Introduction to History of CAD podcast

Roopinder 0:22

Hello and welcome to the History of CAD podcast . My name is Roopinder Tara and I will be your host on this podcast . We will explore the untold stories behind the tools that shape modern engineering and design . Each episode features conversations with the pioneers of computer-aided design , the innovators who built the software and those who worked alongside them or observed or reviewed their work . We dedicate this podcast to the late David Weisberg , who wrote a 650-page treatise , the Engineering Design Revolution , which we will refer to often .

Roopinder 0:57

Joining me today to talk about the history of CAD is Michael Finocchiaro . On LinkedIn , where Michael can usually be found these days , he goes by “Fino” . Michael has a long history with CAD and PLM . He's a mechanical engineer born in Florida . He moved to France in 1996 . He has worked with HP when he used to be in the CAD business , as well as with PTC , and is a director of marketing at Dassault Systèmes , where he worked with the incomparable Bernard Charles and the irrepressible Monica Menghini . If you've ever wondered about the origin and meaning of 3D experience , listen up .

Roopinder 1:33

We join Fino as he comes off a European vacation

Michael Finocario's background and journey

Roopinder 1:36

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Michael 1:36

Here in Europe we've got very long relaxing vacations , so I spent some time in Basque country in Spain . San Sebastian is known for its beach and for its amazing tapas that are called pinchos in the Basque language . But it was raining like crazy for two days , so we ended up renting a car and driving to Bourges , which has a very famous , beautiful Gothic cathedral , and next door there's a monastery called Miraflores , with our UNESCO monuments . The next day we drove to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim and just experienced that town . It's a beautiful town .

Michael 2:08

I had a stretch of bad luck because I rented the car in a very dark garage , drove out in the pouring rain and as soon as the sun came out I noticed a crack in the windshield . Obviously , avis is going to say it's my fault , although there's no way I would have seen it in a dark garage or in the pouring rain . So they charged me 1200 bucks . I've put in a claim to my Visa Premier , hoping that they're going to cover it . So we'll see . But that was the only disagreeable aspect . Everything else has been great when we went to Pau and spent a couple days in Toulouse , and then we've been Marseille yesterday , went up to Arles , which is a really fantastic city . They have a six-month festival every year of photography . Every single public or religious building there's a photo exhibit . It was really awesome . I hadn't realized it lasted so long and it was so big . It's become a really huge local event .

Roopinder 2:56

This is turning out to be quite interesting . I might actually use this . You already turned into one of my most interesting guests .

Michael 3:05

One of your interesting guests got on Thomas Allgeyer's Best of Linkedin list on Smart Manufacturing , so that made me pretty happy you're at the one percent of all LinkedIn I think one percent is defined as like 10 or 12 000 followers , and I've actually passed the 20 000 mark . I'm at like 20 350 , something like that . I'm aiming very pointedly at a Lionel Grealou . I lose . So , Leo , watch out man , I'm coming behind you .

Roopinder 3:31

You must be the top at our industry .

Michael 3:33

Lionel is number one at 26,000 . Oleg is just behind me at 20,200 . And I'm number two at 20,300 . But then you've got some Indian guys that have bigger followings , but I think that maybe slightly less experience to speak from .

Roopinder 3:47

You're really taking to LinkedIn . That's where I first took notice of you . Pardon me for not noticing you earlier . We've been in this industry for quite some time , but for me it seemed like you burst upon the scene at LinkedIn and suddenly you were everywhere . And I'm not just talking about little half-baked quotes , I'm talking about full articles with graphs and charts . Where does this guy come from ? I'm thinking . Why is he not in publishing ? And I find out you've been immersed in the CAD industry .

Michael 4:12

I started doing graphics adapters back when there were graphics adapters that weren't

NVIDIA's origins in CAD technology

Michael 4:17

made by NVIDIA . That was a long time ago . In fact , a lot of the articles you're referring to I've written about the history of CAD and the history of PDM and what became PLM . I was realizing and trying to prove the fact that our industry is really responsible for the rise of AI rather directly , because the math that was required to do the rendering of the 3D models for the Boeings and the Airbuses and the Lockheeds , all that was driven by CAD software , by Pro/E and Catia , which is now NX , and of course , SolidWorks , the whole Windows revolution , Solid Edge and now Autodesk Fusion and On shape .

