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For those who haven't heard, SolidWorks has changed their subscription policy, effective 1 January 2016.
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Jeff Mirisola, CSWE
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Onshape has made it public that they are going to be changing their free plan. It's going to be 10 private documents and no "inactive" documents. See
I don't think they are far from having a product that can do what many companies need it to do, particularly small-medium shops. The major missing tools like drawings, sheetmetal and surfacing all seem to be in the works. What's more, it comes with built in version control, branching, and baked-in file management. As a free account user I've put in performance enhancement requests and submitted bugs, and the dev team at Onshape has already rolled out these changes. The more Solidworks brings about policies like this, the more people willing people will be to give Onshape (and similar tools) a strong look and even contribute to its development.
I don't think they are far from having a product that can do what many companies need it to do, particularly small-medium shops. The major missing tools like drawings, sheetmetal and surfacing all seem to be in the works. What's more, it comes with built in version control, branching, and baked-in file management. As a free account user I've put in performance enhancement requests and submitted bugs, and the dev team at Onshape has already rolled out these changes. The more Solidworks brings about policies like this, the more people willing people will be to give Onshape (and similar tools) a strong look and even contribute to its development.
I just stumbled upon the license renewal situation yesterday and I'm still reading up on it. I am running SW2010 Professional. Since getting it I don't see where the new versions have been much of an improvement. It looks to me as if they are busy changing it continuously but change isn't improvement. And it seems as if over the last 18 months there has been a change in the way they approach business. They have gone to a model of maximum sales and marketing of what they've got rather than fixing it. From my very limited perspective I'd guess that management of the SW product has previously been more from the programming side rather than the (mechanical) engineering perspective (that I would have preferred) until recently and now it seems as if the marketing / sales / business degree folks have taken over, said folks not knowing that product improvement can improve profit but rather only working to sell more of what they currently have for short term gain at a long term loss. Without having a pool of us who aren't paying for support who may be lured back into annual payments there is little incentive for the current management to do anything to fix the product to draw us back in. So with the sales mentality and the loss of incentive to make the product better I predict a slow decline in popularity of SW. But the people responsible will be on to another job by then.
I want to differentiate support from license renewal. We don't need to make annual payments to renew our license, at least as far as I remember reading it. What you are paying for is support and annual updates. Yet one of the blurbs I've read which was purported to have come from SW referred to it as a license renewal. I think if they have drifted to that mentality they might find themselves in a bit of a class action law suit.
Somewhat in parallel with this and showing how SW doesn't recognize you as being legitimate for buying a license but only recognizes customers who continue to give money... I downloaded eDrawings 2016 (2015?) a few months back. It has something in it that went in and killed my PhotoView 360. I've been unable to render with it since that free download. And since I believe I have a perpetual license to run SW 2010 I contacted the local VAR to see how I could get the functionality that I paid for back. I was told more or less that I got what I deserved for not giving them money all these years and given no help. And that downloading of eDrawings (supposedly free) unleashed a torrent of solicitations to buy SW again.
Mark
I want to differentiate support from license renewal. We don't need to make annual payments to renew our license, at least as far as I remember reading it. What you are paying for is support and annual updates. Yet one of the blurbs I've read which was purported to have come from SW referred to it as a license renewal. I think if they have drifted to that mentality they might find themselves in a bit of a class action law suit.
Somewhat in parallel with this and showing how SW doesn't recognize you as being legitimate for buying a license but only recognizes customers who continue to give money... I downloaded eDrawings 2016 (2015?) a few months back. It has something in it that went in and killed my PhotoView 360. I've been unable to render with it since that free download. And since I believe I have a perpetual license to run SW 2010 I contacted the local VAR to see how I could get the functionality that I paid for back. I was told more or less that I got what I deserved for not giving them money all these years and given no help. And that downloading of eDrawings (supposedly free) unleashed a torrent of solicitations to buy SW again.
Mark
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