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Not talking

Roopinder Tara writes in his blog about Dassault and SolidWorks not talking – that is, not providing good translation tools between CATIA and SolidWorks.

Roopinder has brought up a good issue. I think his analysis is good – but I want to add a little to it.

For Dassault, SolidWorks presents a conundrum. By giving SolidWorks management a great deal of autonomy, the company has flourished. Yet, when the company looks around at likely competitors to CATIA, SolidWorks is at the top of the list. Yes, the fact that Dassault owns SolidWorks is a good thing, but that's little consolation to all the folks in France who make their living creating CATIA. For SolidWorks to win by killing CATIA would make little sense. Nor would it make any more sense for CATIA to win by killing SolidWorks.

The best answer I've seen is for the CATIA folks to keep on focusing on the aerospace and automotive markets, and for the SolidWorks folks to keep on focusing on the mainstream market. The two products are fundamentally distinct, and serve distinct markets.

If you look at it from the perspective of the product manager for each line, you'd probably be able to find a lot of things to focus on to help generate more sales before you started allocating resources to building interoperability tools between the lines.

No matter how important interoperability may be to users, absent compelling changes in the dynamics of the industry, it's never going to be at the top of the list for vendors.

There's nothing inherently evil about this – it's just the nature of the beast.

Posted on Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 07:02PM by Registered CommenterEvan Yares in , | Comments5 Comments | References1 Reference

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Reader Comments (5)

IMO, it would help strength both Catia and Solidworks to have some level of interoperability. UG and Solidedge has done this to some extent except that I believe UGS has geld back Solidedge sales. As it is now, Solidworks works better with UG than Catia. I can open a UG model in Solidworks, and manually update the Solidworks file if changes occur to the UG model.

It doesn't really need to be feature transfer. Just the ability for Solidworks to reference Catia model data and vice versa. this should include property meta data in the files for BOM purposes as well.
May 12, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterJason
Interesting points, Jason. To your last paragraph:
"It doesn't really need to be feature transfer. Just the ability for Solidworks to reference Catia model data and vice versa. this should include property meta data in the files for BOM purposes as well."

Does anyone know what the patent issue is with this type of referencing of data from one system to the other? A search reveals at least a couple of patents (eg 6847384, 6473673, so on) that sound suspiciously similar?! Could the real issue for other vendors be that they're worried about patent litigation?
May 14, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterPatently Worried
If I recall correctly, a few years back Solidworks got into some legal problems with PTC about reading in Pro/E files with features. They pulled the code out for a litle while but put it back later. Then PTC went on to try and excrypt the file format to prevent it...or make it more difficult. Autodesk seems to following in their footsteps.
May 15, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterJason
Dassault and Solid Works should take a lesson from UGS and Solid Edge. Two great products that are "fully talking to each other" and not on each others backs. They are at different levels of abilities but like a big brother looking out for the little brother, they get along fine. No rivlary there. Maybe Dassault should take a closer look and allow full translations back and forth and some curvature abilities. Then within the same commercial businesses designers, engineers and other tech people with different levels of abilities can still use and contribute to the "project" with the one they know best.
May 17, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterWilliams
UG hardly talks to Solidedge......meaning very little associativity between the two. And that's one big brother that bullies his little brother and now Solidedge has suffered in sales. UGS would much rather they sell you UG (3x more $$$) than Solidedge. Still, even with that said, at least UG and Solidedge can open each others files, just needs more "smarts" between the two.

Also, there is some technology transfer between Catia and Solidworks. Look inside the Solidworks program files and there are a number of dll files that begin with "CAT". Open those up in a text editor and it has Catia written all over them. I believe the Surface Fill feature is an example of Catia surfacing technology inside Solidworks.
May 18, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterJason

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