3DMojo

Many people are familiar with this illusion of the "old lady, young lady" image. This old/new paradigm seems to be all the rage lately. On American television, we witness countless new reality shows featuring celebrities from the 80s and 90s, desperately trying to find new fame. While sometimes entertaining, there is also an embarrassing undertone to the shows, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It's very similar to how PTC is reviving old Itedo Isodraw references and massaging them into wonderfully new Abortext Isodraw references. These retreads from the past, pure 2D technical illustration references, are being re-framed and re-branded as great new references that are fully leveraging 3D in new and innovative ways. While these references are sometimes entertaining, they are also incredibly misleading -- they are still "old ladies".

3DVIA Composer is faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than anything else on the market, and we continue to prove that in benchmark after benchmark. Don't be fooled the next time you hear some propaganda from the competition, and be sure to put them to the test. It is the new architecture of 3DVIA Composer that is the only "young lady" in the picture.

You've heard us rant about the exceptional qualities of 3DVIA Composer, and how we make better reuse of CAD data than other competitive products such as Isodraw. I've shown 3DVIA Composer to people hundreds of times, and I never grow tired of the look of amazement on peoples' faces when they see what we can do. But what really amazes me is how quickly our customers can go from purchasing our product to being productive and generating positive returns: it's a tribute to our architecture and ease of use.

It's why we win benchmark after benchmark, why customers continually choose 3DVIA Composer over other products, and why customers actually turn off those products in favor of 3DVIA Composer.

But don't take it from me... take it directly from one of our newest customers, Miller Formless. When I heard that they recently purchased 3DVIA Composer to replace Isodraw, I wanted to learn more. This mid-week Podcast is the unedited conversation I had with their VP of Manufacturing and Engineering, Jim Szamlewski. This call was not rehearsed; I had no idea what Jim would say about 3DVIA Composer. My initial plan was to pull some sound bites and quotes from the call, but there are so many good points made by Jim -- and in the interests of bringing you truly authentic content -- here is the full 9 minutes of audio. [Editor's note in the interests of full disclosure: there are 3 edits to clean up audio not related to this particular conversation]

What may surprise you most about this conversation is the enthusiam of the customer only 2 weeks after installing the software, and how the users actually enjoy using it. Imagine your employees using a product that makes them exceptionally efficient, and one that they actually like to use: what would that do for your productivity?

Not only are we faster, easier to use, and more flexible, but our users are passionate about our product. Talk about the ultimate knock out punch to the competition.

 

 Podcast Video [9:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (955)

 

 Online Video [9:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (388)

3DVIA Composer's US offices are in the Boston area. The whole New England area -- with the exception of some lost souls in Connecticut -- is in the grips of a kind of mania about the New England Patriots football team, which so far is undefeated. (For our non-US readers, this is American football we are talking about here, not what we Americans call "soccer.")

Anyway, the big news today is that a member of the opponents the Patriots played yesterday "guaranteed" that his team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, would beat the Patriots yesterday. While the game was close for a little while on Sunday, at the end the Patriots won big.

I mention this because I've been reading a white paper from PTC detailing a customer success in Austria with Arbortext IsoDraw.

(I would happily link to PTC's collateral to make it easy for you to compare them to us, but apparently everything on their system is behind a sign-in and some of the stuff I was looking at I couldn't find a second time. So, we have links to our stuff, but not theirs.)

It's pretty clear that whoever wrote this has been watching 3DVIA Composer pretty carefully -- carefully enough to feel confident in talking about PTC's solution with as much bravado as that Steeler's safety who misspoke so disastrously about his team's chances.

For example, PTC makes a big deal in the white paper about using the "magnifier" in 10 seconds. Then then it lists 10 steps. Sure.....you could do each step in a second...right.

In 3DVIA Composer? One step: press the spacebar.

No matter how much PTC wants the magnifier to duplicate the amazing functionality of 3DVIA Composer's Digger, it just can't. Any more than the Steelers can guarantee victory against a football team many are calling the greatest in history.

Arbortext IsoDraw can't ensure that it will revolutionize your product documentation processes because no matter how you slice the feature cake, Arbortext IsoDraw is saddled with its 2D heritage. 3DVIA Composer was conceived, designed and implemented as a 3D system.

