Evan on Engineering Software

I'm at SolidWorks World for a few days. 

Last night, I attended the opening reception, held in the exhibit hall.  Some of the products I saw included TopsWorks, BlankWorks, MoldWorks, SplitWorks, DriveWorks, OptisWorks, CircuitWorks, DBWorks, MechWorks, CADWorks, KBEWorks, DezignWorks, SigmundWorks, CAMWorks, CustomWorks, FormatWorks, NEIWorks, ToolWorks, FabWorks and CustomWorks.  And none of these products were even from SolidWorks Corporation!

As amusing as all these products riding on the coattails of the SolidWorks name may be, there is some substance here.  SolidWorks has over 1,000 third-party partners, over a half-million users, over a quarter-billion dollars in revenue, and this week is hosting the largest MCAD conference in the industry, with approximately 3,500 attendees.

Let's put that in perspective -- Autodesk's conference last year attracted 5,000 attendees -- covering the entire spectrum of their product line.  A reasonable guess of the number of Inventor users attending would probably be between 1,000 to 2,000. (I don't believe Autodesk has released the actual number.)

Among the attendees at this year's SolidWorks World are a minimum of four Autodesk employees.  SolidWorks openly allowed them to attend.  I understand that there may be other Autodesk employees attending surreptitiously.

This is rather interesting, because Autodesk prohibits its competitors from attending Autodesk University.  I've personally attended Autodesk University for years, and was a speaker there for a several years.  This last year, despite no change in my employment situation, Autodesk apparently decided I was a competitor, and black-listed me, refusing to admit me, after I'd travelled across the country to the venue, and presented my credit card to pay for my entrance.  What's particularly ironic about this is that Autodesk uses my software technology in its products.

Beyond sending employees to attend a competitor's conference, Autodesk felt it might be a good thing to hold a major press and end-user event across the street, going to far as to even post a person at the entrance to the SolidWorks World Conference (inside the hotel), to direct attendees to its event.

So, how successful was Autodesk?  It was a disaster, so far as I can tell.  On Sunday, they only managed to get about 75 SolidWorks users to come by.  Most of the attendees at SolidWorks World are hardcore users, and are unlikely to switch to Inventor. (In my opinion, the user success story they were highlighting was so simplistic that no experienced SolidWorks user would have been impressed by it.)

I stopped by the Autodesk event today (Monday afternoon.)  In theory, they were having a press event.  The Autodesk rep, Jeremy Schmitz, there told me that they were just doing one-on-one presentations.  Translation: Very few press people came by, so they were just talking to the few to wandered in.

Most of the press and analysts I talked to were surprised that Autodesk would do such a thing, and were quite uninterested in dignifying this stunt by attending.

As for me -- I went because I was curious what insane thought process would cause Autodesk to do this.  Jeremy seemed to be under some mistaken impression that this was business as usual, and that SolidWorks would likely do the same thing.  Jeremy, if you're reading this, pay attention:  SolidWorks has no intention to stoop to this level.  They're an aggressive competitor, and they want to beat Autodesk, but they always compete on the up-and-up.

I'm still trying to figure out what Autodesk gets out of this.  They're unlikely to gain any significant sales from the handful of users they talked to, and they've done nothing to improve their standing among the press and analysts attending SolidWorks World.

As far as I can tell, this was a purely self-congratulatory prank, aimed at showing Autodesk top management how smart the Inventor marketing team is.  Pretty sad.