The CAD Insider

Editorial Ethics Pt 3--Vendor Written Articles

In a perfect world, a magazine would have sufficient editorial staff and expertise to write all of its own articles. This is certainly not the case in the CAD, CAM and CAE industry, where most publications toil with a bare bones staff and a lean editorial budget. To fill the pages, publications use contracted writers that vary from professional authors, users, and more than ever before--vendors.

When I was with CADENCE, we had one author (columnist Lynn Allen)  who worked for the company (Autodesk) that made the product (AutoCAD) she wrote about. Nowadays, the number of pages filled with vendor written articles abound.

Take the most recent issue of April 2006 issue of Desktop Engineering site:

• HPC for the Road Ahead - about computers at Ford, written by Srinivas Kodiyalam and Stan Posey, both of whom work for SGI, a workstation manufacturer
• Leveraging Data - about EDM, written by Jerry Waxler, who works for Synergis. Synergis makes EDM software
• Commentary - by Buzz Kross of Autodesk
• Beyond Backsolving - about calculation software, by Tom Lee of Maplesoft, makers of calculation software

Cadalyst runs vendor written articles, too. So does Machine Design.

The advantages of running vendor written articles are:

1. They're almost always free. Vendors don't demand cash to write like most authors do.
2. Vendor articles are usually well written and the typical vendor is very knowledgeable about the subject they are writing about (although they are likely to contain biases towards their own products)
3. Publishers love to exploit the goodwill generated from getting an article published. How can an executive turn down an advertising campaign with a magazine that was kind enough to give him/her several pages--for free--to espouse their views to thousands of potential customers?

So what's the problem? Vendor articles can be informative and interesting. Take Lynn Allen, for example. There are thousands of AutoCAD users who stay on top of their game because of Lynn. A vendor telling how to make the best use of their product in a magazine read by that products users is an example of a good vendor written article. However, I am leery of articles that suggest a solution that just happens to be what they are selling. Well meaning as they may be, I cannot bring myself to read them, much less believe them.

So before it's too late, I hope magazine editors can work to reverse the trend. Vendors are like the smart kids in the class, always with their hands up, always ready with a neat, perfect paper to turn in. It almost takes no effort for an editor to fill pages this way. It's way harder to coax an article out of a power user, many of whom don't fancy themselves as writers. And if they do labor through their Miller time scratching out an article, it's likely they'll want to be compensated for it. To top it off, the article will take more editorial scrubbing as finesse with the language has never been valued by the technically gifted. However, the end result will be a valuable rapport between real-world experts and eager readers.

Autodesk Infringes on Anti-Piracy Patent

Microsoft and Autodesk have to pay $133 million to David (as in David and Goliath) Colving after losing a patent infringment case. The case involved anti software piracy patents.

How's that for irony? Autodesk's software to prevent others from stealing was itself stolen.

Autodesk is going to "pursue its options" -- whatever that means.

Read all about it here:

Autodesk Loses Texas Patent Case, Has to Pay $18M - Bloomberg

Autodesk Found Guilty of IP Theft - Ralph Grabowski

Jury: Microsoft, Autodesk Infringed on Patents - cio.com

Autodesk, Microsoft Lose in Texas Patent Case - San Jose Mercury News

That's just a few-- there were so many news items about this that it was hard to find any other news today.

Editorial Ethics Part 2: Where is the Trust?

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Garrison Keillor

Are CAD magazines looking through rose-colored glasses? Every product cannot be a "Highly Recommended" or "Readers Choice." When was the last time you saw a really bad review of a product in a CAD magazine?

Never. That is what Sean Dotson says, in response to Editorial Ethics, that appeared here. Sean says this is due to a fear of offending advertisers. Conspiracy?

Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing too many bad reviews lately either. And I see a lot of reviews. Our site, www.caddigest.com/subjects/reviews_sw/ lists thousands of reviews of CAD, CAM and CAE software culled from hundreds of sources. Does our industry have no clunkers? Or, as Mr. Fane suggests, do bad reviews simply not get printed?

