NOVEDGE blog

CAD Companies Push the Marketing Frontier on Wikipedia

Reading Paul Wilkinson blog, I discovered a sophisticated and pretty useful online tool called Wikipedia Scanner created by Virgil Griffith. Using the WikiScanner anybody can check the anonymous editing of Wikipedia pages done from computers registered under company domains such as Autodesk, SolidWork, and Adobe.
A search for edits from the Autodesk domain returns a long list of Wikipedia editing activity, spread over several topics, with only a few related to CAD and AutoCAD. Some of the edits are about Autodesk products and are useful contributions to the Wikipedia project. Other edits feel more like a marketing operation than a sincere, objective contribution.

One example is from November 12, 2006, when someone from an Autodesk computer, IP 198.102.112.18, edited the SolidWorks' page, adding this sentence to the product description: "In recent years it has begun to lose ground to more sophisticated modeling systems like Autodesk Inventor, launched in 1999, and Solid Edge in 1996."

What is particularly fascinating is the variety of topics edited from Autodesk computers. You can find editing on pages ranging from the Roman Empire page (see the edit) to the Pretty Ricky, a R&B group (see the edit).

Edits from SolidWorks' computers are slightly less interesting. Someone edited the Autodesk products pages a few times, typically trimming the more explicit marketing statements (by the way, mostly posted from Autodesk computers). Here's one example where the sentence “Generally considered a latecomer to the market, Inventor has quickly become the number one mid-market modeler” later became “Generally considered a latecomer to the market, Inventor has been bundled with AutoCAD to increase usage”. The page was edited from IP 12.159.140.125, a computer on SolidWorks domain.

Another interesting example is from July 15, 2006, when someone from a SolidWorks' computer, this time from IP 12.145.143.98, edited the SolidWorks' page and added this candidly promotional sentence: "Click here to learn more about COSMOSFloWorks" (see edit).

The last pearl I found using Wikipedia Scanner is from Adobe (see all edits): on July 22, 2005 someone from an Adobe computer, IP 192.150.10.200, changed the Carly Fiorina page on Wikipedia, calling the then HP CEO, “Bitchy Fiorina” (see edit).

Franco Folini

Can Oracle Shake the CAD Visualization Market?

Two days ago, on May 15, Oracle (ORCL) announced the acquisition of Agile (AGIL), a company known mostly for its PLM products, for $495 million. I don’t want to discuss the impact of Oracle in the PLM market here. If you're interested you can find more detail at PC World, LinuxWorld, eWeek, Roy Wildeman, Ralph Grabowski's blog, and S. Sadagopan's blog.

What intrigues me is the impact of this acquisition on the CAD visualization market. Agile purchased Cimmetry, the well known CAD visualization company, in February 2005 for $45M cash. And now (through Agile) Oracle owns the AutoVue product line.

Agile is not exactly an example of a successful company. According to Yahoo Finance, they haven't managed to make a profit in the last 3 years. There are also rumors that the Cimmetry acquisition has not been very successful despite the fact that Cimmetry was a fully profitable and established company.

With the appearance of Oracle the landscape of CAD data visualization is changing one more time. It is too early to say what Larry Ellison’s strategy will be, but the main question is: Can a corporation-oriented company such as Oracle foster the end-user product-line of Cimmetry?

The CAD visualization market is going through a series of important changes. With Adobe recently entering this arena with Acrobat 3D, and now Oracle with Cimmetry, I see opportunities and risks on the horizon.

CAD visualization can find the place it deserves on every desktop of every manufacturing company

The main opportunity is for the entire CAD visualization market to mature and reach its potential of millions of users. CAD visualization software can find the place it deserves on every desktop of every manufacturing company. This can generate important business opportunities even for small companies such as Actify.
The risk is that the small software companies will be pushed out of the market by the competition between the two big players. Rivalry between the two giants could drive the prices down to a level that would not be profitable for small software manufacturers.

Franco Folini

Note: Larry Ellison picture is from Gaspar Torriero blog, the composition with AutoVue box is mine.

An Interview with Doug Halliday, Business Development Manager at Adobe (Acrobat 3D)

Doug Halliday is the Business Development Manager specializing in manufacturing at Adobe. Doug's main focus is on Acrobat 3D and its applications for design and manufacturing. Recently he started a blog where he talks about Acrobat 3D and shares his experiences with the Acrobat users community. I first met Doug when, after posting my impressions on Acrobat 3D, I left a comment on his blog with some feedback about the new Acrobat 3D 8. I thought our discussion would be of interest to a larger audience, so I asked Doug to address my questions and concerns in the form of an interview. He kindly accepted.

