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| Atlanta, Day One: Monday, June 10, 2002 brought to you by PTC/USER and PTC with Sun Microsystems Today's topics:
Seems there is always interest how many people attend a conference. At today's opening session Ron McCuskey announced a figure of 1318, which he mentioned was more than last year's attendance. As many of us have come to expect too, the PTC/USER Web page itself mentions typical conference attendance of 1500 to 1700 people. But that probably was before the European and Japan conferences were established. Since people don't have to come to the US anymore to attend a full PTC/USER conference, the days of 1500 to 1700 attendees at one conference may be past. Although I did sit down for lunch today at a table of Swedes, so people still do come from abroad to the US conference. I can testify the hotel is well booked: they told me they couldn't keep my reservation, then offered me a part of a suite. Turned out to be a 20x30 foot room, with two couches and an arm chair, a 12 foot long granite sideboard with full length mirrors above, an 8 foot dining or conference table, with chairs for 6, a complete bar in a side passage (empty), and 3 separate balconies with sliding glass doors, all in an outside corner room on the 18th floor. But no bed: they wheeled that in later, not part of the standard furnishings for this room. So that's the newsletter room tonight. Ron McCuskey said that when PTC/USER met with PTC management last year, they emphasized that software quality had to be the number one use concern. Dick Harrison certainly got that message, no doubt from many other customers as well, and said he saw quality as crucial. But it's Jim Heppelmann, the VP of software development at PTC, who has the main responsibility for product quality now: Dick called Jim "the Maestro of Quality". Jim himself outlined the plan to release the next Windchill version of Pro/E, which is being demoed here at the conference: pre-production release in late summer, 2002, and production release in late fall, 2002 (always good to specify the year when talking about s/w releases). So far, business as usual. But then Jim said he wouldn't hesitate to throw that plan into the wastebasket if it might compromise quality, as measured by bugs getting out of control. And that got him a good solid spontaneous round of applause, a public commitment. Create and Collaborate and Control Over the years I've found the most insightful presentation on PTC as a whole is, naturally enough, Dick Harrison's keynote speech. Not just because as CEO he can make things happen. But because he takes a look at the entire company, and summarizes what PTC is doing. The key phrase that Dick and others used this year was: Create and Collaborate and Control. Other people used it with the same logo, a complete continuous circle, with these three words spaced equally around the circumference. Here's one way you might interpret those three elements:
OK, I got carried away a bit there with Control problems. But it's fundamental, and as PTC continues to emphasize Create and Collaborate and Control, the Control issues will over years become more important. Probably true of the CAD and PDM industries as a whole. For one example, Control issues may influence future CAD system design: fully parametric assemblies are so complex that it's hard to break out subassemblies and pass over control for those subassemblies. Dick said PTC has invested a full $1 billion in Create and Collaborate and Control over the last 4 years. But to finish the job, and to bring all three functions to the same level, could be many more years and a lot more money. PTC's market isn't the "BOM static" (Dick's words) world after engineering release. That's after all been heavily developed by MRP and other vendors. PTC's focus is instead the process before the BOM becomes static, the "BOM dynamic" (although he didn't use those words) environment. As an example of the challenges there, he mentioned a "dynamically changing outsourced volatile BOM" (which ties into the Control theme, how do you control that kind of BOM). Dick says there has been a real emphasis on customer satisfaction over the last 18 months. For example, the customer surveys. Dick asks us to please complete the surveys, because actual pay of PTC managers is tied to those surveys (as Dick mentioned at last year's conference, he is following through). Dick said he's determined to improve customer satisfaction "over the next few years", which sounds reasonable, it can't be a simple or short-term job. Dick said PTC can't be arrogant any more, which he did say a couple of years ago too. He said that the buying experience has to be "comfortable". Which links with a comment from Jim Heppelman, that the two biggest problems he saw were s/w quality and "human relationships with customers". The dot.com boom lured away many PTC sales rep., but now with the doc.com collapse