RANT: Is 2006 ready for the big time yet?

How about forming a SolidWorks Users Union...

We can collectively demand voted on improvements or else we ALL stop
paying the yearly subscription to SW.

 

We did this a few years ago (2001?) As I recall, Mark Stapleton (Sporky)
started a subscription boycott. It got the attention of SolidWorks
management. Mark and two others (Paul Kellner and Ken Redman?), known as the
Three Amigos, were invited to Boston to talk to them. They promised to do
better, and did improve a bit. Now they seem to be getting out of hand
again.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

SW seem to do things in their own sweet time and way whatever the messes
they get into and no statement of regret, apology etc is ever forthcoming.
I don't think trying to organise a boycott will be effective in changing any
undesirable performance on the part of some errant SW employees.
I think the upset at the moment is mainly about PDF bugs and
sp3,3.1,3.3,3.4? and it is true this has been badly handled but there is not
a lot that can be done about it other than make sure customer
dissatisfaction is heard loudly through all channels. Contact you VARs and
make use of the customer experience section of the official forum to make
your opinions known if your work is really affected by this. Most likely you
will only hear weasel words in reply but at least they hear it and it will
filter up.
At the moment they are still doing better than previous releases where every
sp had follow ups. Clearly the work swapping over from Bluebeam to Adobe was
not done in time for the sp3 and there are still bits being sorted now. It
must have been a known inside the company that it wasn't ready for real
use.For this SW deserve a good ticking off but in their defence perhaps they
have some unpublicised issues with license agreements to deal with that have
hampered their progress.
As per usual they make everything much worse will poor communications.
I had hoped we were making real progress in that area but it doesn't look
good this time...my condolences to those on the sp treadmill.

 

Mark Stapleton (aka Sporkman), Mark Mossberg and I. The Three Amigos
moniker originated with the SW receptionist.

For what it is worth, I did another alternate position view with a
similar assembly and it appears to have hope of working. So what we may
be looking at is a lack of robustness when faced with a less than ideal
assembly. This doesn't portend well for new users or old users with bad
habits.

 

What will get their attention are some note worthy customers jumping ship to
a competitors product, and that competitor advertising the fact that it
happened.

Ken

 

Unfortunately most people have a substantial commitment to SW in financial
terms, file types and also user knowledge so there would have to be
something very serious happen for a company to abandon it for something
else. It is still a good product but quality drifts astray too
often....which is why I have suspended subs )
As has been pointed out often before it is an industry wide problem though.
I really hoped SW had put some energy behind the scenes into improving
matters so I am prepared to cut them a bit of slack with the transitional
PDF issues as a regrettable blip however if this continues into stuff ups in
sp4 and all the way to a sp4.4 a lot of customers could be set back to
thinking about the 05sp1 experience and the like.
SW big wigs should take heed of the grumbles audible here at the moment.
They/we don't need another loss in confidence in their ability to deliver sp
that really do work.