Actually it means they have no ideas of their own or have lost the
ability to distinguish what is actually important about the product
now the company has grown into a mega monster of self conscious yes
men.- Is a car for getting from A to B or is it for looking good in
and traversing difficult terrain on the way to the mall? Isn't this
what went wrong with the US car industry?..People caved to monthly
turnover and protection of billion dollar investments and stopped
making genuinely useful appliances.They spun dreams and excess until
it was caught hollow by people who were willing to make what the
customer wanted and actually needed and with a quality people sought
out in preference.

Belief 3.The VAR network is an anachronism in the internet age.

Looking after the VAR network like a government social service is not
addressing the real needs of users.
Continuing to have local regional offices is costly and inefficient
It makes it all too easy to deliberately do nothing about the
fundamental problem of releasing buggy software as finished because it
gives them continued work.The system works as it was concieved 10
years ago why would we change..
Having weak help notes feeds a revenue stream to VARs who would
otherwise probably not eat out this week.

Belief 4.Striving for intuitive interaction with the program means
more time spent dealing with the design itself particularly for
surfacing tasks.


Reducing user functioning to Pavlov's dog level, and getting something
to work in this instance or tha,t by trial and error, using all
permutations of the the available buttons, means you can't actually be
aware what it is you are able to do technically and why.If you cant
think about the tools you use you aren't designing you are making up
stuff that has the appearance of a design and hangs together....so I
can light up a gas torch and make a hole in something eventually but
is that by imitation and persistence or because I had a sound
understanding of chemistry and safety! and I got that hole exactly
round and right where I planned it..
Rather than direct,simple,clear,informed use of a tool made possible
with empowering knowledge and a smart no frills UI you guess about it,
read the tool tips and the error messages, get hunches about it
because it looks similar to something else you used before (and think
you know about), mess around with it on your day off to see when it
doesn't work, discover something useful by accident or, if all else
fails you realise you really ought to sign up to VAR classes because
god dammit you're a dummy....

feel free to comment in any way that you feel challenged by my
incoherence...
remember being a good writer is not one of my lifes outstanding
accomplishments )

 

"Belief 1.Keeping up with the CAD Jones and making a marketing splash
every 9 months is necessary for business sustainability and growth.
Likewise is it important to build customer loyalty with clubs and
conventions and pull in company friendly users and identities at
street level to build trust, buzz and camaraderie."

It's not just SolidWorks thinking it's customers thinking that is the
problem and will remain the problem.

It's my experience that when it comes to CAD/CAM, machining job shops
like to purchase what they see other machining jobs using. Those
making the purchasing decisions really have no idea about issues like
working with non-native geometry in an efficient manner or what kinds
of powerful tools they really needed to work with non-native data.
They see everyone using SolidWorks... so they buy SolidWorks. In the
market I'm in Autodesk Inventor is invisible. This was true in
Phoenix, Arizona and it's true in San Diego, CA.

"They make a large commitment in training and equipment and aren't
liable to stray away once committed even though they might drop off
subscription."

Machining job shops that I have worked for make very little commitment
to training... that's the machinist / CADCAM programmers problem as
far as they are concerned. They buy the software and expect the
employee to learn it with their own money / time or they hire someone
new who they don't have to pay to train.

"Having weak help notes feeds a revenue stream to VARs who would
otherwise probably not eat out this week."

The VAR network does one thing and one thing well... sell. It's still
the best way to sell machining job shops and I'm sure most other
businesses that need / use CADCAM.

The bottom line is that machining job shop owners frequently have no
idea of what they really need software wise. They do little or no
research on what they really need. It's the VAR who is most convincing
that gets them to buy.

Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
http://blog.novedge.com/2007/07/an-interview-wi.html

 

As with the analogy of the auto industry, you gotta wonder when no-frills
(primitive looking, but robust as a milliright tool) CAD software will
arrive from China/Korea/India, available over the internet at a fraction of
swx prices.
I remember when Hondas, Toyotas, and more recently Kia's seemed like cheap
tinny cars, but they did the job and the rest is ...

 

It saves on total costs .. always paid for in some way by the users
out of everyone's cash flow.
Want them to fly out from the home office for a one-person
demo to jb (who never buys anything)?

 

Any new good buzzwords or ads this week?

So you cannot use MasterCAM?

Pretty good CAM programming package is it?
How is it at full five axes?

(CLUE: What is 1+1+1+1+1?)

Another great CAM programming package, is it?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Phoenix+autocad&btnG=Google+Search
~ 1,010,000 hits.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=San+Diego+autocad&btnG=Search
~ 584,000 hits.

The ones doing very simple CAM programing with AutoCAD & SolidWorrks?

Before that leash laws probably apply, right?

Nice that you don't have to worry about any of this
(or even reading manuals & docs).
Lucky you.

But you were just saying ....

Now you are claiming to be a shop owner? Or just that all shop owners
are total morons too?

Seen any pretty demos lately?

STILL a hoot !!!

 

Wow Bill!
Would that not be great!!
Might even get it in the 99p or one dollar stores, lol

 

Remember systems from 20+ years ago?
Why did they add any features beyond 2D etch-a-sketch?