Michael 4:53

Had those applications not made so much demand on the hardware which , at the time before the windows workstation , became usable in around 1999 , 2000 with the 486 and 586 chips ? Before that it was IBM Sun . I was watching for HP and IBM at various times and then , of course , everybody's favorite was SGI . It was the most beautiful machines , right , the purple ones . They were pretty awesome . We were all jealous , oh yeah .

Michael 5:20

Like the Iris workstation ? Yeah , the IRIS workstation . Well , that IRIX was their flavor of UNIX . Right , was IRIS or IRIX ? No , I think it was IRIS , it was APX, AIX, SunOS or S olaris . And then there was IRIS and there was DEC .

Michael 5:34

DEC had their own too , right , yes , DEC had some , but the demands that we were making on graphics meant that we had to create new chips to deal with these matrix operations , mass produced by companies like ELSA , but especially another smaller one called NVIDIA . We created the GeForce , which was the revolutionary card , back in 1997 . So three or four years before Quake and Doom and all these games that the biographers of our friend Jensen Huang would like to say were at the origin of this . Well , actually , several years before that , he'd already created the GeForce specifically for these CAD applications , and without the GPU , without that technology , we wouldn't be where we are today with Gen AI and Agentic AI and MCPs and all that stuff . So I like to think that we had a much larger role to play than perhaps people say these days .

Roopinder 6:25

A little bit of unknown history that it was actually CAD that was behind NVIDIA's success , not the gamers .

Michael 6:31

Initial success . Of course , they exploded after that with gaming , but they wouldn't have created the GPU initially had it not been for the needs of CAD and for rendering in general . When we wanted to create a realistic view of the Porsche Taycan , the computers were just too slow , so we had to create new chips , new chip structures , the graphical processing unit , in order to process the graphics so that we could in real time see the car or the airplane or whatever . We're doing that in the browser . We've got WebCPU and WebGL that are doing that natively in a browser , which is just mind-blowing , thinking of the size of the machines I had to use 30 years ago . I've done a lot of research into startups , engineering startups , and there's a really awesome one out of Hungary , out of Budapest .

Michael 7:16

Istvan Csanady is the founder of Shapr 3D and he realized when he first got an iPad what 2005 , 15 , 16 is what I think the first ones came out . He realized how powerful it was and he said I could use OpenCascade , but I think there's actually a binding for iOS . So he contacted Siemens and got Parasolid on there and he created this awesome CAD application running on an iPad . You know it weighs a couple of grams . You can put it in your suit , jacket , bucket how far we've come in 30 years .

Roopinder 7:45

My red letter day in CAD was when

Boeing 777 and CATIA development

Roopinder 7:48

the Boeing 777 came out . It was the first aircraft totally created on CAD . That was with CATIA .

Michael 7:56

It was CATIA and [ . . . ] . When were you doing that ? What year ? The 777 would have been the mid-90s right .

Roopinder 8:04

Yeah .

Michael 9:28

Mid-90s . I was finishing school in 93 and then joining IBM for a couple of years and then in 96 , I would have been moving to France and I would have been at Dassault when they were creating a CATIA V5 . It was initially called CENIT , called CENIT v4 , which was used for the 777 , was more or less just solid modeling and doing how Boolean operational solids . But they also added exact surfaces , so mathematical surfaces that they could put on top of a facet rather than just a flat surface . They had a name for the kernel which was just the direct modeling , and then it was the e-S olids , the exact surfaces , and then Pro/E came out , Pro/E comes out in 1995 . They make more money than God . They're basically printing money in the basement in Waltham .

Michael 10:06

And parametric modeling , everybody's like mind blower and that's it . Well , we had to build a modeler and do both , because there's people I want to do direct , they want to be able to hide , control their surface , and there's other ones and they were playing with it and he thought the ergonomy was terrible . And it was true . If you remember the earlier ergonomy , the ergonomy was not great . You had to be a god of using your mouse and kilometers and kilometers . Probably lots of people had arthritis and joint problems after that , but basically they wanted to fix the ergonomy of it while maintaining both the parametric modeler and a direct modeler . I think they can with great validity claim the very world's first hybrid kernel doing both parametric and direct modeling . It was a couple of years after that they did the same thing in NX . Was it convergent modeling ? No , I think convergent is when they did the surfacing plus the . Maybe it was just called hybrid or something .

