WorldCAD Access

Bricscad v9.3.9-1 Feels Like v10

AutoCAD users will look at the list of latest improvements to Bricscad, and say, "So?"

Bricscad users will read the list, and go, "Wow!"

When I read the list, I sighed, "Darn."

Bricsys was going to drop in their new, in-house geometry engine into version 10, which goes into beta in a month or so. Instead, they added it to v9.3.9-1, and made it available for download today. The new engine lets Bricscad do ho-hum-to-AutoCAD-users tasks like ignoring gaps in hatch pattern boundaries and filleting polylines with themselves. 

Plus another 80 or so changes. For instance, Bricscad goes beyond AutoCAD's list of system variables to provide access to settings AutoCAD does not. For example, this point.release adds two more sysvars:

• DispPaperBkg toggles the sheet image in paper space.
• DispPaperMargins toggles the printable area rectangle.

As for me going "Darn," I'm in the midst of writing a third book on Bricscad, and now I gotta go back and update the appendices with the changes v9.3.8-1 makes to commands and system variables. (The other two books were Inside Bricscad V9 and Customizing Bricscad V9.)

Bug Swatting

The release also fixes 170 bugs. 

...which is always a two-sided thing. Does 170 fewer bugs mean "Wow, it sure was in bad shape!", or does it mean "Wow, it is so much better now!"?  

Whatever the case, I've come to chuckle at CAD vendors who boast that they had 10,000 (or whatever) beta testers "ensure this this the best release ever!!!" -- only to ship one or two bug-fixin' service packs in the following months.

Getting Ready for Linux

The programmers at Bricsys continue their conversion of Briscad to OS-independence:

• Plot
• Print preview
• OLE (object linking and embedding)
• PastClip (paste from clipboard) and PasteSpec (paste special via dialog box).

This involves changing from MFC (Microsoft's GUI code, which locks the software to Windows) to WxWidgets, which frees software to run on multiple operating systems.

The Politics of V10

Dropping in the new home-made geometry engine; switching to WxWidgets. This is all part of Bricsys' master plan to wean itself from its IntelliCAD roots, and be 100% independent as of V10. 

The split is more than just code. Over at the IntelliCAD.net forum, member iCADsales.com (who markets progeCAD) accuses Bricsys of "unintentional plagiarism." He surmises that Bricsys learned how to program while a member of ITC. Bricsys, however, was a programming house before ITC came into existence, having writing the TriForma architectural add-on now owned by Bentley Systems.

I suspect the discontent is due to the slow progress IntelliCAD V7 is making relative to Bricscad. V7 also is a complete rewrite, to remove all code written by previous owners Visio, Boomerang, and SoftDesk. (Legally, it is Microsoft who owns the V6.x and earlier IntelliCAD code.) It's a big work-in-progress job, and Bricsys is faster in this race, because they have 2x as many programmers working on the problem.

(To be clear, I also write books on IntelliCAD, progeCAD, Bricscad, and Cadopia: Inside IntelliCAD and Tailoring IntelliCAD.)

PTC Shareholders: We Is Happy

PTC Q3 revenues down 17%? No problem.

PTC profit drops 74%? No worries.

Annual revenues falling even lower? Be happy.

That was the message share owners gave Parametric Technology, as the price recovered in a single day from the shedload of bad news issued after the markets closed on Jul 28:

Maybe it was all the happy talk of dominoes and dominating the CAD market through WindChill.

But can you think of which trad marketing message went missing in this call? 

Ans: The Grand Unified Theory. You know, the one where only PTC has a single CAD program to meet everyone's need (well, except for the home hobbyist). 

It is normal for a public company to hammer repeatedly a single marketing message to financial analysts. It's a kind of a "What this company stands for" statement.

It fascinates me when the marketing message changes. What was once so-o-o important, no longer is.

Also invisible during the call: CoCreate.

Dassault: Revenues Down 11%

Dassault Systems reported falling revenues for Q2 of e310.9 million, down 11% (using the same currency exchange rates as a year ago). 

