Oops: Inventor vs SolidWorks

In this week's upFront.eZine, I predicted: "I know, I know. I'm going to hear from you the oft-repeated accusation that over 50% are education sales, and so they don't count." And the prediction came true even before my bulk email software finished sending out the issue to my eight thousand readers. Brad Holtz of Cyon Research was good enough to telephone me and warn I was mixing numbers. And then the emails came.

It was my fault. But only partly. Here's what happened:

Sales in Q3

I took information from both CAD company's Q3 reports. Parent company Dassault Systemes reported that "SolidWorks new seats licensed increased 18 percent to 8,005 in the quarter." DS forgot to specify that the 8,005 number excluded education seats.

Autodesk reported that "In total, we shipped over 46,000 seats to our manufacturing customers in the quarter -- nearly three times as many as our closest competitor." In its quarterly report, Autodesk hints that the 46,000-number is not purely commercial: "...selling nearly 12,000 new commercial seats...of our 3D manufacturing products...". Educational sales are not mentioned.

Total Sales

SolidWorks uses the phrase "over 400,000" at its Web site, which includes commercial and education seats, but this is not specified.

In its Factsheet, Autodesk lists 511,300 in total sales, but again the mix is not noted.

As soon as I was alerted to the problem, I updated the archive at upfrontezine.com and WorldCAD Access with the following numbers:

CAD Software Brand --- Inventor --- SolidWorks --- Notes
Seats Last Quarter --- nearly 12,000 --- 8,005 --- (excludes education seats)
Total Seats --- 511,300 --- 452,000 --- (includes education seats)

Comments

[timnite]

i dont suppose any of you master CAD gurus ever heard of brand loyalty... www.autodesk.com

[LiquidDH]

I'm a student at SUNY DELHI in there 2 year CADD program. This program is concidered by many to be the finest on the east coast. Our success and placement rate are both at 97%. I've had the pleasure of using both Inventor and Solid works and I must give the advantage to Solid Works. Solid Works has a much easier environment to work in, and using "work planes" in Solid Works is better than Inventor. There are more options to choose from in Solid Works, however right now I'm using inventor and it is a sweet program to use, but it is a little slow sometime. I give Solid Works a slight advantage. Plus Solid Works is a offshut of unigraphics, which is the bomb.

[Bill McEachern]

Hi Ralph,

The more pertinent metric is how many of the seat sales are actually going into production and staying there.

Admittedly hard to nail down, but the Inventor seats in my view are the ones that have more of this uncertainty than SolidWorks.

Nobody buys SolidWorks to get their 2D tools......