CoCreate Follow Up

CoCreate origins go back to the 1980s when HP took its in-house CAD system and spun it off, selling it under the names ME10 (for 2D) and ME30 (for 3D). It was reinvented as CoCreate a few years later, its name emphasizing collaboration. In fact, users in different location could work on the same model simultaneously.

That did not catch on, explains Ulrich Mahle, who heads CoCreate's marketing and R&D. "We found designers did not want to continually show their changes. They would rather just show the finished design."

So without the unique selling point suggested by its own name, CoCreate seeks to differentiate itself by another way and now seems to have found it. They call it "dynamic editing," the ability to change  a solid model without constraints, unencumbered by its history. Given that the current crop of popular solid modelers (SolidWorks, Pro/E, UGS, more) are all history based. clearly CoCreate has a challenge in convincing potential customers.

CoCreate is also different from other CAD companies in the following ways:

• Its product development cycle is characterized by quick 3-week iterations in which a task (like a new feature) is created and tested, rather than the more conventional one long development phase after which are code base are gathered up. In addition,  programmers work in pairs, each complementing the other. Daily show and tells keep the whole team aware of individual and total progress.
• CoCreate has no large overseas development staff. A main reason is the interplay that the above-mentioned iterative development process demands. According to CC, overseas development offers a false economy and its onsite developers are each worth multiple offsite developers.

Six week vacations are the norm. But when they are working, they put in the hours. "Nobody works an 8 hour day." Food at the very nice cafeteria is subsidized. I should have asked if CC is accepting applications.

Comments

[ronts/CA]

CC's agile development process with 3 weeks iteration process is appreciable.

But, the statement - "According to CC, overseas development offers a false economy and its onsite developers are each worth multiple offsite developers" is completely wrong and misleading. Productive and junk developers are everywhere - onsite and offsite does not matter. In fact, it is not false economy but a proven fact that cost of same or better talent at offsite is almost one third to on site developer cost and that includes other incidental, logistical costs for offsite developer.

The “worth” of developer depends on whom you hire. In fact most of the CAD development companies have Indians as their largest pool of productive developers and have successful development site at India. Only major problem with booming economy in India and China is attrition and that is apparently hurting product development companies most at offsite development. If top management is convinced about their investment into high-talent and low-cost economy like India, issue with Attrition can easily be tackled with better planning – you should not plan around utopian very low attrition rate with a mindset of stagnant US economy. If reasonable attrition like 10-12% is accounted into the plan, it really does not matter – in fact, it becomes healthier.

Higher merit increase demand is another issue often cited against offsite development sites. This is another fallacy of misreading the figures. The initial salary gap between onsite and offsite is so much that even with higher % of merit increase offsite can never catch or be closer of the cost of onsite development. With more and more experience the growing cost is easily offset by productivity gain of talents. With more matured economy, higher merit increase demand will also cool off.

Agile development process can be collaborated between onsite and offsite very well if planned correctly. In fact, it can work much better between onsite and offsite development site having time-zone difference than single site where round-the-clock development can be achieved in agile way. Management conviction, support, local empowerment based on demography and true trust are the keys to the success of offsite development.

As a long term planning, offsite distributed development with true ownership assignment to offsite is key strategic initiative for product development companies.

CoCreate need to change their mindset definitely after acquisition by PTC.

[jeroen]

Correct. The 2D Cad System was called Me10 and is now called Drafting. (Is actually included in the Modeling Software without extra cost!)

[JohnH]

CoCreate has been doing history-free modeling for almost 20 years, since ME30. This is not a new thing. For many years, they (and others, like IronCAD) have struggled to convince the market of the value. I guess it's because everyone is so brainwashed about parametrics and "capturing design intent". CAD geeks love to build their highly "intelligent" models, despite the fact that their models fall apart as soon as they have to make an unanticipated design change, or worse yet, they have to hand over the design to some poor fool who isn't intimately familiar with the 50-bazillion complex constraints built into the model.

I've always been baffled by why the market hasn't placed more value on this incredibly powerful way of doing solid modeling.

[ralphg]

I have a feeling that the 2D version was named ME10.