Examining the numbers more closely, we see that the biggest drag was from services and other revenue -- down 24%. Mainstream 3D software revenue (that's code for "SolidWorks") was down 10%.

For Q3, the company expects a further decline in revenue. For the entire year, the midpoint of the estimated revenues is being maintained: e1,250 to e1,280 million.

(The press release appears to contain a typo, making it look like Dassault expects to earn over a trillion dollars this year: "e1,250 to e1,280 billion". But no: Europeans use commas in place of decimal points, so the amount reads as "e1.250 to e1.280 billion" to our North American eyes.)

Source.

"How to Trounce Competitors, Domino Style," by PTC

A word came up repeatedly (30 times, no less) during PTC's quarterly conference call this week: domino. Seeking Alpha's word analysis determined domino was the 7th Most Frequent Word In This Transcript, coming right after business and Dick.

Here, for example, is PTC ceo, Richard (Dick) Harrison, saying it three times in one sentence:

In addition to the domino account -- and I think that this is something that we want to spend more time on -- I don't want to water down the importance of the domino account that each of the three major geographies, North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, has-- a list of very recognizable named accounts that are owned by our competitors, that have active displacement campaigns today, in addition to the domino account.

From the context, and from the meaning of the word itself (one thing toppling over many others), a domino account appears to be a customer-win so significant that it can knock over competitors. 

Here is an example given by PTC coo [chief operating officer] Jim Heppelmann:

Airbus is our #1 customer by a factor of 2x-3x, and that just gives you the idea of the power behind the domino strategy, and the potential that they are to unlock a huge opportunity for PTC. 

What Mr Heppelmann is hinting to the listening financial analysts is that getting WindChill into Airbus has the potential to knock out Dassault Systemes's CAD software. Or do he dreams.

Here's what I think is a "domino account": PTC convinces a major customer to take on WindChill, its PLM software that works with major CAD packages. With a foot in the door, PTC then dominoes the competition in two ways: (1) by slowly displacing competitor CAD packages with Pro/E; and (2) by attempting to get the major customer's clients to switch to PTC-branded software.

Messrs Harrison and Heppelmann explain:

(1) We have a significant number of developers who work on integrating our competitors' authoring tools or CAD tools into the Windchill database. So it is becoming easier and easier for us to go in and tell the customer, "Keep your Catia seats or your NX seats, and we will manage them directly with the Windchill product." ...the heterogeneous designing context.

(2) ...the commitment to the customer to become married to PTC.

PTC expects domino accounts to generate $5-$10 million a year "once they become mature, in the third year." The company wants to win 10 domino accounts in this fiscal year, and has won 6 so far. Names include:

• Airbus
• Caterpillar
• Lenovo
• Nokia
• Volvo
• A German retailer

Source.

"How to Loose Subscribers and Maintain Revenues," by PTC

During yesterday's conference call with financial analysts, PTC executives took this question from Richard Davis of Needham & Co:

This is a little bit of a tactical question, but Harley Davidson has layoffs, John Deere has layoffs, and you have one-year renewals. How do you keep [maintenance subscription revenue] when these come up for renewal, and your customers have fewer employees?

That's easy, says PTC ceo Richard Harrison. Just charge them more:

Let us say a company has a 1,000 users. That justifies a 30% discount. If they come back at renewal time and say, "We want to only renew 700," we're going to look at our sheet and  say, "Okay, at 700 users you only get a 20% discount." And so we end up netting about the same amount.

But it also helps to have empathy:

We also had some creative stealth campaigns where we are empathetic to customer situations. We don't want to feel like we won't listen and we're not in partnership. I know we have had a couple of situations on the Pro/E side where people wanted to reduce the licenses and we ended up keeping our price pretty much the same.

Source.

"The Future of CAD," by PTC

According to PTC ceo Richard Harrison, the future of CAD is not CAD, but data:

The CAD market is nice and we have the best CAD products. But we have really become a data management PLM company with the best authoring too,l Pro/ENGINEER.

