Overview of where CAD is going

An article has just been posted by Martyn Day , who appears to have quite an
in-depth knowledge of the whole picture.

His point about subscription cycles allowing CAD companies to walk away from
bugs and unfinished features has been traversed on this NG, although not
always with the clarity he brings to the question.

But he has a particularly clear grasp, it seems to me, of the business
imperatives which drive CAD company policy, and how they set up an
essentially disfunctional dynamic.

One point he makes, at the end, I think misses an important qualification:
he talks about the importance of users having a mixed CAD portfolio -- not
putting all their eggs in one vendor's basket -- but he doesn't point out
the cost penalties of doing so. I'm thinking of the problems which are
compounded when you have to climb several learning curves at the same time.

It strikes me that the biggest problem of the learning curve with a
subscription product is that it does not stay climbed. It's more like
running up a 'down' escalator than scaling a cliff.
The only way we can minimise the time the escalator is running, is by
upgrading late, and seldom. Unfortunately, the need for interoperability
with other businesses, and the continued absence of reverse compatibility,
means many users don't have a lot of leeway in timing their upgrades.

The majority of the downtime and lost productivity is not associated with
learning how features work, but learning how they *don't* work: ie
limitations, bugs, misleading documentation.

As most actual users are only too well aware, the finite amount of
horsepower ('smarts') they command has to be divided between understanding
the tool and focussing on the task. Given the need within one office to
operate on other people's models and drawings, it doesn't seem feasible to
have different users unable to use each other's CAD package competently. If
this is true, doubling up on tools doubles the amount of horsepower diverted
away from the actual task at hand.

The article is at
http://www.cadserver.co.uk/common/viewer/archive/2004/Jan/23/feature9.phtm