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I spent the last year working closely with someone who spent their entire career entrenched in one of the big boy CAD software companies in one of those very te

I spent the last year working closely with someone who spent their entire career entrenched in one of the big boy CAD software companies in one of those very technical roles you do when you avoid management your entire life. He had a lot of great stories. Anyway, while I don’t really have an opinion on the matter, I feel like sharing his opinion here despite not totally understanding the reasoning behind it. It seemed his opinion was that Onshape had great potential to disrupt the industry, but he explained in much funnier terms a tidal wave of celebration and relief washed over his company and the rest of the industry when PTC bought Onshape out. He seemed to think nobody could take a great product and run it into the ground like PTC could, as if they were up there with legendary failures like Microsoft buying Nokia, Yahoo/Tumblr, AOL Time Warner, etc.

auxym 4y ago
I am a mechanical engineer and CAD user (never worked for a CAD software company). I second this feeling. OnShape was founded by the original creators of SolidWorks before it was bought by Dassault. It showed great promise in being efficient, powerful, user friendly, built in PLM (SCM for CAD basically) and surprisingly low cost. Compare hundreds a year for a fully loaded OnShape seat subscription to about 20k/yr/seat we paid for CATIA and some bells and whistles (PLM, FEA, etc). The day OnShape was bought was PTC/Siemens is quite comparable to me, to the HN feeling when Adobe recently announced the purchase of Figma.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Exactly, it's like when eagle was bought by autodesk. Also to add to this, solidworks can be had for ~4k for a perpetual license and ~1300 a year after that for maintenance. So it sits right between onshape and stuff like catia cost wise.
varikin 4y ago
My first job out college was at PTC first in tech support for Windchill and then as a dev for Windchill. Windchill is PTC's PLM/VCS for CAD files. I never really touched CAD. I launched PROe a handful of times, but mainly to test some integration into Windchill. Over the course of 3 years there, I saw maybe 6 or so companies bought by PTC and nothing ever really done with them. Probably the most successful was FlexPLM which for some reason was built on Windchill to offer PLM type software for the apparel industry. It only survived because PTC ignored it. PTC is a company full of too much bureaucracy and managers all trying to push features over completeness.

auxym 4y ago

I am a mechanical engineer and CAD user (never worked for a CAD software company). I second this feeling. OnShape was founded by the original creators of SolidWorks before it was bought by Dassault. It showed great promise in being efficient, powerful, user friendly, built in PLM (SCM for CAD basically) and surprisingly low cost. Compare hundreds a year for a fully loaded OnShape seat subscription to about 20k/yr/seat we paid for CATIA and some bells and whistles (PLM, FEA, etc). The day OnShape was bought was PTC/Siemens is quite comparable to me, to the HN feeling when Adobe recently announced the purchase of Figma.

iancmceachern 4y ago
Exactly, it's like when eagle was bought by autodesk. Also to add to this, solidworks can be had for ~4k for a perpetual license and ~1300 a year after that for maintenance. So it sits right between onshape and stuff like catia cost wise.

varikin 4y ago

My first job out college was at PTC first in tech support for Windchill and then as a dev for Windchill. Windchill is PTC's PLM/VCS for CAD files. I never really touched CAD. I launched PROe a handful of times, but mainly to test some integration into Windchill. Over the course of 3 years there, I saw maybe 6 or so companies bought by PTC and nothing ever really done with them. Probably the most successful was FlexPLM which for some reason was built on Windchill to offer PLM type software for the apparel industry. It only survived because PTC ignored it. PTC is a company full of too much bureaucracy and managers all trying to push features over completeness.