Evan on Engineering Software

Mike Payne, Executive Chairman for SpaceClaim, and one of the more colorful people in the CAD industry, was just interviewed by the Boston Globe, for his thoughts on the potential sale of PTC. You can see a video of the interview here. You can read the article here. (Both are worth looking at.)

While I think Mike’s perspective on PTC is probably as thoughtful as anyone’s (he was one of its founders), I’m more interested in his comments about products:

“When products first emerge, they’re usually priced very high. They’re for the specialists… and they usually don’t work very well. As they start to work better, then more people can use them. And if you want lots of people to use them, you have to make it far more reliable, you have to make it easy to use – but that’s not enough: You have to make it easy to learn, and easy to remember, because people are not so hung-up on being the specialist on things.”

Consider the challenge PTC faces in making Pro/E more reliable, easier to use, easier to learn, and easier to remember.

PTC spent $100 million to develop the most recent version of Pro/E (Wildfire 4.0). All told, PTC spent over $1.3 billion on R&D in the last 10 years, not counting the R&D spending at the companies it acquired. I’d have to assume that Pro/E Wildfire 4.0 is more capable, and likely more reliable, than its predecessors. Yet, I’d be really surprised if it was more than marginally easier to use, learn, or remember (at least, for non-trivial projects) -- not only because such changes are very difficult to make, from a technical perspective, but also because they’re not something that most Pro/E users are really pushing for.

Based on conversations I've had with dedicated Pro/E users, what they seem to want most of all is more reliability, more performance, and more capability. They don’t want major overhauls of a program that they already have a big investment in learning how to use.

Yet, this really raises the issue of how PTC can possibly satisfy their core users, and still have a product that’s attractive to a lot of other people.

PTC’s answer appears to be to have two separate products: Pro/E is a parametric feature-based (history) modeler, while CoCreate, which it acquired last year, is an explicit (history-free) modeler. (I often use the term “feature inference modeler” to refer to explicit modelers, such as CoCreate, that use feature recognition and inference in combination with explicit modeling. I won’t push the term here, as it’s easier to just say “explicit” or “history-free.”)

Jim Heppleman, PTC EVP, said in Manufacturing Business Technology magazine that the application of parametric verus explicit modeling is an issue of form versus function: parts that are functional are amenable to parametric modeling. Parts that represent form are amenable to explicit modeling. More importantly, he came out and admitted that explicit modeling is fundamentally easier, at about one-third the work.

In short, what Heppleman seems saying is that the biggest impediment to usability in Pro/E, at least for some parts, is inherent in how the program works. In designs where model history is not necessary (which may be the case more often than PTC would like to admit), throwing it away could triple a user’s productivity.

While I think Heppleman is probably oversimplifying, this still raises an obvious question: If there is a significant class of parts that could be completed with substantially less work using explicit rather than parametric modeling (and that class, incidentally, includes all imported “dumb” parts), why has PTC never integrated this capability into Pro/E?

I can only conjecture about the answer to this question, but I have a suspicion that it has something to do with PTC being named Parametric Technology Corporation.

While CoCreate does explicit modeling, it’s not really a solution for Pro/E users. CoCreate is a mature product, with a development history dating back to 1984. There is no synergy between CoCreate and Pro/E that would suggest that learning one would make learning the other particularly easier. Though it’s likely that the CoCreate and Pro/E teams are working to build connections between the programs, I’d personally be surprised to see a merged product that both worked, and satisfied existing users of either product. (At least, without at least three major relases to get to that point.)

PTC's competitors seem to be offering a better history-free solution for Pro/E users than it does.

Consider a customer that is dedicated to Pro/E. SpaceClaim offers a standalone CAD product for explicit modeling that works quite synergistically with Pro/E. The only advantage that CoCreate might have in these accounts is that it’s owned by PTC. (And that may, or may not, be an advantage.)

If customer is already wavering on Pro/E, but hasn’t switched for lack of a compellingly better alternative, Siemens may have something that could get their attention: Synchronous Technology. Solid Edge, Siemens’ mainstream product, has been targeted squarely at Pro/E since its introduction in 1996, and now, with Synchronous Technology, it offers both history-based and history-free modeling in one product.

For PTC, I don’t see an easy way out of the competitive jungle, at least, so far as CAD goes. PTC used to regularly kick its competitor’s collective asses. Then Microsoft Windows NT came along, and opened the door for low-cost competitors, such as SolidWorks, Solid Edge, and Inventor. Now PTC itself has legitimized history-free modeling, openly admitting that it’s a lot easier to use than history-based modeling.

The author of the Boston Globe article asked PTC about the idea that someday all of us will be working with 3D design software the way we use web browsers or Microsoft Excel. Brian Shepherd, a PTC VP, responded "we're focused on the needs of professionals."