Doug, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role in Adobe?
Sure, I would be happy to. But, before I start, let me thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. I am still somewhat new to Adobe, having come on board late last year. I am in a business development role focused upon manufacturing.  I do some speaking, participate in numerous events, work a bit with some of our partners and resellers and spend as much time as I can with customers.
I have been pretty fortunate. I came to Adobe after a number of years – almost 30, in the automotive and IT industries. I spent time in various technical, managerial and executive roles.  I have had the opportunity to explore product development and manufacturing engineering, but I have never strayed far away from PLM, which is my first love. I have really concentrated over the past several years on collaboration, which I think is the future of PLM.

PDF is perceived and valued as a safe and easy way of making static copies of digital documents. With the new release of Acrobat 3D, Adobe is proposing a different role for PDF files. How can the two views coexist?
You know, I used to think of Acrobat and PDF as just a way to create static, secure copies of documents too, but that was some time ago. I think some people in manufacturing are like I was. I think one of our challenges is continuing to grow the awareness of what the product and format can do from a collaboration, interoperability and technical illustrations perspective.
Something to keep in mind, of course, is many people asked the same question when Adobe first grew PDF beyond its traditional roots, the creative pro and print production area. I think you'd find wide agreement that expanding PDF to be just as applicable to the general business environment has been quite a success.
Adobe’s first big move from static to "richer" PDF’s was to add a collaboration layer – the ability to add and share comments in a review and markup process. The second move we termed the “intelligent document”. That was around 2002-2004 – integrating technology gained from Adobe’s acquisition of Accelio made PDF an XML vehicle that could be dynamically connected to backend systems like ERP, PDM, SCM, or others. PDF now enables linking structured XML data to form fields for dynamic data presentation and collection. This enables PDF to extend the reach of these back-end systems via the Reader.
So, today, PDF is quite a flexible format. Combined with Adobe Reader, it delivers an “infrastructure” that allows enterprise integration and combined services like Digital Rights Management, digital signatures, rich multi-media content, as well as a way to support native file attachments. Javascripts can provide dynamic and tailored business logic interactions with PDF, too.
I first saw Acrobat 3D almost two years ago. That was the day I met Francois le Masne. Francois is now director of Acrobat 3D Business for Adobe. He really opened my eyes that day. Today, I think of PDF as a vehicle that can assimilate more and more complex information, including 3D, and be broadly distributed and quite easily adopted on a global basis.

Different categories of users interact with 3D models in different ways. For example, when a user needs to look at the back of a 3D model, a mechanical designer rotates the 3D object while an architect moves around the object.  How Acrobat 3D manage to serve wide and diverse group of users with a single user interface?
We really are aimed at things like collaboration between engineering and manufacturing where the cost and complexity of more specialized tools can be a hindrance. The idea really is to add value to what is already in place. Acrobat 3D allows a myriad of 3D formats to converge into a common, well understood document standard that allows anybody to engage with 3D content, regardless of operating systems, CAD capability and so forth. And it delivers the functions that are common to these business areas, mainly to "view" and "understand" the model. It also allows authors to save views, including comments, to drive others in an appropriate way to manipulate a scene. However, scripting capabilities and multiple navigation tools are provided which allow customization of the experience for different purposes.

I had the impression that Adobe didn't push the first release of Acrobat 3D very much. Now, with version 8, your company approach seems to have changed. Adobe is investing important resources in promoting Acrobat and PDF in the design and manufacturing world. What are Adobe ambitions on a 5 - 10 year scale?
I am not sure I would agree that we didn’t push the first version, but certainly we have continued to invest more resources.  I think some of the sense you have about the level of activity is related to significant progress in the latest version of Acrobat 3D compared with the original version.  That is generating lots of interest from users, non-users, and the larger CAD/PLM community.
With our acquisitions of OKYZ in 2004 and Trade & Technologies France in 2006, Adobe has a really strong 3D engineering team – tons of industry experience. A good deal of OKYZ and TTF technology is embedded into Acrobat 3D V8, capabilities like the PRC format, interoperability, support for PMI and compression. But we haven’t come close to integrating all of the technology we gained as part of those acquisitions, so the possibilities moving forward over the coming years are exciting.

You are based in Michigan and therefore you must have a lot of interaction with automotive companies. How is Acrobat 3D perceived by the "big guys"?

