No problem with that, if they really deliver what users need. It’s going to take some time for PTC to fully deliver on the Creo vision. Developing a professional CAD system is about an order of magnitude harder than, for example, developing a product such as Microsoft Office. Taking several very disparate and complex products and merging them into a family of interoperable apps is not easy. I can’t give PTC any grief about being a few months late in shipping, given the immensity of the task before them. The next phase was originally due to launch in the Fall of 2011. The first phase in the Creo strategy was launched, with quite a bit of fanfare, in the Fall of 2010. For PTC, this required a new strategy: Offer a range of products sharing a common data model and a common user interface design, and allow users to choose whether they want to use history-based, direct, or any other form of modeling that might come along in the future. What to do? How to rationalize these seemingly irreconcilable things? The only reasonable answer is to offer customers what they want.
At the same time, PTC management was likely watching the former CoCreate marketing people (who now worked for them) telling a compelling story that didn’t exactly jibe with the PTC’s historical “parametrics will solve all your problems” message. I imagine that a number of CoCreate customers took the time to explain to PTC management why dynamic modeling fit their needs so well. CoCreate customers that needed history and parametrics in their CAD software had long since moved on to other tools (including Pro/E). Companies with product lines that fit within the capabilities that CoCreate offered had no motivation to change at all. The reason people (and companies) used CoCreate software was precisely because it was not Pro/E (or any other history-based solid modeler.) CoCreate’s dynamic modeling (more commonly called direct modeling these days) was comparatively easy to use, especially for people who weren’t CAD gurus. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that PTC’s legion of salespeople would have swarmed into CoCreate’s 5,000 customer accounts, seeking to convert those people to Pro/E users.
While I can’t say, with certainty, what brought on this revelation, I can speculate that PTC’s 2007 acquisition of CoCreate was a big eye opener.
It was, at the highest level of abstraction, a bet-the-company rethink of PTC’s CAD strategy, based on a recognition that not all users (or enterprises) have the same needs. We got to see a good chunk of what’s new, hear about PTC’s underlying goals, and even talk about things we thought they should be doing better.Ĭreo was rolled out in the Fall of 2010. Unlike a formal release presentation, which would be heavily scripted, our experience was much more extemporaneous. PTC will soon be releasing Creo 2.0, and, in anticipation of this, invited me (along with three other blogger/editors) to their corporate headquarters for a preview.
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