The CAD Insider

Lenovo a Lesson in Overseas Success

LAS VEGAS (Autodesk University) - The world is going mobile. Sales of desktop computers have suffered.

from ITPoPortal

Most of the downward trend is on the consumer side, with family use and consumption of Web content, but most full time CAD users still prefer their stationary workstations with at least two big screens, right? Still there must be enough of a perceived need for mobility that most of the major computer vendors have created a line of mobile workstations.

Lenovo, which is now top PC vendor by shipments¹, was on hand at Autodesk University. Having a special fondness for ThinkPads for my personal (non-CAD) use for years, I cannot resist seeing what Lenovo is offering. Though nothing new was being presented, Lenovo was showing its 30" dream monitor. With a 2,560 x 1600 resolution and a $1600 MSRP, the ThinkVision LT3053 is worthy of top users only (see PCmag review). The W540, introduced last Fall and though it's 5.5 lbs may seem heavy compared to laptops, it claimed to be the lightest in the mobile workstation category.

Tom Salomone, world wide segment marketing manager at Lenovo declares Lenevo's 30 inch monitor "perfect for CAD."
(picture from CADplace, taken at PTC event)

Lenovo bought the personal computer product lines from IBM many years back, the desktop products first, then later the ThinkPads -- resulting in a collective gasp from business users who had prized their ThinkPads for their bulletproof reliability and legendary keyboards. What would happen to them when they fell into hands of a Chinese company no one ever heard of? Unbeknown to us, Lenovo was a force to be reckoned with in Asia with the giant share of that area's computer market. The best surprise of all, however, was that quality of the ThinkPads stayed just as good as it ever was and innovation actually increased. The Yoga, which may be named for its ability to contort itself into all sorts of positions, may have no equal in the touchpad market.

 
video of Yoga touchpad by Lenovo

Lenovo may be the lone exception in our industry of a company that has successfully leapt across oceans. Companies floundering in their attempting to sell in the US should study Lenovo. It helps to have great products but I see many great products that suffer from lack of understanding of US marketing -- and US psychology. Lenovo has done its best to preserve the same image that IBM so carefully generated: solid and dependable. Perhaps Lenovo has hidden its foreignness, but even if no one may admit to it as a corporate directive, it was genius to not introduce such a discontinuity.

For More Information

www.lenovo.com

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1. Lenovo Overtakes HP as the Top PC Vendor While U.S. Shipments Stabilize in the Second Quarter of 2013, According to IDC, July, 2013

A Quarter of PTC Users on Creo, Goal is 50% by End of Year

You would think that after making a product that everyone says they want, that product would be automatically and universally accepted. Not true. Ask Coca Cola, whose "new Coke formula" introduced in 1985 after millions of dollars of market research including thousands of taste-tests, met with lukewarm welcome and had to be embarassedly withdrawn.

In our industry, this is happening with Creo, a direct modeling, easy to use, 3D MCAD package, meant to replace Pro/E Wildfire, old history-based software. It was exactly what customers were saying they wanted. 

Creo was introduced with much fanfare, an overly theatrical prison break, symbolic of the constraints of the old CAD parametric, history-based systems. Here was direct modeling. Freedom.

Two and half years later, only 25% of Wildfire users have converted to Creo. PTC hopes 50% will do so by end of 2013.

"The SMBs [small and medium sized businesses] are doing much better [of converting], says PTC CEO Heppelmann. "It's the enterprise customer that is lagging. We won't be able to convert them until all the data they have can transfer."

Understandable, as design data for a big company is a vast investment. You are not going to convince John Deere (one of PTC's biggest customer of Pro/E) that it should switch to Creo for a few bells and whistles. I imagine they are quite comfortable in their "jail."

"We knew they weren't going to jump onto Creo 1.0," says Hepplemann. "Or 2.0. But by 3.0, we think they will come."

Creo 3.0 is not due til later this year

The risk to PTC is that their best, most high profile customers, will be stranded on an island from which PTC has sailed. They may well see Creo off in the distance, a very different CAD system which will get more different with each release. If they have to learn and transfer their data to a very different Creo, why not evaluate competive CAD programs, too?

 

Autodesk at Maker Faire - Crazy Like a Fox

 How often does a CEO of a billion dollar company give up a Saturday to guide kids? Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, is doing just that. Before a standing room only crowd at Maker Faire, he delivers a heartfelt plea for one and all, the young and their parents, to use his company’s software, to help make things, something, anything -- whatever their heart might desire, it seems. To help them, he’ll make his software, some of it sold to professionals for thousands of dollars, available for free --or really cheap.

It is a message that plays well to those attending Carl's talk “CAD for Kids.” A lot of kids have actually showed up – along with their parents. Before the show, Carl tells me, it was the parents he actually wants to reach.