Witness just April's reviews from Cadalyst magazine. Only one product does not get a "highly recommended" rating.

• April 17 - Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP LCD Cadalyst -- highly recommended
• April 10 - VizUp v2, Cadalyst --highly recommended
• April 7 - AutoCAD 2006 and AutoCAD LT 2006 Bible, Cadalyst --highly recommended
• April 6 - MaxonForm for ArchiCAD, Cadalyst -- no rating given
• April 1 - AutoCAD 2007 -- highly recommended
• April 1 - Adobe Acrobat 3D, Cadalyst --highly recommended

Granted, reviews are subjective. I have not reviewed these products so I can't truly say if the reviews are valid. But in the case of the Dell monitor, I can see how other reviewers (outside our industry) found it:

• CNET: the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP gave it only a 7.6 out of 10 (see CNET review) using a weighted scale that accounted for setup, design, features and performance. In the $1,200 to $2,470 price category, the Apple Cinema HD Display scored higher, with a 7.9. But as far as I know, Apple doesn't advertise with CAD publications.
• ExtremeTech (owned by Ziff Davis) gave the Dell Computer an even more rigorous workout and found fault with "hotspotting" (really only noticeable fro DVD and high-def video playback), giving it an 8 out of 10 score. (see ExtremeTech review)
• PC Magazine gave the Dell unit and Editor's Choice award but only 4 out or 5 stars (see PCmag.com review)
• PC World gave it an 84 and a 'Very Good' rating (see PCW review)

The consensus from the computer press, based on the above non-scientific poll, would reveal that the Dell display is good, maybe even very good, but not "highly recommended." Cadalyst could easily argue that its rating is justified as faults found by the computer press that resulted in a lower rating (lack of DVD input, hot-spotting) may not be relevant to the CAD user and the Cadalyst reader.

Also, look at another review that appeared in Desktop Engineering, this one of Inventor 11 (see review). Throughout the review, the product is praised for all of its enhancements. However, in his summation, Al Dean states "Inventor is finally reaching the level of maturity that its position in the market place demands." Whoa! Finally? Is reaching? That means it's not quite there, huh? That is indeed damning by faint praise.

CNET, PC Magazine and PC World have been know to give bad reviews. Forget damning by faint praise, products have left their labs burning in flames. And what does this do for me, the reader? Well, for one thing, if respected experts are not afraid to say what they really feel, I don't have to read between the lines to make an informed buying decision. It's not necessarily that they condemn a lot of products, but they are courageous enough to point out faults where they exist. This, as CAD Insider blog readers point out, is something missing from our industry.

Autodesk Rides the Blog Wave

Of all the blogs that are out there (see TenLinks list of CAD blogs), and overwhelming number (54 out of 79 listed, or 68%) are related to AutoCAD and other Autodesk products. Is it because AutoCAD is the single best selling CAD product ever? AutoCAD's popularity may have something to do with blog proliferations but I suspect Autodesk, as a corporation, has given blogs an official push.

As a case in point, consider how many blogs are by Autodesk employees:

• Amy's blog on Manufacturing Community
• AutoCAD Insider - by Heidi Hewett of Autodesk
• Between the Lines - by Shaan Hurley of Autodesk
• Between the Walls - by Chris Yanchar of Autodesk
• Beyond the Paper - by Autodesk's Scott Sheppard
• The Evangelist Speaks - by Autodesk's Kevin Schneider
• In the Machine - by Amy Bunszel, Pete Lord, Andy Palioca, Jeff Wymer of Autodesk
• Lynn Allen's Blog
• Under the Hood - by Grant Rochelle of Autodesk

Smart move for Autodesk. It got right on that wave and is riding its crest. You don't expect big companies to move so fast. As has been covered here, print coverage of products is declining. Traditional publishers have been slow to transfer content to the web. In that vacuum, blogs have sprung up and Autodesk seems to have taken full advantage.

But can Autodesk count on its ragtag army of bloggers to be faithful? Surely, those bloggers already on its payroll can be expected to loyally sing the company tune. But what would happen if things went bad? What if Autodesk had a bad day and put out a dud? Remember R13? These independent bloggers are likely to turn mean.

