heh. just had a really funny image of joe dunne doing jumping jacks every morning before starting one of his QA meetings!! i suppose there is some truth to that. but suppose the salesman could point to the newsgroup and challenge the prospective customer to find one negative post about SW quality within the last, for example, 6 months to a year. or even a no-crash guarantee (maybe refund 1% of purchase price for each CTD). Granted, with a SW approved system (vid card, drivers, etc), and could not be attributed to hardware failures. Or even just 1% for each repeatable crash? I would take that offer seriously. --nick e.
Hey, there's always real-estate... "improved performance" or "great view of the ocean" same thing right? - Eddy
Jonathan, Thanks for being mature and coming back with some good opinion to debate rather than immediately get your panties in a knot as some have. Stick around. We need more people like you here. I have to agree with you 100%. I would also say that if the shoe were on the other foot and I was running the business of selling SW I would tap into the user base for free Beta testing as well. I mean why not get the best people in the world to rigorously test your software at a very little, if any, cost to the company? I know a lot of people get excited about seeing new features, and some hope that their long-term problems are fixed, but I as some others have here as well, are over the excitement because we really don't feel like we have received much of a return on our investment in the past. But, if I was running the business and really cared, I would be listening to my users more closely and giving them what they want. I believe this to be the reason most are upset. They say they listen to their users and that is what sets them apart from other CAD companies, but sometimes we don't think we are heard. I think I would try a little better to get people motivated and give them a better incentive. Especially with the fact that lately things haven't been too smooth.
can i ask a question that isnt quite solidworks related Having used pro e on 2001 and solidworks i found that pro was mighty reliable to a degree, however having not been exposed to this beta testing malarky i was wondering if pro e users get to beta test and report bugs as opposed to just having what ptc comes up with(i have heard some good things about wildfire but then i have heard som horrendous things about it and now it seems wildfire 2 is getting some abuse too)forced down their throat. The big problem i saw with pro at a clients offices recently was the software and windchill compatability ,it was screwing the data base up and ruining months of work. now if pro users do get to beta test and it still comes up as a bad cut of software then there is something wrong much higher up the food chain(same applys for SW) this brings up two conclusions IMO if pro isnt beta tested as solidworks is by users like us and is not quite what it should be we can think ourselves lucky that we kind of get a say in whats wrong and can catch a lot of the mistakes before its released meaning our favourite(used loosly)software is better than the other apps (a good thing) if it is tested and still comes out not very good then i think somewhere people will have to make a stand and say to the big boys that if we are paying for crap we arent going to pay what your asking or find an alternative (i think the only place big corps like this will listen is if you hit em in the pocket) BTW you may need to read this a few times to get it to make any sense
In my experience, it really is no different from PTC to SolidWorks. Just recently, ProE (actually, pretty much any PTC product) had a Y2K- like bug in which it would stop working on Jan 10, 2004. PTC, did get a fix out, but 1.) implementing the fix was painful (manually finding dlls, replacing them, and more) and 2.) they did not catch every single related issue. We also had a problem in which all columns in a family table (the ProE equivalent to design table) would disappear. This would leave you with all your configurations being the same as the default. BIG problem when all of your bolts and nuts, etc. are driven by family tables. Remember all the grief SWX received (and are still receiving) over user interface constancy, especially when they started moving dialog boxes to the property manager? ProE (especially WildFire) is 10 worse in this respect. There are lots of other issues as well. Like I said, I don't think ProE is any different than SWX.
Funny. I can't wait to see the slow down that this creates. I may need to up spec the computers I requested for this year. Ken
"The updated user interface features Windows XP-style icons with 256 colors" i do everything possible to remove those jackass xp icons, now this. what's next, animated help assistant (ms office)?