If you really want to be in a growth market going forward-- The CAD market is going to be low single digits [less than 9% annual growth] for everybody. The action in the next five years is going to be in the data management space, in:

• Connecting diverse companies around the globe
• Connecting their supply chains.
• Helping them collaborate.

Even the community aspect (or the social product development aspect) of building products more easily with those supply chains, that is where the action and the growth is going to be.

Source.

DoubleCAD XT Pro's First Educational Win

University of the Pacific's School of Engineering and Computer Science of Stockton, California is standardizing on IMSI/design's DoubleCAD XT PRO for 2D CAD instruction. (This is the commerial versionl; DoubleCAD XT is the free one.)

Since CAD vendors are known to give their software away for free to educational sites, what's to gain by going with DoubleCAD Pro? Here's the reasons sysadmin Paul Burdick gives:

• DoubleCAD XT PRO feels familiar [to AutoCAD LT, the only competitor CAD package mentioned in the press release] yet had more features, like geometric constraints.

• Hampered by other CAD vendors' licensing and activation technologies.

• DoubleCAD Pro's deployment saves installation and licensing headaches.

• Students can download free non-watermarked non-restricted copies for personal and business use.

I teach part-time at a local technical college, and so I know that easy deployment is a big deal for sites like these. While my students could get Autodesk software free from the the company's educational site, frequently they found it was limited to 30 days, because they could not get the 13-month license code that was apparently available. And they found the watermark annoying.

Like I said, deployment is a big deal at colleges.

In the end, it's the marketshare that determines the CAD vendor's attitude. Autodesk is huge, so they need to be restrictive; IMSI/design is small, so they have to be relaxitive.

The Canary in Our Coalmine: PTC Down 11%

Parametric Technologies this afternoon reports that Q3 revenues were $226.2 million, down 11% from a year ago (based on constant currency and non-GAAP).

The company hopes end contraction and to return to growth in 2010 with a 20% increase in EPS (earnings per share).

PTC is guessing that Q4 revenues will be $235-$245 million, and for all of 2009 approximately $931 million.

Source.

Oldest CAD Vendor?

Who is the oldest CAD vendor still operating? My guess is Intergraph (originally named M&S Computing), based in Huntsville Alabama. Its first product was real-time software for NASA, sometime in the 1960s -- which makes it at least 40 years old. 

Who is the longest serving employee in CAD? That might belong to the staff at ACS Software, who have been there since the company's beginning in 1981. Debbie Simpson of ACS sent a press release yesterday with this footer:

Did you know that 2009 marks ACS Software's 28th year in business?! That's right, ACS has been around since 1981 -- one year before Autodesk opened their doors.

ACS Software develops the AutoEDMS Document Management & Workflow Solution for workgroups, and they just released the SR4 update for v6.5.

www.autoedms.com/downloads/update-info/65SR4RelNotes.htm 

What's New in Autodesk Patents

Autodesk last summer applied to patent the navigation wheel found in some of its newer software.

Link to patent application 

More interesting is their patent application for a presumptive drafting solution:

...a relevant geometric entity is identified based on how the cursor is moved over the drawing. A presumptive drafting solution is then provided [such as object snaps] based on the identified... entity. In addition, prior drawing solutions... are obtained and compared to the... geometric attributes.

Patents are hard to read, but this one seems to do the following:

• Select geometry by the way the cursor moves over it (selection without picking)

• If more than one presumptive drafting solution is available, then a priority process sorts them.

• When the cursor moves nearly parallel to an entity, it receives a higher priority; nearly at right angles, low priority. See figure.

• Making an x-shaped movement near the center of a line performs a mid-point osnap.

• Making a circle-shaped movement near the end of a line performs endpoint osnap. See figure.

• Making either movement could also extend a line, or not. See figure.

• Pausing over a point identifies it.

• Rules can be applied so that rectangles on layer Desks are always 3" away from wall socket blocks; or blue circles are usually tangent to yellow lines.

The patent claims any kind of gesture, and may well indicate Autodesk's plans for touch-based CAD.

Link to this patent application.