Does Autodesk have a plan to control the monster? I wondered this out loud to Shaan Hurley, Autodesk employee and author of Between the Lines, one of the earliest blogs and still one of the most popular. Thinking he was "in charge" of the bloggers, I sent him a list of questions:

1. Have you officially been given responsibility for monitoring/helping/creating Autodesk-related blogs? If your responsibility is unofficial, does official responsibility fall under a particular department at Autodesk?
2. Does Autodesk have an official policy on blogs? If so, can you detail it for me?
3. Does Autodesk support any blogs or bloggers financially? Either with direct pay, advertising, software, trips to Autodesk? (not including Autodesk employees)
4. It seems Autodesk employees are encouraged to blog (please correct me if I am wrong). How does Autodesk support its own bloggers? (For example, maintainenance of blogs on company time is permitted? Is having a blog is looked on favorably during reviews? Etc.)
5. Have you received feedback from Autodesk upper management re. blog content? Have the executives shown they are reading the blogs?
6. How does Autodesk or its employees react to negative material on blogs? Have you or any Autodesk employee censured a blogger? If that hasn't happened yet, is there a game plan on how to handle negative material?
7. Does Autodesk assign status on a blog based on favorable/unfavorable content?
8. What sort of information does Autodesk send to blogger? Product release info, pre-release information, etc. How is that information distributed?

Shaan got back to me a few days later saying his blog was not an an official duty, just "a geek hobby gone big." Also, we (Autodesk) "do not pay or entice customers to blog their opinions..." Well, okay, that answers my first question, maybe part of another. I was referred to someone else at Autodesk for the rest. Stay tuned....

As Print Coverage Shrinks, Web Coverage Expands

Vendors attend trade shows to hawk their products. They pitch to the attendees but attendees seem to be dwindling over the years. For the ones who do show, it seems to take more little toys, t-shirts, Ipods, etc. to attract them and keep them at the booth. Most booths contain solitary, lonely looking figures. It's sad.

One adaptation shown by some vendors has been to lure the wandering press. They know that pitching to the press gets you way more bang for the buck. Get a story into a magazine, or these days a website, and you may have magnified your efforts a thousand fold.

But within the CAD, CAM and CAE industry, venues for editorial coverage in print have shrunk. Some magazines have gone away. Penton folded CAE magazine in 2001. Canada's CAD Systems stopped publishing in 2002. My old magazine, CADENCE -- once the largest CAD publication in the world -- was subsumed by Cadalyst in 2003. Computer Graphics World is still around but it stopped covering CAD years ago. Even magazines that survive have gotten thinner and thinner.

Several factors may have contributed. In a business that is advertising supported, there may not have been enough advertising to support all the magazines. However, from my point of view, the demise in print in due far more to the rise of the Internet. Most people find their information nowadays on the Web. In fact, I will more likely look for an article on the web even if the print magazine which contains the article is in a pile on my desk. Call it the Google effect. More importantly, for every magazine that went down, several other sources of information have spring up. As proof, I cite our CADdigest Weekly newsletter which last week listed 92 CAD, CAM and CAE articles. That is more than the monthly total of all the CAD magazines even when CAD magazines were in their heyday.

So for all the product managers and marketing personnel bemoaning that no one will review their product, take heart. There are more sources now than ever. It's just that the game has changed. Life may have gotten a little harder. You now also have to deal with message boards and blogs, whose authors often hide their identities.

Next, I'll explore how one company has used blogs to great effect.

Too Skinny and Too Rich

This is not about Carol Bartz, lame duck CEO of Autodesk. It could have been. She is rather svelte these days --and immensely rich. Another time. It's more about AutoCAD 2007--the skinny little box it comes in makes me wonder how rich Autodesk wants to get.

All a software CEO has to do is wander into his/her shipping warehouse after a release and see skids of large boxes filled with tons of user manuals and reference guides. A lightbulb will go on, "Why not put all that documentation on disk!" Production and shipping costs are greatly reduced. The company adds to its bottom line and shareholders rejoice.