Roopinder 10:56

Point the tessellated models .

Michael 10:58

That's the convergent modeling that they just did a couple of years back . They basically merged their direct modeling from I-DEAS and Unigraphics to the parametric modeling that Unigraphics could do . It was basically a hybrid . They were the second ones to do it and they put that inside , of course , Parasolid . So all these companies that bought Parasolid as a kernel were able to use it . It was a cool time .

Michael 11:18

I was there when they were creating C-NEXT and they were actually learning C++ as they were designing it , which is kind of crazy . Right To learn the language as you're designing software . I talked to another guy . This was Jack . Jack is now one of the EVPs at Capgemini . Jack said that he remembers being at a table . There was Jack Levine, there was Bernard Charles it might have been Didier Boursier , although there was some debate whether he was at DS already or not but they were basically sitting around a table looking at this thing . Well , we take CATIA v4 and fortran and just fix the things and add stuff to it , or do we start completely fresh with c++ ? And basically the two other guys at the table were like well , you know , and , backery , he claims to be the one that's told bernard , no , bernard , we need to start all over , we go c++ , and that was , that was the decision , and that's that was history being made right there .

Roopinder 12:07

Bernard Sharlaz is a key figure in the history of CAD . No question , Did you have an opportunity to work closely or directly with him ?

Michael 12:14

I was working at Dassault from 2010 . After Dassault acquired the IBM branch of Pelham and the Turinga project . I was at DS until 2017 . I didn't see Bernard all the time but of course everybody knew who he was in the hallways . But when

Evolution of CAD kernels and modeling

Michael 12:28

we started thinking about 3D experience platform , we had this marketing woman named Monica Menghini who made a huge impact on the industry herself . I got to know Monica and I got to work on that team that was conceptualizing what a platform , a unified platform for Dassault Systems would look like that could unify the user experience all the brands of Dassault Systems . And then what does the messaging look like ? That could unify the user experience all the brands of Dassault systems , and then what does the messaging look like ? How would we go after the various industries we want to consider ? That was the whole re-foundation of Dassault around 2012 to 2015 . Basically , from ground up , of saying , okay , we need a unified user experience , instead of saying ENOVIA , v6 is the platform and an app . Well , an app and v6 is a platform , except v is a letter and 6 is a number , meaning 5 wasn't that great and 7 will be better . So we got rid of that and called it 3DEXPERIENCE , which was just the name of the platform and then we said each brand will have apps on the platform . Rather than selling apps , they sell a role like Mechanical Designer which has a little bit of CATIA but a little bit of Inovia for data management and so on . So it was a huge change .

Michael 13:30

I presented to Bernard once in the XCOM meetings on the user interface of Inovia , which was not anybody's favorite . That went pretty well . I was in a couple of meetings . He was there but yeah , I got to interact with him a bit . He was a character , he was turbulent , he was just as charismatic as he came off in public , I'd say , and very well loved by the employees . I mean , no place is ideal to work for , but at ds you did , particularly when Bernard was there . You did feel like you had a purpose , you were working on a mission and you were going to change the world in a positive way . It was an interesting place to be yeah , very , very learned .

Roopinder 14:01

Quite a visionary . He has a phd in mechanical engineering , I believe .

Michael 14:04

Yeah , very well respected which is interesting about the generation of CEOs in PLM . It's a generation when we had Tony Affuso at the head of what became UGS and then was sold to Siemens as Siemens PLM and now it's Siemens Digital Industry Software kind of a mouthful , but that was Tony . And then you had PDC James Heppelman , who comes from SDRC . He and John Gibson decide that it's kind of dumb to write stuff in C . We need a neutral language . It's easier to port , so why don't we just rewrite metaphase in Java ? And so they do that and they try to find a name . They're in Minnesota , it's super cold , so they call it windchill factor .

