Informal survey for Solidworks usage.

SOLIDWORKS SW General
41

Wow,

Had not read through all this until today.

I started with SolidWorks with v96, way back yonder. At a previous company we had done some nice work in Pro-E and I wanted to see if we could bring that capability to a small consulting company that I had joined.

I knew what Pro-E cost in those days (>$50k per seat in 1996 $) and asked the owner if there was support. He kind of chuckled and asked if there was anything out there that was similar but less expensive.

So, I went looking and found 2 candidates, SolidWorks and Trispectives 3D (now IronCAD). I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why, but we selected SWx.

We bought a seat and jumped in with both feet. We liked SWx so much, we joined as VARs. I went to SolidWorks World in Boston in '98 as a var.

Our little VAR was the first company to demonstrate SolidWorks at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. Pretty much introduced the Oil and Gas Arena to SolidWorks. If you don’t know, OTC (https://2025.otcnet.org/) is the preeminent showplace for technology in the O&G world. Typically >40,000 attendees visit OTC.

Not too long after that, the consulting company decided it wanted to go in a different direction and I departed to do my own thing. I bought a seat of SolidWorks, which I supported until last year.

Now, I’m now retired, creating things to print with my new Bambu Labs P1S 3D printer with SolidWorks v2023 SP5.

When I retired, I reached out to my var, MLC CAD, to see what they could do about the subscription costs due to my retirement, and to be kind their response was laughable. Loyalty is definitely a one way street with DS.

So, I sit on the sidelines sadly watching a company that I spent a goodly part of my career with, slowly self destruct. It’s painful.

Take care folks

1 Like
42

Awesome story man, hopefully we can cross path some day and I can pick up on all that experience you have :stuck_out_tongue:

I feel your pain, I am pretty much going through a similar process. I’m still being optimist, but I am finding it harder and harder to see the light at the end of the DS Tunnel. It’s as if the tunnel just keeps stretching out everytime I stop to see if the light is getting closer. Still, I try to push them to be better, some nice comments here and there, some a little more snarky then others, and a little behind the door talk with them. I’m not holding my breath to be honest, they have yet to prove their commitment to their community and have continueously doubledowned on their poor choices even after a multitude of concerns brought up by many. It seems their corporation is too big and the only way things will change is once the corporation’s wall starts crumbling unfortunately. I can tell you many at SolidWorks feel the same but are not, or cannot be, vocal.

43

And that is the exact reason why they are in the place they are in (and why it’ll continue to get worse and is far to late). Seems like a trend in the last 25 years in many facets of modern life.

44

Very cool that you have a nice printer and the skills to do cool things with it! Tools like Solidworks just help us realize our dreams. Over the years some brands get better and many get worse. Some are worth passing on to the next generation, but most of them aren’t. I think we all agree on where Solidworks falls. It didn’t have to be that way, but they made the choices they did.

45

The sad part is that SW was and still is a great, fundamental tool. They nailed many of the core facets of how it works and the UI etc I recall years ago around the time that the rumors of a new, full re-write started. They showed off some actual useable nex-gen type features like squishable parts (think gaskets or the like) and i had hoped at the time that they would do a similar thing to what happened to Unigraphics (to be a ground up re-write and unification like they did with NX). If they had done that alongside keeping SW going for 10 years that has now since long passed… while keeping the core things that make SW great… it would have been a power house and hard to beat.

46

TL;DR DSS is comical, but not funny.

I just saw this post and there is a lot to go through. I am in very much the same boat of being a long-term SWX user (BTW, I do not use SOLIDWORKS or any of their other dumb naming conventions. I use SolidWorks and SWX, but not their other crap). I consider myself a charter SWX user, having started with the first official release of SWX 1995. I even used John Hirschtick’s 2-D predecessor product, DesignView. I recall our computers didn’t have a CD reader so a SWX update came on 17 high density 3.5" floppies. I had a 30-day evaluation license and for six months I had to change the date on my computer to keep using it until my company bought ten seats (in lieu of four Pro\E maintenance fees). Ah, the good ol’ days!

Wow! 30 years of doing some great things with a very capable, intuitive, permanent license desktop CAD software. Yep, you read that right, I’m not using their cloud or subscription versions.

DSS is like the angry step-parent of a really smart and strong-willed kid. SWX rightly earned its place in the market by being a very capable and easy to use product. In the pre-DSS days, and even in the first few years of DSS ownership, the good folks at SWX were very open to ideas and alerts to problems. They listened and they were responsive. As the product quickly matured it took more marketing hype to make each new release seem like it was as big a change as previous ones. We’re engineers and we don’t easily buy into the hype. Show me that you have something I have been asking for and I’m eager to upgrade. But tell me about something I’ve never heard of and that it is a must-have and I am highly skeptical. When I find out out my skepticism is justified then you lose credibility. Those last two sentences describe what DSS has done for the last ~10-15 years, and they’ve gone all-in.

As engineers we want to understand and be convinced about the merits of something, not have something shoved down our throats. I get that sometimes we need to be educated about the merits of something, but that means teaching/showing us why it is good. DSS instead has been doing a lot of virtue signaling. That doesn’t work for me. I need to be convinced, not coerced.

I have used SWX for 30 years and will continue to do so in my retirement starting in a month (I am SO ready!!). I have designed many things that are right in SWX’s wheel-house: pneumatic power tools, police car emergency lights (what a fun job!), a lot of industrial equipment, machining and assembly fixtures, etc. I started a SWX users group in 2000, before SWX provided support and am solely responsible for bringing SWX into several companies.

Like a lot of you on this forum, I was very active on the old forum. I was even one of the co-conspirators, along with RickB (Rick Becker), of the ONE and TWO! uprising. For 18 months DSS included me on their “steering committee” trying to influence the new 3DSwamp. It was so funny because they were advocating that their “platform” was a one-stop shop and could do everything that all the other tools could do, but in one place. Oh, we can host meetings and chats and share files and all the other sexy globally connected stuff, they said, however, we had the meetings on Zoom because their platform could not host more than 15 people at a time, to name just one limitation. It was comical, but it wasn’t funny.

Maybe my attitude toward DSS is just emphasizing the G in GOM. It’s their loss that I am.

3 Likes
48

The more they go to cloud and internet dependent system the more I go to alternative softwares. Local installation for me. Co-operation is done by continuous Discord screen sharing + Rukovoditel PDM for file sharing and data management.

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49

Love you Dennis. I agree and concur with everything you stated.

Really good to hear you are ready to retire. Me too, next year.

Rick Becker

1 Like