Acrobat 3D will help the automotive people address the exchange problems along the supply chain

You bet I do see the automotive folks a lot and I think we are gaining great traction…maybe “excitement” is a better term. As you may have seen, we just announced Renault’s significant adoption of Acrobat 3D. As you know, the automotive OEM’s and Tier 1 suppliers have had significant challenges with globalization, supply chain communication, and so forth. PDM is recognized as an excellent vehicle (pardon the pun) to push engineering information beyond their management systems and firewalls. These guys, for the most part, are pretty advanced in the PLM space, and they’re going to want to maximize the return on the investment they’ve already made. Acrobat 3D will help the automotive people address the exchange problems along the supply chain, where standards are badly needed. With PDF and Adobe Reader already deployed worldwide, the difficult-to-deploy plug-ins required by the CAD/PLM vendors are not needed. Adobe’s strategy is to leverage the Reader, which we’ve distributed over 525 million copies of worldwide in about the last two years, and Flash, which is installed on well over 90 percent of web-connected computers worldwide, as much as possible. That’s why we believe Adobe is poised to become a first-in-class, cross platform and device software infrastructure for information and rich internet application distribution.

Many of your competitors are working on providing process-based solutions (PDM, PLM systems) to the problem of archiving, sharing, and delivering technical data. Acrobat seems to approach the same category of problems from the file format point of view. Can you explain the Adobe strategy on this topic?
PDF is on its way to becoming a truly open standard (see Adobe press release), it’s trusted and already part of most companies’ day-to-day business processes. We believe PDF can extend the capabilities of management systems. It can also provide off-line capabilities for processes like RFx, field service delivery, MRO, etc.
Let me give you an example: A dynamic PDF form containing XML information coming from PDM and ERP systems is sent for bid purposes to suppliers in China by e-mail. The document “flies off-line”, collects information from the bidder, and is sent back to these backend systems via e-mail or direct XML exchange. During this off-line period, our Policy Server product, combined with the management system, allows the sender to keep constant control of who accesses the information package as well as tracking all events (read, modify, fill-in, print, copy, etc.), revoke users, and modify rights on usage. So both revision control and IP protection.
I guess the point here is we see what we’re doing with PDF via Acrobat 3D and our LiveCycle servers as being complementary to the PDM/PLM/ERP systems.

The acquisition of TTF brought to Adobe the skills and technical background required for approaching the design and manufacturing software market. Is Adobe considering other acquisitions to strengthen its position?
Well that sort of gets back to the question of what our ambitions are.  I can’t speak to future acquisitions, of course.  But I will say this: Adobe is constantly creating and in search of new technologies that will help address customer needs. And, again, we haven’t come close to integrating all of the OKYZ and TTF technologies, which opens a number of possibilities for continued innovation in the 3D space. The imagination can run wild.

I would like to thank Doug Halliday for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Doug or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

Adobe, CAD, Blogs, and Marketing

The term blogosphere started as a joke but quickly became a common word to indicate the community and the social network of blogs and bloggers. Like every other community, the blogosphere has its own style, guidelines, and customs. These rules are a way for the blogger community to recognize its own members and to define itself. Bloggers define a blog as a group of web pages with certain features, like posts, permalinks, trace-backs, comments, and the presence of the author and date associated with each post. While everybody has the absolute freedom to use the word blog for any web page, the guidelines are shared by almost all the bloggers. For example, I can drive a Smart car and wear a French beret and claim to be a cowboy; but if I sit in a Texas bar, I'm sure the other cowboys would not recognize me as one of them. The same holds true for bloggers and their blogs. If a blog doesn't accept comments and trace-backs we can still call it a blog, but the blogosphere may not consider it one of their own. (FYI: I am not a cowboy and I do not wear French berets. I also do not drive a Smart car.)

According to several experts, the blogosphere style-guidelines are not only useful to the blogger community; they are fully compatible with business and business blogs. The popular book "Blog and Marketing" by Jeremy Wright (blog) presents several examples of companies that are able to benefit from blogs without ignoring or reinterpreting the concept of a blog. In his book Jeremy describes the famous example of Kryptonite. In 2004 the company decided not to address several bloggers' negative feedback about one of its bike locks (see the original video on how to use a 10-cent ballpoint pen to pick a $100 bike lock), and lost a great amount of user confidence in their products.