Michael 14:42

Computer vision at the time is flailing in terms of PDM and PLM . They did PDM relatively well , but the UI was awful . I don't think I've seen a worse user experience in my life than OpTrigor , and CADS was a great product , but we had a separate executable for the parametric and a separate one for direct and it was a bit of a mess . In fact I talked to Scott Harris , who is the guy who created all that . I think you've already interviewed him on the show . Scott was telling me yeah , it was just such a mess of code . It was just people throwing stuff in and hoping it worked , kind of thing .

Michael 15:16

Cv saw this startup in Minneapolis and buys them at more or less simultaneously as PDC buying CV . There's an interesting thing there because there's a debate on whether did PDC buy CV because they wanted the software , and I would say not really . On whether did PDC buy CV because they wanted the software , and I would say not really . I think they wanted the end to Airbus and Hyundai Heavy Industries and all these huge customers that CV was able to get . I think that was the main thing they were trying to get . And Winchell they wanted the portfolio because they put CADS on life support immediately right . It was more or less a dead end at that point and of course , optigra was never anybody's favorite system . It was more or less the only thing that you had if you were willing to do big stuff at the time .

Roopinder 15:51

So interesting piece of history , I want to go back to 3D experience . Is it correct to say you were the father of 3D experience ? No I couldn't , would it bother you to know ? People are still wondering what that is .

Michael 16:09

What 3D experience is ? It's a very long name . I did mention to Monica at a user conference that v6 was a terrible name for a platform and they weren't even using it correctly because they were making people buy CATIA and then they had to buy Inovia too At one point that Daimler Benz was a huge customer of Dassault Systèmes . But Daimler said we don't want Inovia , we like Teamcenter . We love CATIA , but we love Teamcenter . Bernard said no , if you're gonna use gatia , you have to have a novia . And they just couldn't agree . And so damo said okay , fine , we're out of here .

Michael 16:34

I remember it was a radical decision and it really ticked off , bernard . Bernard would leave his car parked in front of the front office of dasso in the velizy . He had a high-end mercedes and we sit there in the ac , 65 degrees and all kinds of weather and casey had to go to the airport or whatever . And that car mysteriously , after this demo decision , disappeared and was replaced by an xg , xgs4 , jaguar , like almost immediately . And I had to turn in my company car , which was a class b mercedes , to take a bmw or volkswagen because they you know , damer was no longer an acceptable car to drive whatever the equivalent is for automobiles .

Michael 17:11

So we were at a conference and Monica had given this I love you speech because , with the industry approach , when she came in and she said what's important is solving business problems , not just selling licenses to software . We need to solve problems that businesses have To do , that we need to understand

Birth of 3D Experience platform

Michael 17:26

for each industry . For aerospace , for auto , well , we ended up calling it mobility and transport for automotive , but also includes trains , for industrial equipment , the big three , and then you've got shipbuilding and energy . We wanted to sell solutions rather than just software . And she created an entire organization with the vice president of an industry and a whole organization of people that were creating these solutions the brands I was in Inovia brand at the time . We all felt threatened with that . Oh my God , she's going to kill us , she's going to destroy the brands , the brands are going to disappear . So they had a conference well , basically tacked , on the end of a conference in Las Vegas , they had this I love you mask , basically All the brand people invited in this room , and Monica came in front and she said I still love you , don't worry , we're all friends , we're just trying to do this because we need to be able to sell better .

Michael 18:09

Right now , the Katia guys hate the Delmia guys and they hate the ENOVIA guys , and we are all on the same team . Our customers don't care about these internal rivalries . They want to buy software and fix their business problems , and so that's what we're trying to do here . The brands will always be there , but they would drive revenue , but what we need to sell is business solutions . And as she walked out of that meeting I said well , Monica , we haven't met yet , but my name is Michael Finacchario .

Michael 18:32

Isn't the problem right now the naming ? Because we had this problem with Daimler . You guys said they wanted to buy CATIA and you guys said , no , you have to buy Catia plus ENOVIA . If you had said they want to buy Catia , okay , fine , we'll sell you Katia v6 . And then you can connect CATIA v6 to Simcenter . That would have been a different argument . It would have been less aggressive , a little bit less hardcore than saying no , you have to buy Inovia . So I always want to put the idea in Monica's mind that separate ENOVIA , the application doing PLM , from ENOVIA , the platform v6 , and then everything happens . I can't claim credit for the name I did put a bug in her ear about . Maybe we ought to think about what a real platform is and what apps are , instead of doing an amalgamation of everything in the same term , which nobody understands and they're irresponsible for a lot of the marketing and the 3DEXPERIENCE experience .

