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There is plenty of talk going on about what people want and need from their design tools.  Over the last weeks I have been watching a thread in the Solidworks forum and thought we would set a few things straight.  Take a read here of some others’s users frustrations and wishes.

What really stood out to me on the Solidworks forum were the user who were looking for this:

“We think the current crop of tools take too much resources to manage in a medium sized company.  The up front purchase, the subscription costs, the installs, upgrades, hardware, troubleshooting, PDM, etc… falls on our shoulders, so we see the real costs.  It’s too much.  Dassault is running in the other direction and adding to that pile of costs with something that really disappoints.  I think Adrian would agree here.  We would not pay the $2,988… thats ridiculous to add on top of SolidWorks costs.

A worthwhile company would have a freemium model so that you can try it out.  CAD on the cloud would be accepted if the costs were $50-$175 per month per user, and slightly more if it offered FEA and PDM/PLM out of the box.  I would expect it to be able to take in native SolidWorks files and be able to do direct editing on them, so that feature history would not need to be converted to make smaller edits.  I think the rub would be how to export information out of current PDM systems and into the new system.  We would have the options to store file backups locally… but in a neutral format, like STEP.  Drawing backups could be kept local in PDF format.  I would maybe keep a local copy of something like Spaceclaim in case the world ended and we still came to work.  That would allow for editing of the backup STEP files. All kidding aside, no one has done it right yet… and Dassault is clearly going to loose the market.  They are lost and trying to protect Catia.  This is why lots of folks have already left SolidWorks.  I think they saw the writing on the wall.”

What do you think? Do you agree that “no one has done it right, yet?”
Oh and by the way:

• $50-$175 a month? Try $25 to $40
• Read native solidworks? Check. Oh.. and Cata, NX, Creo, Inventor, DWG, IGES, Rhino and STEP to name a few more
• Direct edit? Check
• Iterative modeling? Check
• Export for local storage as archive or STEP? Check.
• Export Drawing as PDF? OK this is still in Beta but you can do it there so, Check!

We hope you feel like we are listening and going in a direction that excites you. We hope the low cost and powerful capabilities make Fusion 360 an important part of your design workflow –  whether it’s for your business, for a hobby, or for education.

Be sure to let us know how we are doing. What is Fusion 360 helping you the most with? What do you wish it did better? How does it compare to other design tools?