I'm having a similar experience with a company with plenty of ambitions to enter the CAD world. In a recent post on this blog I highlighted that Adobe Acrobat Reader could benefit from some major redesign and that the latest releases are unstable and can easily crash (mostly when used inside a web browser). A few days later, Doug Halliday on an Adobe official blog acknowledged my post (no links, just my name): "Reader not working? Wow! The point about the reader working or not is interesting. We will investigate this and report back - this is the first I have heard of such issues with the Reader."

In the mean time I found that FoxIt is selling a PDF reader plug-in for the FireFox web browser. The interesting part is how FoxIt is promoting his PDF Reader on LifeHacker website: "You don't need Adobe Reader to load up for 5 minutes, freezing your computer 4 times in the process, just to view a PDF."

I thought it would be useful for Adobe to receive this kind of feedback; I went back to Dough Halliday blog and posted a comment (only after going though an unnecessary registration process): "Hi Doug, Just a short comment on the topic "Reader not Working?" raised by my recent post on NOVEDGE blog and addressed by your post. I believe I'm not the only one experiencing a problem with the Acrobat Reader. It seems to be a known issue. I'm a bit surprised that Adobe has to learn this from me. For example, take a look at the description of FoxIt Reader, a FireFox plug-in intended to replace Acrobat Reader."

My comment was never approved by Dough and never appeared online (blog comments have to be approved in order to be published). Like Kryptonite, Adobe decided to ignore a user feedback.

a blog is a great opportunity for a business to establish a beneficial dialogue with its customers

I sincerely believe a blog is a great opportunity for a business to establish a beneficial dialogue with its customers. Being in a dialogue means to listen and to answer, even when you don't like what your customers are saying. Is Adobe having a dialogue with its customers or just using blogs as a marketing tool? Please feel free to express your opinion by leaving a message (I promise I will not delete your comment).

Franco Folini

P.S. On April 1st, 2007 after leaving a comment, and exchanging a couple of e-mails with me, Doug Halliday published my original comment (dated March 7) on his blog. I would like to thank Doug for his positive reaction to this post.

Is the New Acrobat 3D headed for Failure or Success?

I like "CAD Data Visualization," another may prefer DDC (Digital Design Communication), someone else might like the ambitious acronym PDC (Product Design Collaboration), but whatever name you choose, this kind of software program has been around for many years. The central idea is to provide affordable ways to visualize the content of a CAD file for those who don't own the original expensive CAD system. Over time these tools evolved from view-only to view-share-and-communicate.

In January 2006 Adobe released the first version of Acrobat 3D joining the group of software manufacturers offering CAD visualization solutions. Acrobat 3D 1.0 is a special version of Adobe's popular PDF product. Despite suffering from the typical problems of every first release, it indicated Adobe's ambitions for the CAD world. Now, one year later, Adobe is getting ready to lunch a new and improved version of Acrobat 3D. Most of the features in the new release are based on the technology Adobe acquired with TTF (Trade & Technologies France), a French software company specializing in CAD interoperability. For a detailed list of feature improvements for the new version you can check the Adobe pages.

when a company adds a new feature it can't dictate to users when to use it or not

Last Friday Adobe invited me and other bloggers such as Deelip Menezes to an online preview of the new Acrobat 3D version 8. I would like to share my opinion on this new product and the Adobe strategy for the 3D world.

Data Visualization or Data Translation?

While the first version of Acrobat 3D was a visualization-only solution, the new release will offer the option to export a 3D model from PDF to IGES and STEP file formats. According to Adobe, this feature is not intended for a CAD-to-CAD data translation and, according to them, PDF should be used only to move geometry from a CAD system to a post-CAD system, such as CAM, rendering, animation, etc. While theoretically this is not a bad idea, I expect users will ignore Adobe recommendations. When a company adds a new feature to its products, it can't dictate to users when to use it or not. Pretty soon Acrobat users will start to use PDF to move geometric information among CAD systems, and Adobe will find itself pulled into the data translation area. Without a very strong technical background in that field, this is not a nice position to be in!

To PDF or not to PDF?

Over the years PDF has earned a great reputation as a multi-platform, reliable, mostly version-insensitive, compact, and standard format. Leveraging this huge popularity, Adobe has gradually transformed PDF into a sort of container where you can put almost everything: text, images, sound, forms, videos, and 3D models. This seems like a great idea to expand the PDF market, but it can easily backfire and undermine the reputation of PDF.
Let's look for example at the problems that can arise from storing a CAD model in a PDF file. 3D models are not as simple as text or pictures. In fact, in just one release PDF internal representation moved from one to 4 different 3D file formats: (1) the internal tessellated representation, (2) U3D specification 1, (3) U3D specification 2, (4) PRC (the TTF file format). It's a slippery slide: if this proliferation of formats continue, in the near future receiving a PDF would not guarantee simple and easy access at information contained inside the file. If this happen, users will have to learn that what they know about PDF documents doesn't apply to PDF 3D models.