sales force turnover has shrunk down to 10% a year. Which means that customers have found their PTC rep. has been around long enough to understand the customer's business. Within PTC there's a project Fun to make PTC more of a fun company with which to do business (tedious details like maintenance, licenses, etc.). If you're finding your business with PTC isn't "fun", you can ask the PTC person what they're doing about that. Jim Heppelman, Mechanical Engineer Jim (as mentioned before, VP of s/w development) certainly has a reputation as a process kind of guy. Not just because he was a co-founder of Windchill, but also because he worked at Metaphase before that. You'd think that would stamp him as a process person. But he emphasized right away he's a mech. engineer, has a degree in it, of However when Jim threw up his first major slide, titled "Product Development Process", a good number of the rear part of the audience got up and left, by the nearest door. Probably they were people who found process discussions tedious, even when delivered by a degreed mech. engineer. But we all are inevitably stuck in a process of one kind or another, so, actually, nobody can avoid process, certainly not at work. Jim's process chart looked like this: Plan Design Source Make Sell Service And his main conclusion was that the design engineer (Design) has independent relationships with the other parts of the process, including exchanging information. Now different groups will have different representations of the product, but Jim said the "best representation" is the "Digital Product", the 3D representation (which could be ProductView, for sharing). But Jim, like many CAD people, seems to miss a very important point there: that the biggest value added and the most crucial stage in product design is the very earliest stage, and that's usually paper and pencil (or pen, or crayon). By the time a Digital Product is created, the basic design may be in place, on paper. Apple's latest iMac, for example, was designed by Jonathan Irbe, Apple's chief industrial designer, in a day. Over 2 years ago, then 2 years of intensive CAD following up, by entire teams, worldwide. And Apple industrial designers are so CAD adverse they only touch Vellum, and have "CAD Sculptors" (the job title) to take the 2D sketches into 3D surfaces for the mech. engineers using UG. Jim emphasized a process view by saying that mech. engineering wasn't necessarily "the long pole in the tent" (never heard that phrase before). For example, if the Pro/E users are two times as productive, will the product get to market two times faster? Not likely. Jim pointed out that PTC is now offering Pro/Desktop Express for free on the Web site, and it could be compared to Pro/E rev. 5, or thereabouts. Signs of progress for the customer. PTC intends Pro/Desktop for design partners who want ease of use above full functions. PTC had to do open heart surgery, and remove the Parasolids kernel that CV had included in Pro/Desktop, and replace it with a native PTC Granite kernel, "helping the patient to recover afterwards" (major operation for most solid modeling systems, replacing the kernel). An enhanced version of Pro/Desktop, with support (in case you don't find it so easy) and photorealism and Intralink connections is for sale, under $1K. Intralink 3.2 has a "dual build stream". Because when PTC set out to fix Intralink 3.1 problems, the only version of the code they had which they could work on and fix and send to customers was the evolving 3.2 code still in development. Which meant 3.1 customers got new unreleased features and bugs too. With two build streams now, problems with the released version can be fixed independent of the next version under development. Windchill Dynamic Design Link is a product that "throws away" family tables for generating custom products over the Web. With the right work in advance, for a similar family of products, a customer can select a product in a Web browser, answer whatever questions are programmed, and see the product they've specified modeled in 3D. It was back at the Anaheim Pro/User conference in 1998 that PTC showed the new rev. 20 user interface. Now 4 years later the user interface changes that began with rev. 20 seem to be mostly complete. And the real sign of that is the old Menu Manager menus on the right side, that people have used since the dawn of Pro/E, are now finally gone. Took 4 years, but they're gone. Back then, in 1998, the talk was of a Windows style user interface, and certainly many people didn't find that the mere style of the interface would help with CAD. Even with rev. 2001, probably most people found the new top bar Insert menu just not worth the trouble of changing years of habit, and probably continued to use the good old Menu Manager on the right. But between rev. 2001 and the latest rev. (the Wildfire rev. of Pro/E, although I don't know if that's the final name) PTC seems to have made some