This might seem subtle to some, but it's very important. If you watch the PTC video demo of Arbortext IsoDraw, you'll notice that animations are produced in the context of technical illustrations. They feel "tacked on."

Now watch the 3DVIA Composer video. In 3DVIA Composer, technical illustrations are a module -- among many modules, like BOM and high resolution images -- that are integrated into the content creator's experience. In 3DVIA Composer, these modules aren't extending a technical illustration package, they are functionality built on top of an XML-based property editor.

Like the Patriots yesterday, on the actual field of play, the real talent is pretty clear to see.

Many of you may remember the rock band called Talking Heads. And you may also remember their famous movie, Stop Making Sense, in which lead singer David Bryne appears onstage in an ill-fitting "big suit."

Both the title of the film and the fit of the clothes pretty aptly describe what we think of Parametric Technology's announcement of a "comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution for creating, publishing and delivering technical service manuals."

We wonder why you need four separate applications -- none of which are widely-deployed standards -- to author content. Will tech writers prefer Microsoft^® Word^® or Arbortext^® Editor^tm? How eager do you think users are to learn a new text editing tool? PTC's press release says, "The success of any new solution hinges on an organization’s capacity and commitment to using it." We completely agree and hope they have some magic formula for displacing Microsoft Office^® among non-engineering content creators, a task that has so far eluded everyone from Lotus to OpenOffice.org.

Arbortext Publishing Engine^tm is said to "leverage" output from Arbortext Editor to apply stylesheets and publish in multiple languages. So much for the old saying that a picture tells a thousand words. Among Seemage customers, the emphasis is on using Seemage to replace translations wherever possible. I guess if you have "text" in your product name, interactive, 3D animations are the farthest thing from your product plan.

One other thing we wonder about: why do you need separate products to view illustrations (Arbortext IsoView^®) and another to create them (Arbortext IsoDraw^®)? By contrast, Seemage Player is not just an ActiveX viewing plug-in, but a full content-viewing application that uses the same architecture and performance-enhancing technology of the top-of-the-line Seemage Publisher content-creation product.

To us, "out-of-the-box" doesn't mean separate products that you put together in your business. To us, out-of-the-box means integrated products all based on the same technological core that differ only in available options. In other words, a system like Seemage, which by the way, isn't intended as a nose-under-the-tent for any PLM system.

Just as most people today know the difference between cloth you sew yourself and a ready-made suit, we think most people will see this announcement for what it is: a repackaging of some very large piece parts of software. We hope you don't get lost in this "big suit."

Allow me to detour for a moment from our usual fare of Seemage-focused commentary to lend the support and encouragement of all of us at Seemage and 3DMojo for our fellow blogger Franco Folini.

In a recent post, Franco details how his efforts to engage in open, direct communication with a blogger at Adobe was met with corporate stonewalling.

Reading Franco's post reminded me of the most important lesson companies need to learn when they start reaching out to online communities: be authentic. If you want to give your point of view, you have to take the commentary of the community. And rule one: the community will tell you lots of things you might not want to hear.

As Franco points out, there's a tradition of allowing voices to be heard. Stepping on that tradition destroys any claim of authenticity. In Adobe's case, they're trying to muscle their way into the CAD world. Ignoring people in that community won't help. The CAD world just ain't that big. Needlessly pissing off people who have influence, like Franco, is a huge and long-term mistake.

Adobe has done to Franco the very thing that makes customers feel like companies are monolithic and unapproachable. For its part, Adobe is probably busy dismissing the online CAD community as insignificant or irrelevant. (How wrong they are!)

I am not suggesting that a company has to permit spam or inappropriate commentary. But if you just don't like what you're hearing from people, you ignore it at your own peril. On this blog, for example, we do require people to register to post commentary. And we put all incoming trackbacks into a queue to separate out the spam. But we have a strict policy of publishing all valid commentary, even when we disagree.

Sure, 3DMojo.com is about Seemage, and our vision for revolutionizing the way CAD and PLM are used in manufacturers. People who come here know they're gonna get a dose of propaganda. But still they come, because they are interested in what we have to say and they know we "get" the blogosphere. And we aren't trying to control it.

It looks like Adobe is so tone-deaf it thinks it can.