Evan on Engineering Software

Deelip Menezes has been talking in his blog about solid modeling technologies,  such as parametric feature-based, direct feature, and sometihng that appears to be feature-tree inference.

He seems to be hung up on technology.  User's don't really understand CAD technology.  All they really understand is that the CAD tools they have don't cut it.

One of the reason why I was (and am) so enthusiastic about Synchronous Technology is that it was the first major new technology from a top-tier CAD vendor, in perhaps 20 years, that wasn't mostly about pwning users.

Think about it.  Back in the days when CAD salesmen wore Gucci loafers and drove BMWs, they were selling a technology as addictive as cocaine.  They'd weave a powerful tale of how good it was going to feel once the customer got parametric feature based modeling... and customers, grasping for anything that would make things better, would gladly buy.  It was only after the customer was hooked that they realized the high was not as good as they'd hope for, and the cost to get it was more expensive than they'd ever imagined. 

Synchronous Technology, and all the other variants of direct feature modeling (especially those of Kubotek and SpaceClaim), are more like chocolate than cocaine.  Have you ever heard of a person screwing up their life because they're a chocoholic?

We can argue about technology -- whether feature tree inference is better than feature inference, or whether history-based modeling is better than amnesia-based modeling -- but , in the end, the most important question, for users, is can they get their jobs done better with this technology, or are they just trading one drug for another?