Evan on Engineering Software

Over on his blog, Ralph Grabowski has recently been talking a bit about how Autodesk Inventor has surpassed SolidWorks in the number of seats sold. This "seat count" metric seems to be important to Autodesk, as users might infer that more seats means a better product.

Here's my perspective:

- Autodesk has bumped seat counts of Inventor both by bundling the product with its drafting products (with preferential pricing), and by selling at extreme discounts to targeted accounts. SolidWorks maintains much closer to list pricing on their products. To my knowledge, when Inventor and SolidWorks go head-to-head in major deals, SolidWorks is always more expensive.

- Monster.com currently lists about 350 Inventor jobs, and over 1,000 SolidWorks jobs.

- The COO of a CAD company that competes with both Autodesk and SolidWorks told me a few days ago that his people see about 10 SolidWorks users for every Inventor user. Maybe he was exaggerating - but I have no reason to believe he was.

- SolidWorks World will be opening tomorrow in Las Vegas. I've been told by a reliable source that the attendance is anticipated to be major -- enough that, when compared with the attendance at Autodesk University (which includes users of all of Autodesk's products), it should be possible to make some inferences regarding relative number of seats of both products that are actually in use.

Given all this, my sense is that SolidWorks' impact in the MCAD market far exceeds that of Inventor - despite Inventor holding an official lead in seat-count.