Editor's Day

When a CAD company invites editors to visit them for a day or two, as did Synergis Software this week, it's not just a chance for the company to market itself to the editors, but also time for the editors to exchange notes with each other.

Roopinder Tara of Tenlinks.com has been writing a real-time diary of learning SolidWorks from scratch. I asked him why he picked SolidWorks. "Because it was on my shelf."

If you've been following his blog at CAD Insider, then you know that he's been having problems with SolidWorks, and resorted to four days of training. We editors nodded sagely to this truth: if you need letters to the editor, just write something negative about SolidWorks.

What makes SolidWorks users as insecure as Apple Mac users, I wondered to the group.

Synergis put us up at a fabulous 150-year-old hotel. How fabulous? The stairs creak. The conference room in the basement has stone walls and a brick ceiling.

One of the editors used to own a similar style of hotel. How much fun did he have running it? Put it this way: he owned it ten years, and it took four years to sell. Since he and his wife lived in the bed'n breakfast-style hotel, he couldn't even make a cup of tea to relax in the evening without a chatty guest trying to be friendly and hit him up for some conversation. He finally bought a house across the street for privacy.

I got to meet Kenneth Wong, who free-lances for CADalyst. He comes from Burma, where, he told me, punctuality is unknown. Ask when the train leaves the station, you're told, "This afternoon." He also told some funny stories of his first job as a bank teller.

Roopinder told a story about getting an airplane to return to the gate so that he could get on it -- at age 18! David Cohn related how he got a plane to change from 25th to leave Chicago to 3rd in line. I told how my flight from Vancouver was delayed 3.5 hours because the crew needed sufficient sleep; and then the same thing happened on my return trip. United Airlines does not care that all the passengers went without sufficient sleep (I was up at 3:30am) to get to the airport on time, and can't be bothered to staff sufficient air crews.

You can read about the touchy-feely side of Synergis at Synergis Software's Coming Out Party [CAD Insider]. I'll have my report in next week's upFront.eZine.

Comments

[Rob M]

"resorted to four days of training"

Give us a break! Training is a recommendation for 90% of customers. Isn't getting people productive quickly what it's all about? Isn't that why you sell ACAD guides?

As to your point on letters to the editor... There is a core of mac users who are zealots. The reason why you get responses when you talk about SolidWorks is because there are a heck of a lot of active users and there is a very strong reseller community supporting customers.

There is a difference between being negative and correct, and just negative.

[Jason]

Of all 3d cad programs, SolidWorks users seem to be the most passionate about their tool of choice (I admit to being one of them). I also use UG and the online community for it is non existent. For me its about Autodesk failing to really develop and update Autocad, they just sat on teh cash cow. It took a company like SolidWorks to make wake them up from the slumber.

I guess Autodesk has ruled the 2d roost for so long that there is a bit of a Anti-Autode$k fervor similar to Mac versus PC, OSX versus Windows. The difference is SolidWorks isn't a niche, they have quite a bit of the 3d market. Autodesk still owns the market for overall cad but they'll have to get used to no longer having the whole amrket to themselves. No one company will dominate the 3d market. Of course, how many will make it in the end?