Future of MSC ? 4

[mikel526]

I am dieing to hear what the 'problem' is.....

http://www.arclen.com

 

[johnhors]

Mike,

Your link doesn't work !

 

[ljianxiao]

Seems to me that only a few people here have ever tried Altair HyperMesh. for pre processing, HyperMesh is the best, believe or not, Abaqus tech support and developers use HyperMesh instead of CAE. you can't compare Pastran with HyperMesh, there is no comparision, try it yourself.

 

[brep]

ljianxiao,
Your statement about ABAQUS developers and tech support, apart from not making sense (i.e. tech support are supporting CAE too, why would they use Hypermesh for this!?) is also untrue. Care to provide some evidence for this claim?

 

[gokmavi]

I have nothing to say against nastran (most of the time I work with global models and use linear static solution) but PATRAN is a disaster. In the office, it is one of the top three softwares, which are in our hate list.

 

[fkmeyers]

Now that the discussion seems to have switched to pre and post processors, let’s put things into perspective. These are my opinions and are based on using these products myself. Patran is a dead product. The current version was initially developed in the late 1980s and when released caused a lot of problems. It has been marginally updated over the last 15 years but is still the same basically. FEMAP is one of its biggest competitors in the aerospace and has seen a rise in popularity over the years. It has many strengths over Patran but several weaknesses as well. Like Patran, it lacks a strong linking to CAD programs. Hypermesh is good for shell meshing and is geared towards the automotive market. It has always been a competitor to Patran and FEMAP. Hypermesh is considerably more expensive than FEMAP. As a general FEA pre and post, I think FEMAP is better. For automotive applications, Hypermesh is better. These are my opinions as a user of these products for over 15 years.

 

[prost]

Don't have any hard research, but I'd say PATRAN is definitely NOT dead since I see ads almost daily, looking for structural eng. with PATRAN experience--almost all in aerospace. Lots of companies appear to be using it, regardless of whether anyone thinks it is on life support or dead.

 

[johnhors]

See my last sentence of my original post, and anyone using SimEnterprise/SimExpert yet ?

 

[fkmeyers]

Prost,

Good point. But you must not confuse the fact that aerospace companies have spent $$$$$ training employees to use Patran for the last 20+ years with the fact that MSC is not really doing anything with it. MSC will keep making money on it with little development effort because Aerospace will continue to pay maintenance on it. FEMAP and Hypermesh are chipping away on this but Patran is still out there and it is hated. What engineers want and what companies will buy are not always the same. MSC has made it a dead product, not the consumer.

 

[prost]

I have no personal knowledge of Patran other than it seems to be used by an awful lot of mostly aerospace companies. It's a wonder the aerospace companies that have so much invested haven't kept pressure on whoever owns Patran (MSC) to continually upgrade. I suppose many companies have just switched to Catia and others; which themselves take huge investments upfront to realize cost savings long run.

Now the question--given MSC's almost overwhelming advantage in market share say 15 years ago in particular industries, why did they allow the competition to take such huge chunks out of that market share without committing substantial resources towards maintaining that market share with superior products? Certainly greed played a large part; perhaps hubris was the biggest contributor?

 

[tstanley]

Since the termination of Nastran for Windows was more than a year ago now, the small users will be seeing their maintenance costs go up. However MSC still hasn't come up with an equivalent package to N4W. I did hear that they were working on something based on Simdesigner, but it hasn't happened yet. How can they ignore that segment of the market? Years ago they had something called PAL2 that was aimed at the little guy, but they dropped it for a while and then came back with Femap. Is this history repeating itself?

Has anyone else noted how many of their board members have their roots at SDRC? I don't know enough about SDRC to know whether that's good or bad.

Tom Stanley