The CAD Insider

CoCreate CAD Give Away

With CoCreate Personal Edition (PE), CoCreate joins the ranks of CAD vendors who give away a version of their CAD product. Over 50,000 copies of PE have been downloaded and registered. However, it is not known how many are in active current use.

The program file is about 90MB (which is small relative to the size of most general purpose CAD programs). To download it, you have to fill out a short questionnaire but it's fairly painless. After the survey, CoCreate shoots you a link via email to activate the product. After initial activation, the program must be reactivated every 72 hours. Geoffrey Hedges, the man behind the program, tells me the reactivation can happen often without the user knowing it. So why keep CoCreate PE users bound to the Internet? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Pluses

• up to 50 part assemblies
• no time limit
• no ads
• full 3D

Minuses

• users must logon on every 72 hours or program stops working.
• does not have advanced surfaces, threaded holes or hole wizard, sheet metal, CAM, FEA or other add-on modules
• data files cannot be read by commercial version. However, if customer upgrades to commercial version, they can upload all PE files and CoCreate will convert them to commercial version.
• no telephone support, no live support of any kind. tutorials are available online and a user forum.

You can download CoCreate Personal Edition for free here.

CoCreate Follow Up

CoCreate origins go back to the 1980s when HP took its in-house CAD system and spun it off, selling it under the names ME10 (for 2D) and ME30 (for 3D). It was reinvented as CoCreate a few years later, its name emphasizing collaboration. In fact, users in different location could work on the same model simultaneously.

That did not catch on, explains Ulrich Mahle, who heads CoCreate's marketing and R&D. "We found designers did not want to continually show their changes. They would rather just show the finished design."

So without the unique selling point suggested by its own name, CoCreate seeks to differentiate itself by another way and now seems to have found it. They call it "dynamic editing," the ability to change  a solid model without constraints, unencumbered by its history. Given that the current crop of popular solid modelers (SolidWorks, Pro/E, UGS, more) are all history based. clearly CoCreate has a challenge in convincing potential customers.

CoCreate is also different from other CAD companies in the following ways:

• Its product development cycle is characterized by quick 3-week iterations in which a task (like a new feature) is created and tested, rather than the more conventional one long development phase after which are code base are gathered up. In addition,  programmers work in pairs, each complementing the other. Daily show and tells keep the whole team aware of individual and total progress.
• CoCreate has no large overseas development staff. A main reason is the interplay that the above-mentioned iterative development process demands. According to CC, overseas development offers a false economy and its onsite developers are each worth multiple offsite developers.

Six week vacations are the norm. But when they are working, they put in the hours. "Nobody works an 8 hour day." Food at the very nice cafeteria is subsidized. I should have asked if CC is accepting applications.

An Introduction to CoCreate

Unlike most other user meetings, the CoCreate user meeting did not start until 11:30. I took the opportunity to get in a morning run through Sindelfingen, Germany, past a beer garden, through the quaint old town center, with shops, bakeries with pretzels, cafes and then to its outskirts past Daimler-Benz' largest manufacturing plant. Mercedes, headquartered in nearby Stuttgart, spreads its factories and offices around Sindelfingen as well, and I am told is also the town's biggest employer. However, the town does not seem to suffer too much from its industry, as do American cities. In fact, only once did I hear the clanging of metal. Certainly, my lungs appreciated the crisp, clean air.

William Gascoigne, CoCreate CEO, addresses the crowd of over 360 users in Sindelfingen, Germany.

I asked if Daimler-Benz was a CoCreate customer? Not even one seat, said Dr. Thomas Roser, CoCreate's Europe Marketing Manager and the emcee to the one-day user meeting. "Not our type of customer." CoCreate's niche is high tech electronics firms, a specialty that harkens back to its birth, when it was an in-house tool of Hewlett Packard. But even within such firms, CoCreate counts most of its 11,500 customers (and over 100,000 seats) in Europe and Japan. Though CoCreate maintains a small office in Ft. Collins, Colorado, the US market is still one that needs to be cracked. Only 15% of its users are in the western hemisphere, compared to 47% are in Europe, and 27% in Asia

Consequently, its user meetings are held only in Japan (650 attended the last one) and in Germany, where on this day over 360 were present.

Dynamic Modeling

If CoCreate had a company face, it would be grinning ear to ear. Recent media coverage has been favoring history-less solid modeling (the chief practitioners being CoCreate, who calls it "dynamic modeling," and Kubotek) and quotes from well known industry writers lit up the big screen. Customer presentations were also on message as customers extolled the "flexibility" CoCreate gives them and the ability to quickly change existing designs. One customer (Xenon) explained how designing a new assembly machine from an existing design made them ever so thankful of having CoCreate to do it with, as opposed to the (far more common and way less flexible) history-based solid modelers.

Autodesk Needs to Lead in Technology, Too

If you look at financial metrics, Autodesk is a clear market leader. It is closing in on $2 billion annual sales. But what of technological leadership?

At a recent press event, Autodesk was asked about haptics - -a technology that would allow the ability to "feel" a design, arguably a technology on the frontier of CAD research. The question seemed to reflect an genuine expectation, asked by a member of the press who sees a lot of new technology of an Autodesk VP, who might be expected to know of it. We'd all seen a lot of gee-whiz graphics by that point, including "real-time" ray tracing. Call me jaded, but lately, the changes in visualization seemed to be incremental, each version eking out a tiny bit more realism than we had before. But a real engineer will pick up a product, feel it, truly interact with it. Haptics might be a way to get that interaction.