Do you want Geometry or Tessellation?

When you create a 3D PDF this is the critical question asked by the Adobe software.  A tessellation-only PDF is a safe way to share design information and to protect your intellectual property. It's like sharing a picture of your 3D model. On the other hand, when the 3D PDF also includes the geometry, sharing the PDF is equivalent to sharing the original model. Anybody can extract from the PDF file a STEP or IGES copy of the original geometry. As you can imagine, the consequences of this simple decision -- tessellation or geometry -- are enormous. The problem is: does the average user know what a tessellation is?  Does he know all the implications of this choice?  Based on what I've seen, Acrobat 3D user interface is not doing a good job in helping users to understand the meaning of "tessellation" and "geometry" and to appreciate the consequences of the two options.

What is in a PDF?

Because of the structural ambiguity between tessellation and geometry, when you receive, send, or archive a PDF you don't really know what's inside. When we store a PDF file on our hard disk, are we archiving valuable geometric information or just a bunch of small triangles (tessellation) good only to create nice images on our screen? The only way to tell the difference is to open the file and see if the "Export" option is enabled or not. This ambiguity can easily become a CAD manager nightmare!

Do we really need another 3D file format?

When you generate a 3D PDF selecting the option "include-geometry" Acrobat 3D converts your original CAD file to PRC file format and embeds the PRC representation in the PDF file. If you share or exchange geometric information using PDF, you are just using a PRC file nicely wrapped within the familiar PDF file format -- it is still a PRC file. Adobe chose PRC because it's the TTF file format that they own, not for any specific technical reason. Why didn't they embed a fully standard STEP file instead of a PRC? I'm sure the Adobe marketing has a good explanation, but from the end-user point of view, now we have one more 3D file format to deal with. And nobody needs it!

Acrobat Reader Nightmare.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is essential to the Acrobat 3D success. For most of the users Acrobat Reader is just a way to open PDF files they receive by e-mail or download from the Internet. Over the years Acrobat Reader has become a huge, slow, and unstable piece of software. If we don't hear many complaints from end-users it's because this is a viewing-only tool. When it crashes (not a rare event on my computer) the user doesn't lose any data. He/she can restart the program, reopen the PDF document and everything is OK. If Adobe couldn't manage to develop a reliable Acrobat Reader when PDF contains only text and pictures, what will happen when PDF comes with 3D models, in one of the 4 different formats?

After listing all the limitations of Acrobat 3D and Adobe strategy, let me explain why I believe Adobe has a chance to succeed with Acrobat 3D.

Adobe Acrobat 3D is here to stay.

The acquisition of TTF and the investments in the new version of Acrobat 3D are the proof of Adobe's commitment to design data communication. I believe there is a huge opportunity in this market. So far I haven't seen any company with the strategy, resources, and determination to develop and conquer this market. Adobe is a good candidate that I'll be watching.

Acrobat doesn't have competition.

Today Acrobat 3D still a young product. Over time it can grow into a mature, full-featured product. Adobe is looking at a huge opportunity -- even more so because there is no real competitor to challenge Acrobat 3D. Currently, the CAD Data Visualization is a market only partially exploited, controlled by a handful of single-brand solutions and a few small companies. The single brand solutions, like Autodesk DWF and e-drawings, are by definition limited to the products of just one single software manufacturer; they don't have any appeal for other software systems users. The other competitors are mostly small companies. Some of them are offering excellent products but they don't have the strategies or the resources to develop and occupy this huge potential market.

Adobe is like Switzerland.

A CAD data communication solution can be successfully promoted only by a company that doesn't own, and is not related to any of the major CAD systems. This is one of the reasons for the failure of the Autodesk DWF file format. After some adjustments to Acrobat 3D (that will presumably require a couple of releases) Adobe will be in a perfect position to propose itself as a neutral and reliable partner to manage the design communications of all major manufacturers, regardless of which CAD system each company uses or will use in the future.

These are just my opinions, but I would like to hear yours too. Please feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts with me and all the readers of this blog.

Franco Folini