substantial improvements so you can work within the graphics windows, minimizing use of any menus at all, outside of the graphics window. So if you didn't like the Insert menus, well, hey, you may not be using them that much anyway. The phrase is "Work on the Model", and PTC seems to have These user interface changes (they need a name, how about Wildface?) probably have given PTC a good position in comparison to SolidWorks (which may have been so successful just because of the PTC people who went there, drawing on their knowledge of PTC users). Mike Campbell, VP of tech. mktg, who led the Windchill demo, mentioned a sample part which took 253 clicks on Pro/E 2001, 216 clicks on SolidWorks, and 180 clicks on Pro/E Wildfire. Of course other parts might yield very different results, but Wildface seems to have made a more substantial improvement than just the usual rev. to rev. changes. Some user interface features of Pro/E Wildfire:
If you stayed with rev. 19 because you didn't like the rev. 20 innovations, and feared they might some day lead to the disappearance of the Menu Manager---well, you were right, that's the way it went. But now you have a reasonably final version of the changes in front of you, that began on rev. 20. So you can just go direct to this version. For everyone else, who's somewhere in between rev. 20 and rev. 2001, inclusive, now we can see a mature user interface, which is complete in itself and doesn't embody different pieces of different user interfaces and different user interface philosophies. With Wildface (I like that), we've got a consistent user interface, which we last had on rev. 19. As Dave Pancoast, formerly of CV, liked to say, CAD customers might have really two main concerns: (1) functionality, and (2) user interface. So this is big news, that the user interface evolution that began with rev. 20 is now complete. Many more changes are possible of course, but we do have a single user interface again. You may decide you don't like it, and that you're going to stay with rev. 19, but at least you do have a finished product for your decision. And a user interface which is very much tuned for CAD work, for work that's done in a graphics window. That was certainly cause for discontent at points since rev. 19, because certainly some of the user interface changes along the way weren't visibly CAD oriented. Now we have a user interface which is Microsoft in appearance, at least as far as the top menu, but which is CAD at heart---and that's good, since Microsoft doesn't know too much about CAD. Seems I have more notes about other Pro/E Wildfire features, than about the user interface. But that's actually a pretty good sign, because it means that simplicity may well have been a principle of the user interface work. It's rare that simplicity wins in product development, usually at most companies the trend is to more complexity. And in the other Wildfire features there is the usual complexity that we've known at other conferences, including no less than three (3) new modules. Perfect example of complexity there, the proliferation of modules. the ISDX surfacing package has been enhanced for improved surfaces, like Restyle is a package (new module) that lets you convert point clouds to facetted surfaces to real Pro/E surfaces.
I've lost count of the years when people asked about Linux support, but now it's here, PTC has partnered with HP to port Pro/E to Linux. I don't have a release schedule, but Linux fans should probably make sure their sales rep. knows their interest. I was interested to visit my Southern roots before the conference started. Up in Asheville, North Carolina, where my great-great-grandfater, William Johnston, had a home in 1860. It was a brick house, on the corner of Patton Ave. and Church St., which is as close to the heart of downtown Asheville as you can get, then as now. It was to this house that William Johnston brought his son, Thomas Dillard Johnston, my great-grandfather, when he was critically wounded, "despaired of", in the battle of Malvern Hill in the Civil War. He recovered, married, and eventually had a daughter, my grandmother. Had a career as a lawyer, and represented the Asheville area in Congress in D.C. in the 1880's. Standing on a street corner brings history back to you. Across the way, to mark the heart of downtown Asheville, is Pritchard Park, a triangular plot of land which my great-great-grandfather gave to the federal govt. for the first post office. Eventually the postoffice moved someplace else, and the land became a small park. Has two waterfalls now, plus some built-in chess tables. When I knew my grandmother, she was well established up in New Jersey. She didn't mention her Southern past much, and this was my first visit to Asheville. It impressed me what a powerful bundle of cultural and social and historic and other facts define a place or a region, like The South. Shows that technology isn't everything. Peter Nurkse |