Carl is on a mission to gain acceptance among the youth. But spending millions on software just to give it away? But for those outside the room, the shareholders, the board, the financial community, people without kids… are they thinking Carl has gone crazy?

He might be crazy like a fox, though. Autodesk discovered the consumer market almost by accident. Its Sketch app for the iPhone got a million downloads in almost no time. It had taken years before its flagship AutoCAD reached a million users. To say it struck gold with Sketch might not be accurate as most users stay on the free version, generating zero income, but Autodesk was in a place that it could afford to commit millions of dollars to see where such numbers might lead. A consumer division in Autodesk was born.

Autodeskers credit Carl for such the initiative, the daring to go after a not-immediately-profitable market. Sowing the fields, i.e., providing technology at low cost hoping for commercial success is not new. Apple did it for years. Now generations of kids have grown up with Apple computers. It can be argued that it led to Apple’s success today. It’s not entirely without risk. Didn’t Apple almost run out of money before its mobile devices saved the day?

Carl gets the maker movement. He is a maker. His medium is wood and his tools are his own CAD products. He gets making things like no other CEO I can think of. It’s not just dollars and cents with Carl but some higher calling. Make something! He seems to say.

In jeans and a t-shirt, he's not your usual CEO. He seems more like an uncle. And a kindly one, too. The uncle who remembers your birthday and what you actually like, not the one who gives you socks. He knows you play too many video games but he won’t tell you to get off your ass and make something of yourself. He’ll play ball with you in the front yard.

The tools he has offered are substantial and generous. What is he hoping to gain? To me, it seem nothing less than a resurgence of creativity and productivity, starting with the young, but applied on a scale that Autodesk can address, this could be BIG! Give me your kids, I’ll give them the means…starting with software, but with 3D printing, a lot more. Let’s see that they can make. Why can’t they make anything they want? Including making America great again.

I find myself under Carl’s spell and have to shake myself. But the message of hope is unmistakable.

There may be detractors among the more cynical. For sure, a couple of bad quarters could make detractors out of the previously hopeful. The road to winning the minds of the next generation is a long one, but the difference from one Maker Faire to the next is considerable and noticeable. Kids are swarming the Autodesk booth, playing on iPads, using Sketch, the 3D Creature, wanting to get a 3D print of themselves. I don’t remember so many kids last year. I wonder if the kids belong to Autodesk employees but I am assured they most certainly are not. The kids seem to be having fun.

I allow myself to slip into Autodesk’s fantasy: a generation of children growing up using Autodesk applications of whatever devices their little hands can hold, all cheap or free, all online, not caring if on the cloud or what format their data is in, who their reseller is, how to install it or maintain it, no need to train on it or do homework.

Crazy like a fox, indeed.

Related articles

Autodesk CEO: How CAD Empowers Kids (and other Makers)

Now for Something Completely Different - A Reading List

Please excuse this digression from the world of CAD. After the last email is sent out and the IM dialog peters out, I close my laptop and look for something to read before bed that has nothing to do with CAD or engineering -- heck, it may even be non-technical. Yet, somehow, almost everything I am reading gives me some inspiration or knowledge that allows me to do my job a bit better the next day.

Have a book you'd like to share? Please suggest it as a comment to this post.

Here's what is on my night table:

1. The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar, novel contrast Mumbai servants with the privileged family they work for
2. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson, coming down from a failed attempt on K2, author stays at a village too poor to have a school, so he builds one, then another...
3. Bicycling Medicine, by Arnie Baker, great info on sports nutrition so you can find out went wrong on your last ride
4. When You're Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris, essays by the funniest writer in America (sorry, Dave Barry)
5. In Bolivia, Eric Lawler, at a yard sale, I wondered how some one could write a whole book on a place I could not describe with one sentence
6. 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time, by Mark Jacobson, a 'semi-dysfunctional' family goes around the world
7. Intoxication, by Ronald Siegel, physiology and biology of chemical addiction. Legend has it an ancient goatherd saw his flock get frisky after eating certain berries, leading to coffee.
8. Dreams of My Father, Barack Obama, an introspective look, includes childhood in Indonesia and Kenya
9. Does Anybody Eat Wasps?, New Scientist, 101 answers, may be to one of your weird questions

Recently Finished

• Smile While You're Lying, Chuck Thompson, expose on the travel media. You will never want to pick up another travel magazine.
• Ultra Marathon Man, Dean Karnazes, who orders a pizza delivered to him during a run and eats it while running. Anything goes when you are running 200 miles at once!
• An Imperfect Offering, by James Orbinski, a past president of Doctors Without Borders writes of experience in Somalia, Rwanda, more, and reveals how big pharmaceutical companies ignore plight of the diseased poor.