I’m reading lots of impending doom speak for “solidworks” as a legacy desktop product…
How soon can we realistically expect to see a proper sunset & burial of Solidworks & the foretold forced migration to cloud products?
I represent just one business & such a change would be earth shattering to our eng team.. It’s difficult to expect that every other business that has used & integrated solidworks into their workflows for the last 20 will go willingly over the cliff…
Is it unreasonable to assume solidworks will remain available for ‘legacy’ businesses in some form as long as it continues to produce revenue?
Also, is it unreasonable to assume that the new cloud-based offerings are meant more to scoop up entirely new business, rather than being a lock stock & barrel replacement for what was?
I think that is the million dollar question and the reason this thread and ones like it exist. In my opinion, we are a LONG ways off from Dassualt admitting that they are sunsetting solidworks desktop. Dassault keeps promising that Solidworks isn’t going anywhere. One thing is certain. They are doing a horrible job at providing clarity.
I have concerns that instead of a clearly communicated sunset of solidworks, we will instead see price hikes and gradually poorer quality support and service packs for the legacy products. (price hikes for network licenses are already coming April 1st)
I have concerns that 3dx is not currently everything its been promised to be (leaving out the migration portion of the conversation). I have hands on experience with one 3dx branded application (exalead) and I have not been impressed. Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the “forum” debacle. Lack of customizability to fit existing data seems to be the theme with 3dx. Currently I also believe there are still some glaring feature omissions from their solidworks focused replacement products as well. I believe that’s what the “Xapps” are intended to be?? Did I hear they don’t yet have 2d drawings?? This concern is more based on hearsay, but the lack of adoption I think speaks to this concern about the quality of the actual products.
I have concerns that there will not ever be a truly valid and inexpensive migration path from solidworks legacy to 3dx. The abandonment of the parasolid kernel means that in order to provide this, they would need to build an even more complex feature to feature translator for a true migration path to exist. I’m not sure if a true bone fide “translator” of “solidworks to 3dx” is something that Dassault is even attempting to pursue. Its definitely something they “should” be able to do, given their access to the source data models, but I have no doubt that it would be expensive and complex to build. One of the higher ups at our VAR says that solidworks is “working on this”, but I’m not sure that he actually knows that or was just saying it to make us feel better.
I have concerns about the business model of “cloud cad” and if our data does ever get “migrated” to 3dx, what is the long term viability of our data retaining useful engineer value in the 3dx world? What if the 3dx ship sinks? What will an export from 3dx look like? How easily can we jump ship and still retain a valuable cad library? How expensive long term will a permanent rental of 3dx cloud space be?
I have an expectation that if the migration path is going to be expensive and complex anyways, we might as will look at the cad competitors. Siemens is sounding more enticing every day. I’m sure there is an element of “The grass is always greener”, but the grass is looking pretty sad around here.
I was working in the trailer industry & I am currently working in the RV industry and I think changing to something that works more with direct editing the geometry does not sound very insane to me.
More complex shapes are probably different - but those are most of the time fairly consistent (i.e. body parts etc.) & there are not very many ‘quick’ changes.
Most of the time it is more about organizing workflows/BOMs/part numbers/PLM&PDM/Properties/2D Drawings/sheet metal/ECOs…
How is 3DX on that end?
What about competitors?
Edit:
To clarify further: I think working with ‘dumb solids’ for a year just to switch would entirely be possible!
I can’t see a way around explicit constraints in many of our key components. Some of our models literally could not be have designed without construction sketches or an alternative form of explicit constraints. (unless we were to do it through trial and error) I don’t care how advanced implied constraints are. They won’t know that “the tip of this wedge shaped extrusion needs to be exactly located tangent to a nested pattern of 66.3mm diameter cylinders as they move tangent to a plane at a 12 degree angle.”
We don’t allow external references in production, but we DO use explicate constraints as some of our most important design tools. (this usually means sketches with construction geometry in feature sketches or dummy sketches, but it can also mean nonproduction “design assemblies” that allow external references for the purpose of generating calculated production parts.
just thinking back to my school days, 4 bar and other “bar linkages” are another example where some kind of explicit “calculator” is an absolute requirement for a meaningful design. complex mechanisms become unintuitive rather quickly. possibly you could design a four bar linkage without explicit references, but you would certainly need to build a separate linear algebra “calculator” to determine the exact link lengths and ground locations based on the equations that drive the precise lengths. (basically reinventing the wheel of what a parametric solver gives us)
Explicit geometric references allow engineers that don’t remember a day of linear algebra to built pretty complex “math-based” models without even cracking a linear algebra text book. That is nothing to look down at or “overestimate”
Again I don’t doubt that this type of work can be done in SE using other non solidworky forms graphical explicit constraints, and I do believe there is a time and a place for “implied constraints” but I do doubt that our SW models will be nearly as valuable to us as they are now if we were to migrate especially some of our key components.
[quote=matt post_id=17901 time=1645571267 user_id=49]
Yes, I’ve tried twice, but I’m on my phone. I’m going to have to wait until I get on my other computer.
[/quote]
Let me make a golden bridge for all of you regarding the new CEO:
[list]
[*]Many here agree that SolidWorks as a desktop product is not going to be pushed forward much more
[*]Due to 'legacy' (let's just call it that with no bad intentions) support that still needs to happen they won't abandon it either
[*]At the same time it seems that they want to push you over to the new 3DX platform to get away from the parasolid kernel & the alimony they have to pay Siemens for every license
[*]In contrast to the previous point they do NOT offer a customizable PDM/PLM system on their platform yet
[/list]
What do you think will change regarding SolidWorks? Will they start ‘fixing’ more instead of pushing new features? What can we actually expect?
My 2 cents: [list]
[*]SolidWorks is bad when it comes to designing in context. Anyone who has seen somebody working in Blender/Rhino to change parts (esp. imported geometry) to their gusto in LIGHTNING SPEED can see the benefits of this approach. There is NO WAY around this design approach for the future [sarc](but it will take time until the dinosaurs are done!)[/sarc].
[*]From what I have seen SolidWorks is concentrating on upgrading their strengths and just doing the bare minimum in other regards:
If you disregard PDM (which is imho painfully integrated - did they just buy a company & rebranded it to SolidWorks PDM?) it's strengths imho are clearly patterns (you can even edit them now in LDR) in combination with design tables. This is where history based 3D design shines & adds great value!
[*]If you disregard PDM - Weldments seem to work for specific applications insanely well & fast. Combine this again with configurations & you can change whole structures in a breeze!
[*]Also their partner products sometimes are incredibly well done for their specific applications. This binds you their eco system (you invest in 2+ programs that depend on SWX) & that is one of the key things, I think, why SolidWorks is often slow to integrate features that were done by some other company already.
[*]They push/ed hard to get their foot into 3D printing & they did a fairly good job - it's a strong growing sector & many optimizations are clearly made for this. This sector is also not as dependent on PDM - many 3D printing applications are basically job shops & you do not need much history there
[/list]
I’ll ask the ‘why do you need so much more than dumb solids on fairly old & outdated parts?’ question in the new thread.
The “New SW CEO” thread has been split into 3 threads:
New SW CEO
CAD in the Cloud/CloudWorks
CAD Migration
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