SW has serious compatibility issues from one release to another. Imagine a terabyte archive inside a PDM full of versions, workflows and macros with a train wreck of bugs, having to migrate on a novel untested platform… let’s add two kernels (parasolid from siemens and acis from dss) that afaik are not interchangeables (ztg not allowed in the former and probably many more?).
data conversion will be a nightmare for complex models that are already performing poorly inside SW alone.
Then let me say if you move also all the workstations on the same cloud as the data with at LEAST the SAME PERFORMANCE as the local machines for a LOWER COST it COULD make SOME sense.
But we know the real world is quite hard and with DS we should expect a suboptimal outcome…so when my company will have to spend big $ and Invest a lot of time, my engineers find hundreds of those “suboptimal” files or broken versions inside our PDM vault: who is gonna pay and take the responsibility? and PAY?
Because I do not think DS would spend a lot of effort in a data migration like you are offered when buying a new CAD-PDM package. My var is not able to put their hands in the software to solve my daily dose of issues let alone migrate 1TB of data flawlessy on a platform they have no experience and FREE of CHARGE.
No way We are going to pay more for their choice after paying a premium after another every year for this mess.
sorry for venting, but the way they announced this 3dx thing out of the blue, show us how out of control the decision makers are over there.
manufacturing companies need stability to manage their legacy data and future strategies.
hope at last siemens will help us.
@mp3-250, Damn dude. You have just painted a seriously nightmare scenario for large companies. I cannot even get my head around the trouble this could cause to the ACTUAL (existing customers) companies that DSS is likely marketing this all for.. (We are only a single seat bespoke manufacturer)
True tho I suppose, DSS doesnt actually care much about their existing customers. This whole cloud farce is their directional push to new customers, promoting “gig” style employment mentality and systems based on buzzwords..
Older/existing customers either catch on, or fall by the way. No fuss to DSS. After all, we have perpetual licenses and only pay subs begrudginly to VAR’s usually only to help debug issues with constant updates and workarounds for broken features..
I spoke with my VAR the other day. They said 3D experience SW is actually aimed at small companies without a PDM system
and SW PDM should stay until its cloud version catch up feature wise.
The current "cloud PDM " 3D experience is nowhere close to SW PDM and short term migration is unlikely.
Our new licenses will enable by default part of our users to share data on the 3dX cloud, I asked them:
the size of the online shared space included in the current licensing
what control we have over our engineers uploading and sharing data outside the company via 3dx and if it could be locked by us without asking DS
if it was for me, we would begin the migration to another PDM asap.
it is like a slow and painful death to be dragged on the bottom of a swamp.
ps I am unable to find my own posts on the platform most of the tIme.
my var is also trying to blame my web browser as my admin role was migrated, but not in the english translation of the new admin portal apparently and the cad dashboard refuses to load as it seems is only available in english, but my english profile says I am not an admin, but if I switch in japanese I become admIn again so… THE PROBLEM IS YOU TRYING TO USE THIS SOFTWARE, this site, this platform or whatever… just pay and shut up.you will be happy
There is a LOT of misinformation out there and it is generally caused by people not understanding the terms/words they are using. Can you define what you mean by “online”?
If DS was going to answer with a yes or no to our questions it would trigger a mass migration to competitors, panic or any other unwanted consequence.
maybe keeping the smoke screen up until it will be to late to withdraw from this mess and force everybody to go on the platform is the main plan here?
I hate to be the nay-sayer here, but I think the doom and gloom is a bit premature. Look at the list of new features in 2024. You can argue that they are of little value; you can argue that the time would have been better spent fixing existing issue; but you can’t argue they’ve abandoned desktop solidworks.
If they have any brains, they will keep doing just enough to keep us around. As a few guys on here can testify, changing software is a huge investment. It will have to get really bad for many of us to leave SW. They would be foolish not to take our money for as long as we will give it to them, even if they have to spend a little to do so.
I’m not saying they aren’t doing everything they can to push us to the “platform.” But there’s still a lot of money to be made off of us old geezers, and even DSS isn’t stupid enough to cut off that revenue until they can replace it.
If you are using term that contradict with what normal people normally understand.. something is definitely off.
Conceptual or mental model are what people really have in their heads and what guides their use of things.
A good design does not even need proper definition of term as they convey the correct/accurate conceptual model to the user already.
the interview is dated 2011, irrc the platform was refurbished in 2012, then 2020 and the latest (and GrEaTEeSt so far ←this is sarcasm) upgrade started at the end of last year so they are clearly going in the direction envisioned in the article at forced steps.
At least the were more honest about the kernel back then, compared to the smoke screen we are seeing today.
The paradigm shift (to use some buzzword the managementis going to like) here is the trope “lower the costs” which is followed by “letting us run the show” (aka your data and systems completely in our hands) .
Since the debacle of data migration on the platform my hopes are very very low: they could have asked us to register again in the new portal instead of TRYING to port and merge the user data from multiple portals (customer support, mysolidworks, 3dx…) to the new platform. let me be blunt: it was a CLOWN SHOW and a all the issued we are seeing until now could be avoided or mitigated, but it is a clear demonstration they do not care about their customers.
By the way, to download some macro from the market they still use-require you to login with a different account with solidworks as it was apparently not migrated to the new platform…
Probably the initial costs could be competitive to lure us on board, but given the trend to overpromise and under deliver it is going to be painful.
The platform approach with a facebook like, infinite scrolling collaboration mess is not something good for a structured company, let alone it overlaps with other functions our company is already paying and investing to integrate with other providers.
On the hardware side we have zero guarantees that the performance on the cloud would be on par with on premise server and workstation. 2 yrs ago CATI(iirc) made a broad presentation about SOLIDWORKS performance and the results of 1000s automated benchmarks they made.
They analyzed a cloud option and the cost to keep it on par with an on premise solution WITH SIMILAR performance was not deemed competitive at the time as the cloud power is not free, but the workstations will require the same computational power for CAD nevertheless, be them on premise or in the cloud.
Another can of worms is the API and all the band aid fixes, workarounds we use them to keep our solidworks users run with a decent productivity.
Just the other day I had the threads bug (big circles) popping up in the drawings and I had to come up with a macro to update 90+ drawing views in the same file to avoid hours of unproductive manual update for an issue not related to our design, but a software FLAW.
In a cloud environment always updated to the latest version we will be forced to every regression the software is going to expose us to, let alone the low priority (at least for ds pow) issues that cause us to lose producivity, but since there is a workaround (that costs us hours of cad data reworking) will never be fixed.
Remember what happened during the ONE TWO ONE TWO thread?
DS was so detached with reality they did not even realized how many times their software was crashing or failing per day in trivial things like the UI or basic functions.
With the platform they will be even more detached as your complaints will be buried at the bottom of the bottomless 3Dswym.
This sounds more and more like the CAD solution nobody in the industry asked for, and it will clearly put additional costs and problems for structured companies like us.
It “could” be a cash grab for DS with a small and large user base that do not have a critical mass of data or do not care of legacy data once their projects are completed. It “could” be a temporary solution for small makers as well, but they can jump to another platform anytime.
RANT OVER
edit: fixed a barrage of spell and typing errors. Sorry, I always write from my phone in suboptimal english.
