WorldCAD Access

Autodesk Consolodates Mac Architecture Market -- Really?

This headline caught my eye for its strangeness:

Mac architecture market consolidates

I found it on a Web site called MacNn, which runs this as its lead sentence:

Autodesk has acquired the assets of Green Building Studio, further consolidating the market for Mac-based architecture software.

The Mac angle is this: GBS has a link to Graphisoft, which has a version that runs on Macs. Commenters figure that Autodesk will cut off the Graphisoft link, and eliminate the Mac version of the software -- all false speculation, since Autodesk states that the Graphisoft version will be running again: "ArchiCAD add-on is temporarily unavailable while we are making updates to our new servers." 

But how MacNn gets from "Autodesk acquires GBS" to "Mac architecture market consolidates" is beyond me.

Strategic Research Suspends Operations Today

I thought was the most successful pr and marketing firm in the CAD industry, but that's not stopping owner Rachael Taggart from taking a rest from the biz. As the email bounceback reports:

SRPR is suspending its operations as of June 30 2008.

"Suspending," because Rachael will hang onto the Strategic Research name -- just in case, you know.

PR Sez

...one of my people just talked to Katie Cotton and she says Steve is in extremely good health and isn't frail at all and this whole thing about losing weight was just made up by the filthy scumbags in the media to stir up controversy and it was all just caused by the way the lighting was done on the stage at WWDC because they put in special lights to try to make Phil Schiller look less huge and the side effect of that lighting was that it made everyone else look thinner too but in fact Steve weighs more right now than he's ever weighed in his life and there's nothing to worry about and no reason to short the stock and everyone at Apple is just super-excited about the 3G iPhone and that's really what we're here to talk about and if you are going to keep asking about personal questions then this interview is just going to have to be over because we don't talk about hypotheticals and we don't talk about speculation and we don't respond to rumors and frankly from the way you phrase the question it sounds like you've already made up your mind and jumped to conclusions and you've already written your story without doing any reporting and so what point would there be in us trying to talk to you and anyway we're here to talk about the 3G iPhone and we're all just very super-excited about the new 3G iPhone and we're not ducking your questions we're just saying we're super-excited about this really exciting new product which we think people are going to be very excited about and we really just want to talk about that excitement because it's just so super-exciting and we don't have time to cover everything related to Apple and we don't have the bandwidth to be talking about all sorts of other things and we're just trying to stay focused on something that's very exciting and if you have other questions then those questions are things you should maybe talk about at another time sometime down the road and no I don't know when that time will be and I'm not saying we're going to talk about anything I'm not making any statements about when we're going to make a statement because there is no statement to make at this time and no that doesn't mean there will be a statement to make at some later point in time and seriously what is wrong with you people?

-- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs Jerry Yang

BW Interviews CB

Today's Business Week web page has an interview with Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. Nothing exciting to learn from Matt Vella's interview for those of us experienced with CAD -- other than Autodesk software designs the Mercedes Benz S-Class car. Not fully. I think the important phrase there is "with the aid of" and I am certain the unmade reference is to Alias, not Inventor.

X3DMEDIA acquires AEC magazine

They used to work there, now they own it.

Martyn Day and Al Dean used to work at EDA, a magazine publisher in England. Earlier this year, they left to form their own publishing house, X3DMEDIA, and quietly launched the x3media.com blog and related properties.

Today the duo announced that they acquired AEC Magazine ) from EDA Ltd. The print publication will continue as before, with an issue every two months available in print and online.

X3DMEDIA plans to launch Product Development and Manufacturing in late-June.

SolidWorks Replaces Pro/E

It is typical for a CAD vendor to announce that their software has replaced that of a competitor's. It is atypical to name the competitor. Dassault didn't mind doing that during their most recent conference call with finanacial analysts:

Here you can see a win for SolidWorks, which is called Leviton -- one of the leaders in electrical and electronic components. They are producing 25,000 different components and have decided to standardize on SolidWorks and replace both the combination of PTC and CoCreate.

Is it significant that Dassault's home page now lists SolidWorks first the lineup of its software?

DASSAULT SYSTEMES is the worldwide PLM leader and software innovator. Our SolidWorks, CATIA, SIMULIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA & 3DVIA solutions empower users to create, share and experience in 3D.

Missing from the list: Cosmic Blobs.

PTC's Reaction to Dassault's V6

During PTC's quarterly conference call with financial analaysts, Jay Vleeschhouwer of Merrill Lynch asks:

Are you seeing any customer piloting activity at all of Dassault’s V6 architecture?

PTC's chief product officer James E. Heppelmann responds:

I think most customers I've talked to are highly skeptical about that. A lot of them think that it's an out-there idea based on some questionable architectural approaches. For example storing CAD data in the database rather than a file system, which has been proven by several vendors not to work that well.

I'd say I see a huge amount of skepticism from customers and I think customers by and large prefer that Dassault just finish V5 -- rather than switch horses again and started talking about a new architecture.

I think Dassault potentially is walking the plank here with this V6 story, having not really satisfied customers with V5 and now embarking on a riskier yet strategy.

Link: PTC

3D Not For All

After hearing yesterday about Dassault's 3D app running in Facebook, I asked my daughter to hunt down 3D Collage. It's (apparently) a photo integrator: pick a 3D background, provide a photo, and the two are somehow merged.

She quickly found it, and click the big green START button. But the next page was a disappointment, for it read:

The 3D Life Player is not supported under Microsoft Windows Vista and this Web browser. Please use another Web browser.

She was running Facebook in FireFox 3 on Vista. As I have said before, Dassault needs to stop using the tagline, "3D for all."

Nemetschek Changes Logo

German CAD vendor Nemetschek has changed its logo from the stylized N

(which I rather liked, kind of reminded me of the logo for the old Burlington Northn railway):

...to the horizontal skyscraper logo:

The purpose of the logo is to emphasize the company's emphasis on AEC (architecture, engineering, construction.) Or, in the words of the press release:

The core of the new brand is the slogan “moving minds”, together with the use of a horizon as the key visual and a logo that reflects the group’s diversity. ... Use of a horizon as the key visual symbolizes the opening of new possibilities and makes room for unrestricted design freedom.

Every time a company comes out with a new logo, it seems the design has to be justified with flowery, inscrutable language. I'd like to see a company announce, "New logo. We like it. Get used to it" -- just for once.

Negative Software Pricing

We can pay $$$ for some software.

We can pay $0 for free software.

And now we can pay $150 for no software -- a brilliant idea from Sony. ($50 to not install trialware software on your new computer, on top of a required $100 fee for a "business" verison of Vista. Sony has since recinded the fee.)

Perhaps others, those who like pushing software upgrades onto our computers, such as Microsoft and Apple, will start charging us if we say "No!" to potentially-damaging upgrades.

(Reminds me of pay parking: being charged to not use my car.)