The whole thing is driven by greed, I mean money money comes from new sales, new sales only come from marketing (or so the marketing people say and since they are the most skilled at convincing others they win) so marketing drives the bus, not tech support, not development planning. You don’t have to mean it just threaten it, I’d be ready to back it up though. I get the feeling that in general the only way for an existing subscription paying customer to get attention from any of these Software companies is to inform them you’ll not be renewing your licenses. I guess it’s the art of negotiation, I don’t really play that game, I say what I mean and mean what I say. Both our SE VAR and Siemens didn’t think we were serious for several weeks so it seems like the only way to get traction is with threats. They had plenty of opportunities before that. I think what they meant was they were not given a fair shot at solving the issues after we informed them we were no longer buying their product. They claimed they were not given a fair shot at solving the clearly outlined issues. The VAR scrambled to fix things but it was too late, of course they wanted a meeting which we obliged, they thought they were going to win back the business we considered it a courtesy interview. I met several nice people from the Eastern US Siemens office right quick after that. I had not heard from Siemens, except for when they tried to sell us TeamCenter, until we informed them we were not renewing subscription a couple years ago. Since I don’t use CAD professionally, I’m interested to hear from those of you who do.If we switch to SE or IV one of the biggest considerations will be how Siemens and Autodesk treats their existing customers at this point. You can download it here and try for yourself. If you create a free login, you can also visit their forum, where they have video tutorials, discussion boards and links to some impressive examples of work. It’s also Mac compatible, takes about a minute to download and install, and again, it’s free. It also can be run without any noticeable effect on memory allocation, and so far, I haven’t experienced any crashes, freezing or lag. In contrast, DraftSight is simple enough to be really small (it only takes up about 200 MB). There’s a reason that it’s one of the industry standards, but I remember dealing with frequent crashes in the earlier Windows operating systems, and on a bad day, it would take me several minutes to rotate a model through 360 degrees. The problems I encountered with using SolidWorks were that it’s not available cross-platform (any Mac users I have known to use it are required to install Windows first and run Boot Camp or a virtual machine), and it’s a beefy program, using a lot of RAM. While DraftSight lacks some of the intuitiveness of its more powerful cousin, I’m impressed by its quality, given that it’s a free program. Learning some of the more complicated features took some patience and time, but I remember picking up on some of the more basic tasks on my own. I was trained on SolidWorks through school, and loved using it primarily for its ease of use. Dassault Systemes, makers of popular 3D CAD software SolidWorks, have just made a beta version of their new free 2D program DraftSight available for download.
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