CAD Olympics Part 1: Who's #1?

Business is competition and every competition has its contestants, its judges and its winners. Sports has its Olympics. But businesses also vie for top prizes in several arenas. Movies have their Oscars, Motor Trend has is Car of the Year. Travel magazine ranks cruises, hotels and more. Consumer Reports sorts out just about every type of consumer product. The list goes on...But no one wants to say which is the best CAD product

Wait. Let me take that back. With the lack of true arbiters, many CAD vendors have declared themselves #1, using criteria such as sales figures, seats sold or -- as has been done on these pages -- with some new technology that is certain to leave its competition in the dust. But contestants placing olive wreaths on their own heads is hardly credible and has only caused confusion among potential buyers.

Why not let the contestants compete? In an arena, with judges, an audience...? It's not a new idea but previous attempts at CAD competitions have been spotty. I have been involved in three of them:

• A mechanical CAD competition (Archimedes) was held at the M/Tech event in 1998 as part of a bigger show. All contestants were given a computer mouse to model and analyze. But several leading vendors were missing. As far I know, it the event was never held again. I was with IMSI at the time and we participated with TurboCAD.
• A more recent competition pitted Inventor against SolidWorks (see article). The less robust Inventor was the surprise winner in this 2002 shootout, as judged both by the judge and the audience. The resulting firestorm of protests from SolidWorks backers left well -meaning contest organizer Elise Moss feeling bruised and battered. Chief among the protests was that the contest tested the user more than the product, a claim of some validity as the winner was an Autodesk-trained  demo jock. SolidWorks had declined official participation in the event, so a SolidWorks user had been invited to participate.
• An architectural 3D CAD Challenge has been the best contest I have ever seen. Several teams were given a project and were asked to create a design as an audience watched. But the last one seems to have occurred in 2003. Largely a labor of love by Geoffrey Moore Langdon, this contest should serve as a basis for future competitions. I served as a judge one year.

Next: What would make a good, fair CAD contest?

Comments

[Mike]

"even though they might do very well, the potential downside of not winning made it not worthwhile to participate"

So rather than participate in a fair contest, just keep it a feature vs. feature paper wad war.
Typical.

[Evan Yares]

I ran the Archimedes MCAD Competition.

It was interesting -- but not much fun. Companies such as SolidWorks pointed out that, even though they might do very well, the potential downside of not winning made it not worthwhile to participate. I didn't have a good counter-argument.

The reason I never ran the event again (other than having run myself ragged the first time) was that Joel Orr, Brad Holtz, and myself came up with an idea that we wanted to put our energy behind -- the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software.

By the way -- Carl Bass would likely beat John McEleney in a wrestling match, mostly because he's a lot bigger. Why not make it more interesting? They can have a road race, each driving a car designed with their respective products.

[John Burrill]

John, you moron! First your lead-off analogy leads no where. Then you insulted the Taoists! (What did Winnie the Pooh ever do to you?) and finally, you not only misspelled the name of Solidworks' CEO, you got the Autodesk CEO's last name completely wrong. It's Carl Bass, not Weiss. Carl Weiss is a production engineer where you work.
Why don't you-You know what? I can't even look at you. You're an embarrassment to the CAD proffession...AND YOU TALK TO YOURSELF IN PUBLIC!

[John Burrill]

Has anyone ever seen a Borland vs. Microsoft C++ challenge? How about Lotus Notes vs. Office, or Word Perfect vs. Word, or ANSYS vs Fluent?

You know why you don't see it? Because no one who takes their work seriously is going to pick a CAD package based on one of these contests.
Think of pitting philosophies and religions against each other.
"You have two minutes to explain the existence of the cosmos and why we're in it and there's a 5 point bonus if you can account for all of the extra space. Taoism, you're automatically disqualified since you consider the question irrelavant. You to just keep chasing each other."

I mean all of the really important questions can be answered without this kind of horsetrading:
1)Can I define a boundary patch with c2 curvature continuity to all of it's adjoining faces
2)How fast can it open, rebuild and save a thousand part assembly
3)will it support Vista, 64Bit OS, SLI video
4)how do I share and distribute my designs?

If CADDER's want to compete as entertainment, they should sponsor NASCAR designs or robot fighting or I'd pay for an upgrade just to see a greek wrestling match between Carl Weiss and John McElleny.

[Jay]

I agree with Mike. A CAD/BIM competition sounds good in theory but in reality I just don't see how it could be accomplished fairly. It's not like putting 6 races on a line and telling them to run 100 yards that way and whoever crosses the line first wins.

A CAD/BIM competition would need to consider end user needs (design, drafting, modeling, engineering, etc.) and differing industry needs (residential, commercial, industrial, government, etc.). The choices are too varied.

Now if you had a challenge that was for say residential programs and the goal was to complete a 3D model, construction documents, and bill of materials output on a 1-Story, 2,000 s.f. house then you might have a chance but how do you gauge who takes part and who gets to run each competitors program. A demo jock from each firm, a medium level user or a beginner? Again, too many variables to get an accurate end result.

I think in the CAD/BIM world it will remain up to the user to do their homework on if the sales person is blowing smoke up their skirt (just b/c its new doesn't mean its good) or is it the real deal and even if it is real is it a good fit for resolving their needs?

[Mike]

Cad challenges are hard because companies buy cad systems for different reasons. An ID company may be looking for good surfacing, A machne design company may want automation.
A competition needs to look at the things that each user encounters while using the Cad software.
I represented a couple of CAD companies in the past, and the most common problem encountered when asking customers was always related to Changes.
Now that i have this model how easy is it to change.
What features fail when i change it, and how much training do i need to understand how to fix it.
The industry has changed from expert CAD users to Casual users.
This is why so many mid range systems poped up, CAD users just dont sit behind the tube 8 hours a day anymore, they have many tasks to perform.
Customers should really challenge the CAD vendors to really examine the problems they have now and how the new CAD package can address it.