Autodesk knew nothing of haptics. Ditto, virtual reality. The press member stopped short of asking about nanotechnology, another ground breaker.

A minor point or an indication of a larger problem? If a market leader cannot explore leading edge technologies, who will? Autodesk has long been flush with cash, why not use it to advance the state of the art by applying it to R&D?

Autodesk may argue that its acquisition of small technology-intensive companies is sufficient to keep it on the leading edge. But I doubt if many small companies can invest in pure research, the research-for-research's-sake from which there are many flops but also huge discoveries. Some companies are famous for their research, such as IBM, GE or 3M, from which we got Big Blue (the chess-playing super computer), Lexan, or yellow sticky notes. That kind of trial and error takes a lot of money.

It seems like universities are still doing pure research. I had attended the recent CAD Conference last June, in which much pure research was given a spotlight. For example, a couple of presentation were given on shape-based search engines. But none of the major CAD companies were in attendance. What a lost opportunity, it seemed, as all that CAD research being done for free, so to speak. If I was a CAD vendor VP, I'd make sure to monitor such proceedings. Just cherry picking the best and brightest would be worth the price of admission but latching onto an idea that has been hatched and nurtured in a CAD lab that can make lives easier for all your users would be a jackpot.

The House of Payne: SpaceClaim

During the lovely dinner as we floated down the Siene, most of the journalists were happy enough at being invited to Autodesk's press event in Paris that the conversation stayed light and pleasant. But one among us could not be contained. What do you guys think about SpaceClaim, he asked of Autodesk.

What followed was a round of product and company bashing. They won't amount to anything. The revenue model is flawed. Blah, blah, blah. That was typical, you can expect any competition to be trounced in such a context. But what interested me was that everyone at the table had heard of SpaceClaim, a company in its infancy, one with scarcely a customer. It was like an elephant noticing a flea.

What make SpaceClaim so noticeable? I've seen the product early on, before its release. Sure, it looks easy enough to use--but so do many others. It puts out a inordinate amount of press releases, for sure. It seems to have created some interesting relationships among CAD vendors, ostensibly partnerships, even to the point of finagling a booth at the upcoming Autodesk University -- a venue in which Autodesk has strictly forbidden competition. No, it has to be more than all that for the entire industry to take note...

I think the  buzz is due to Mike Payne, CEO of SpaceClaim. You see, Mike has the enviable pedigree of starting PTC. He followed that with SolidWorks. Is SpaceClaim the Third Coming?

The Greening of Autodesk

Autodesk's CEO Carl Bass flew in to address the press and analysts assembled for the manufacturing division's press event in Paris But he wasn't just here to talk about Inventor, though it may be Autodesk's biggest success since AutoCAD, or the manufacturing division's stellar sales ($99 million last quarter). His was a bigger mission. Carl was there to save the planet.

I should have known Autodesk was turning green. The evening before, I had cruised down the Seine where even the beauty of Paris at night could not dissuade Buzz Kross, head of Autodesk's manufacturing division, from a discussion of the greater good, all the way from conserving paper by printing on both sides at his office to determining the carbon footprint of a part made in Inventor.

As it turns out, Autodesk now has a Sustainability Czar, and judging by speed at which a Corvette-driving senior VP has turned green, this person has a lot of clout. I couldn't find a lot of details (Carl was whisked away after his talk faster than a rock star after a concert) but judging from Carl's zeal on the subject, I'd guess the Sustainability Czar was Carl's idea.

A CEO with a conscience are always welcome as far as I'm concerned, and should serve as a model for others.

Some highlights of Carl's discussion.

• Paper or plastic? That oft asked question at the grocery store presupposes that there are only 2 choices. What about bringing your own reuseable bag?
• A PBS program (which Autodesk sponsored) showed a how many farmers in Minnesota now run wind mills on their land. Calling themselves wind farmers, they treat the wind as a cash crop. Though not cheap (one wind turbine costs $2 million), once functional, each wind mill can generate enough power for 3,500 homes. State assistance and a complicated financing scheme (companies buy the machine, and pay the farmers to maintain the machines for 10 years, and then transfer the ownership of the machines to the farmers all in return for government tax credits) have allowed even some down-and-out farmers to make money from wind. According to the program, this shows promise of reviving many small towns that have been depopulated by urbanization and mass farming. Not only that, the maker of the windmills (Suzlon) has decided to manufacture in Minnesota, creating 300 much need jobs.

Pretty Makes for Competitive Advantage

Industrial machines were known for heft and brawn -- not good looks. But that seems to be changing. The HTC 2500 iX, a floor grinder/polisher (designed with Autodesk software) is probably the dream machine of that job description. Shown recently at the Autodesk Press Event, it emphasizes the emergence of aesthetics in all products, not just those for the consumer.

The HTC 2500 iX may be the prettiest floor grinder/polisher, evidence of the importance of aesthetics even in industrial equipment.

And why not? Isn't every product in a competitive market? All thing being equal, why wouldn't a buyer give a nod to the machine that not only does the job but looks good, too?

It may be harder to justify the CD/DVD player, however.

The HTC machine was very much in evidence throughout the 2 day event, being used to show how various Autodesk softwares could be used from concept design to analysis. HTC used Alias to to create the "Batmobile's" good looks.

Buying Alias allows Autodesk to say that its software is used by 100% of all the major automotive companies.