Well, to be fair, downsizing the the box is a general software trend. The recent editions of Microsoft Office ships in a little more than a CD holder. My first experience with opening a software box that cost thousands of dollars and getting a thin book, a CD and air was actually SolidWorks 95.

It used to be you got practically a bookshelf's worth of books with AutoCAD. Talk about your thud factor. The immediate out-of-the-box experience was, "Wow, this is some serious software (to warrant all this documentation)." It was comforting, like you were getting your money's worth. Plus, you could take the books with you places, highlight passages, bookmark them. You could throw them in your briefcase, read them in bed. Ok, maybe that was going too far. After several 12-step programs, I don't do that anymore.

With AutoCAD 2007, you get a card that you have to fill out and send in before you get the User's Guide. It's free. Of course, this money-saving scheme would backfire if everyone did that. Autodesk is gambling that users actually prefer electronic documentation.

Autodesk retails for close to $4,000. But each box that goes out the warehouse door costs Autodesk only a few additional dollars. We are talking an enormous profit here. Autodesk made over $1.5 billion dollars last fiscal year and out of that, $329 million was profit. How much more would it add to each box to throw in some books? $10?

And what would that extra money spent in printing and shipping buy a software company? More than gratitude from old-fashioned book loving geezers like me. How about long term gains from less software piracy? If all a company is shipping is a CD, it creates an impression that there is little more to the product. A CD is easily duplicated. It costs less than a dollar to make an illegal copy. Printed matter costs a lot more. If I was an illegal user of AutoCAD, would I feel cheated because the legitimate users got some very impressive looking books on their shelves? Would I be more likely to buy a legitimate copy? Or, in a world in which CAD software always came with thick books, wouldn't the software police (AKA the BSA, of which Autodesk is a member) know right away when they were in a hotbed of software piracy because of the complete absence of such books?

Model Seekers - A New Class of CAD Products Emerges

At the recent NMW show, I met with Dr. Don Flugrad, Sr. VP and COO of ISEEK Corp, makers of CADSEEK search engine. Dr Flugrad showed me his software, a CAD-oriented search engine. Unlike search engines you are familiar with, like Google, that search words, CADSEEK searches shapes -- CAD models, to be specific.

CADSEEK will make an initial pass through your library of parts. Its Visual Navigator will  and sort them into a 3D multi color bubble diagram, in which each bubble represents parts that are of the same shape. Bubbles close to other bubbles are of similar shape. It's not a sight that is immediately self explanatory or familiar to the CAD users but the good doctor was able to navigate the bubbles to show bubbles close together were indeed similar--not something your normal directory listing can do.

More information at http://www.iseekcorp.com/.

It brought to mind other products of a similar ilk. CADFind by Applied Search Technology (http://www.sketchandsearch.com/) also claims to find all parts of similar size and shape for SolidWorks users.

Purdue University researchers are working on a similar project that compares "voxels" or volume elements to find similar parts. According to an article in Purdue News (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/040420.Ramani.CAD.html), design engineers spend six weeks per year looking for information on parts, often overlooking parts that their company may already have designed. Purdue's product may not yet be commercially available but you can try out its sketching interface at http://me98pc26.ecn.purdue.edu/search.aspx.

Freed From the Tyranny of Editors

Got a CAD tip to help others? Got a gripe? Get a blog and tell the world about it. Blogs are now the easiest way to distribute information. Anyone can start a blog and publish just about anything they want. Used to be that if you wanted to be published in a magazine or book, you had to get past the gatekeepers, also known as editors. Editors are a tyrannical lot. Their rule over what gets into the publication and what does not is absolute and final. A lot of material submitted to editors never sees the light of day.

I remember the thrill I got to have my first article published about ten years ago. Kathleen Maher, then editor of CADENCE magazine, called me about an article I had pitched to her. Actually, when she called me back she couldn't remember what the article was about. I couldn't believe I had her on the phone. As my heart raced with excitement, I described to her how users of finite element analysis make common mistakes that can be avoided. She thought they could use it. So for a couple of weeks I wrote and rewrote the article. When it finally appeared, I asked for several copies for family and friends. I had the article framed. It was a huge deal. I've written many articles since then but I'll always remember that one.

