Why don’t sales and marketing understand that scare tactics just make them sound desperate? It’s rather pathetic.
Show that management are bullies.
Nothing instills confidence in a product like desperate looking moves like this, a thorough push behind another product in their stable and obvious executive hatred of the old product.
Let’s be real though, Solidworks is big in the CAD industry, they’ve done some shitty things, and made some significant mistakes, but they will remain a big name in CAD for the foreseeable future. This two year subscription thing upsets me less that some of the other things they’ve done in recent years. It’s not blackmail or desperate, it’s a calculated a policy change which isn’t totally unreasonable or unprecedented. Two years isn’t a long commitment for a business-CAD relationship, and it’s not going to phase their medium to large customers. It’d be nice if 3DS though of the little guys more, but you know that isn’t the recent trend.
Raising the price to add cloud services could certainly be unpleasant (I haven’t seen how much the price is going up). But they are committing more fully to the cloud based 3DExperience services, which I think will actually end up being pretty good, especially if you time travel to 2025 or later. Integrated and easier cloud based PDM is a hole that this will finally (probably) fill.
If you want to go off subscription you can. That’s good it’s still an option. If you want to change VAR, you can.
By the way, you only need the final service pack for each year, but you may want to save out multiple years - sometimes there is a case for working with an old version with a certain customer, or old computer.
Use the installation manager “option to Download and share all files . . . the full version and service pack are contained in one install” https://help.solidworks.com/2022/english/SolidWorks/install_guide/c_installing_on_individual_computers.htm?id=4d7d98e80a314d198dccc087e5edc152#Pg0
Assuming you can actually log into your account…
Not if you are using another PDM/PLM system like Windchill. The increased subs just means I pay for something I don’t use. Why not just offer a sub without cloud services and sub with cloud services? Because they want their huge user base to foot the bill for their cloud development costs. It would be easy to give the customers a choice but Dassault management decided to be greedy instead of customer focused.
Hopefully these greedy bastards get it in their heads… a subscription program which is pay as you go/need or levels of use during change/demands would be ideal! 
I’m not typically optimistic, but I have hope, in the long term, at least.
20 years ago the music industry got itself in a bind with bad practices. As a result, more people stole music than paid for it. The industry eventually sorted itself out, and the world for consumers of music is now in a really good place.
A few years ago all of the major players in TV decided they needed to have their own streaming service and keep all of the content/profits for themselves. They are now figuring out that there aren’t enough consumers who wanted to pay for 20 different streaming services to keep them all alive. It hasn’t worked itself out yet, but I’m confident it will in the next few years, even if it means several of the streaming services fail, or merge with other service providers.
IMO, we are at the very beginning of the curve in the software (Or at least CAD) industry. Right now everyone is rubbing their hands and planning European vacations on all of the new revenue generated by subscriptions. Eventually it will be too expensive for a company to hire a new employee, because a new employee means another $10k in subscriptions alone (M365, acrobat, quickbooks, solidworks, photoshop, etc.) At some point, the market will be forced to adjust. There will be cheaper alternatives, or companies will just decide to get by with less. It may take a decade for this to run its course, but eventually, there will be a correction.
In the end we will be forced to a suboptimal cloud service that will ask for even more money and efforts to keep our data from breaking down. As I said many times, Solidworks as it is, means DS paying royalties to Siemens for the Parasolid 3D engine and the sketcher engine (formerly from Dcubed that was introduced in the NX series IIRc) inside SW and probably other stuff I do not remember at the moment.
This is why SW has apparently 2 kernels (PARASOLID and ACIS) that can be activated inside the registry. Ditching Siemens components is a priority for DS, but they have to make a good excuse to make us trash our legacy parasolid data… IMHO cloud is a nice chance for them.
I want say that it is not going to end well for medium sized company with PDM as SW PDM and their cloud thing are not even compatible…
I wonder if the brains at DSS are doing the math comparing an increased file size to increased storage revenue.
You gotta break it before you can fixit.
DS still in the breaking phase.
@mp3-250 Is the idea it’s a priority to ditch parasolid based on anything? Siemens licenses that to a lot of companies, and it sounds like speculation that Solidworks would depart from that long held standard.
You really don’t get it, do you? Hey, would you go borrow some money for me? I promise I’ll pay you back. Yeah, 2, 3 million should be plenty. I’ll pay you back tomorrow. I’m totally trustworthy. I promise.
It is my educated guess based on hard facts.
fact 1 DS is trying to milk money from us in every possible way.
fact 2 SW was developed before the acquisition form DS. SW developers decided to pay royalties instead of develop their engine and tools from scratch. the royalty owner (Siemens) is a competitor of DS on both plm-pdm (team center engineering or whatever is called nowadays) and cad (NX-Soliedge) platforms.
let alone siemens aquired mentor graphics which is used inside SW simulation… so more royalty money for them.
fact 3 DS is pouring a lot of money and resources on a platform that overlaps SW and PDM, but it uses different data structures and is not yet compatible with SW.
If I had to make some forecast I would say that lowering costs and increase ROI from thier platform is a logical strategy.
It is not possible in the short therm so they start forcing new customers on the platform, then the smallest legacy customers, then the middle one and in the end the big customers with a lot of legacy data.
small customers could move their data to a SW competitor with a relative small damage (for DS)and quickly compared to a bigger customer.
this is why we need a contingency plan to move away from DS in the worst case scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel
ACIS is developed and licensed by Spatial Corporation of Dassault Systèmes.
Can’t say I’ve heard this before. I know there was another software that employed both kernels, but have not heard that with SolidWorks…
The original pre launch version of SolidWorks was based on ACIS, then they pretty quickly switched to Parasolid due to issues with how ACIS handled certain geomtry back then, parasolid was just better atleast at the time.
so I believe it is just that legacy registry entries you are seeing it’s been there as long as I can remember. Despite all the FUD from the likes of Siemens resellers etc I don’t think there have ever been serious plans to switch it’s so hard you might as well start from scratch.
As has happened with the lack of compatibility between Catia V5 and V6 etc I suspect the plan is just to have the cloud apps like xdesign based on CGM (not ACIS) develop to become a credible option. If they Get to a point where they are capable enough for people to switch and leave SolidWorks as legacy rather than changing its kernel. But well there are still plenty of Catia v5 licenses in use and new licenses being sold we will still be talking about the death of solidworks in a decade as we were in 2010 etc.
a) That’s harsh Matt.
b) Why would I know everything about CAD kernels? I asked a question.
(How much does Siemens charge to license parasolid anyway?)
c) Still sounds like speculation, probably based on some real negatives of what 3DS has done in other situations.
Honestly sorry you think thats harsh. Anyone who expects DS to do nice things for SW users at this point is __________. You fill in the word. They don’t even treat Catia v4-v5 or v5-v6 customers that well.
Anyway, best of luck.
I need help. I have an older laptop that I want to update from SWX 2020 to SWX2023, which is the last version I bought before my subscription expired. Normally I run SWX on my desktop and just now realize it has been a bit since I used SX on my laptop. My dilema is that I cannot get access to download anything since I am off subscription. It used to be that we could access downloads, I think any of them - even the most recent, but their activation was limited to our sbscription.
Can anyone help me figure out how to get access to the download area? In particular I need SWX2023 SP1.0.
Thanks in advance!
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- -Dennis