Everyone Has a Special Relationship with Microsoft

A press release appears in my email inbox Friday morning:

"UGS Demonstrates Support of Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative at the Global Automotive Summit"

Moments later, a second appears:

"CoCreate Demonstrates Support for Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative at the Global Automotive Summit"

The two companies could not be more different: the first is American, the second is German. The first is one of the biggest CAD companies in the world; the second is, um, much smaller. The first was owned by EDS; the second by HP. Heck, they don't even have the same press agent.

So, what's with the identical headlines? And the identical text in the body of the press release:

UGS writes: "UGS, a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services..."

CoCreate writes: " CoCreate Software, Inc., a leading provider of flexible CAD and collaborative PLM software applications..."

Okay, they're both a leader in PLM. When everyone's a leader, no one is.

UGS continues: "...today announced its support of Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative at the 2005 Global Automotive Summit. The Peak Performance Initiative identifies four core areas that Microsoft and its industry partners are focused on driving insight and innovation throughout the automotive community."

CoCreate continues: "...today announced its support of Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative at the 2005 Global Automotive Summit. The Peak Performance Initiative identifies four core areas that Microsoft and its partners will focus on as they drive insight and innovation throughout the automotive community."

Is it okay to plagerize press releases?

The Microsoft vision of the future for CAD.

I don't know if these guys saw the same chart that Microsoft showed me a few years ago at COFES. It was a diagram of interconnected rectangles and squares that showed how Microsoft planned to interface with the CAD industry.

Here's the scary part: 97.5% of the paper was covered with Microsoft's software and services and whatevers; in the far upper-right corner was a small square representing the entire CAD industry.

Comments

[Jeff Currier]

I don't believe that Microsoft's strategy is to own everything around CAD, PLM, or any TLA in the general engineering space.

I think what your seeing is that we are finally realizing that we don't do enough to support this space and are trying to make concerted efforts to support this area with technology, relationships with ISV's and expertise. Hopefully, by doing so we'll show our customers in the manufacturing area greater value by understanding their business and how our (and our partners) technology really helps to solve their business problems.

Hope this helps,

--Jeff--