Nowadays, getting your first article in print may be even more difficult. There are fewer print publications for CAD than when I started. Luckily for would-be authors, along came the Internet and blogs. It seems like every one has a blog. In fact, the fastest growing list on TenLinks.com is our list of blogs. (see CAD blogs on TenLinks.com)

How to get started? I asked Ralph Grabowski of WorldCAD Access, one of the most experienced CAD bloggers. His reply was Google's Blogger (www.blogger.com), which is free, or if you want a more corporate  style, go TypePad (www.typepad.com)

And if you do create one on which pearls of wisdom about CAD, CAM and CAE will appear, do let me know. We may feature your post in TenLinks Daily and on our websites. Consider me tyrannical editor no more!

Editorial Ethics, Part 1: Riding the Editor's Coattails

I've heard the following more than once at trade shows, as a two people -- one wearing a suit --- approach a vendor at a trade show booth. Says the person not in a suit to the vendor:

Hi, I'm [name of editor] from [name of publication]. I had an appointment. This is [name of sales person]. Would you mind if they sat in on this meeting?

Sales people more often than ever will accompany editors to a product briefing. This may seem innocent enough, especially when sales people insist they are just "learning more about the market." I was first introduced to this practice at CADENCE magazine. I was a publishing newbie. Something about it didn't jibe with the high-minded moral framework that had been presented to me when I was hired at Miller Freeman (CADENCE publisher at the time).   

I don't think it was unique to Miller Freeman. It may have been prevalent in the industry. Editors may have questioned the practice. The response was most likely something like, "Unlike you with your wealth of industry experience/knowledge/training/exposure (pick one), we, the sales people/publishers come from a non-technical background. I used to sell cars/pour coffee/patch roofs. Without these very important educational meetings, how can I put food on the table?" This was best uttered with tears welling up in the eyes. You, arrogant and holier-than-thou, high-minded and mighty editor that you are, may have then realized that while your calendar was full of appointments at every trade show, nobody in those booths really wanted to see the poor advertising sales people. After all, vendors are at trade shows to sell something, not be sold to. Riding an editor's coattails was simply a survival technique, a sure-fire foot in the door.

Once a meeting takes place with both editorial and sales functions of a publication in the room, editorial ethics should prevent the subject of sales being brought up while the vendor is pitching their product or service. In my experience, the sales people were very well behaved. They would sit still and be silent through all the PowerPoint slides. However, they always seemed to linger around the vendor even after I left....

Even in the best case where the salesperson says nothing, it creates an connection between editorial and advertising in the mind of the vendor. But sales people do not make a living with their mouths closed. A few well placed question and comments, however innocuous they may seem on the surface, can reveal to even the most un-savvy vendor that the sales person also can bring something to the table. From there, it's a small leap for a vendor to assume that their advertising dollars will influence editorial coverage. This, quite possibly, something unscrupulous publishers will exploit.

Editorial Ethics--A Thing of the Past?

Most of us in the industry press pride ourselves on our ethics. As journalists, we are committed to tell the truth. We are to not bow to pressure or special interests. We are not to allow monetary gain to interfere with our ideals. In the publishing world, there is a separate and distinct sales side which dirties its hands with the 'business" side of publishing, allowing the editorial side to stay pure. We call this separation of church and state.

Without such separation, what's to stop large companies with big advertising budgets to influence the reporting of news? For example, a pharmaceutical giant could stop a story on birth defects caused by one of its products by threatening to pull its advertising. Or a automobile company could influence a magazine to print a favorable review of an undeserving car. Publishers have historically upheld editorial standards as a way to maintain ongoing trust with their readership.

But the tide may have turned. Publishers--especially those in the industry press in search of short term goals, may have blurred church/state boundaries. Consider what I've observed in recent years as I embark on a series of posts on the subject of editorial ethics.