Roopinder 19:20

I remember monica when she first came onto the scene and we saw her on stage at a dasso 3d experience event . She was like nothing we engineers and media saw at a cad conference . It was like crazy right , she was not in our world and she's just a presence around her . She talked about the experience , not so much the usage of cad but the experience of it . Everyone lives for the experience . I think she likened it to starbucks , if I'm not mistaken yeah , that was one of her pivot analogies .

Michael 19:47

The thing is that at the , if you're going to rename it , of course you're going to have to say 3D , because it's Bernard and everything that Bernard did was 3D . So the number three and the letter D had to be in there somewhere next to each other , preferably . What you have to remember is that coincides when Joe Pine published the Experience Economy , which was kind of the business book of the day . At the time , all the cool kids in the business world were reading this experience economy thing . So basically , monica and Bernard took that to heart and say well , 3d experience , we wanna create experiences . Right , and that's probably what she said at your conference .

Michael 20:17

She said the customer doesn't care about buying the software . The customer ultimately wants their customer to have a superior experience during their flight , during their taxi ride , during coffee . That's why she talked about Starbucks . She said why do people spend $4 or $5 on a cup of coffee when you can get one for two bucks ? Because of the Starbucks experience . You have a barista smiling at you asking what your first name is . The whole place feels very comfortable , nobody's smoking , but it's really nice and convivial . You can sit down for a while . Nobody's gonna tell you to leave because we need that table . It was an experience . That's why she was using that starbucks example . That's why the platform is called 3d experience , because they were trying to right pitch this idea of let's sell the customer's customer this episode of the history of cad is sponsored by shaper 3d , which could quite possibly be the future of CAD .

Roopinder 21:10

I first saw Shaper3D being demonstrated in San Francisco in 2018 . There was Istvan Shanadi on his first trip to the US from his native Hungary . His startup from Budapest was going to show a room full of CAD insiders how to do CAD , but where was his computer ? He stood in front of us with an iPad in one hand and an Apple Pencil in the other . He proceeded to create a solid model , though From where I stood , I could see no UI . He had no keyboard , no mouse . But Shaper3D was no toy . He said it was based on Parasolid . Was Shapr3D finally going to give engineers a natural way to sketch , finally able to capture ideas as easily as drawing on a notepad ? This was missing from every CAD program . Shapr has grown since those early years . It's ported to Windows , it's added rendering drawings , arvr . It remains , at least on the ipad , the easiest to use mcad program ever . Check it out .

Michael 22:15

sh apr3dcom I went to oracle open world about that time for two or three years in a row awesome concerts back in the day , I think . That year I saw the black keys playing and then another year I saw Aerosmith . It was awesome . Oracle was also using that same idea in their customer experience stuff . In fact , I even created a class based on a class I took at Oracle OpenWorld , which was walking your customer's shoes , like you know , creating the experience of your experience , and then looking at your products and where they interact with the customer during a particular interaction , finding the pain point and then saying , okay , why don't we fix that part of the experience ? Because suddenly we'll be able to talk to that customer more intimately in terms of fixing that particular problem .

Roopinder 22:57

She came from a more creative world . I would say Proctor and Satchi , Satchi and Satchi , right .

Michael 23:02

If the person cleaning your house , whether that's you or your wife or a cleaning person , they have a swifter in their arsenal . That was 100% Monica's idea . She came up with the idea , the branding , the color

Monica Manghini's impact on Dassault

Michael 23:14

, the marketing strategy that that was 100% . And I think back . You know , 15 years ago that was $2 billion of revenue for Procter Gamble .

Roopinder 23:22

I know that lady behind the swifter Interesting . What do you think her legacy is ? I think it's more the industry .

Michael 23:27

So it was the industry approach . She wasn't technical at all . She was very much get cut through all the BS and get right to the point that every meeting with her was more or less okay . I don't want to hear the blah blah . Just who are we selling to ? What are we selling and what are the paths to profitability ?

Roopinder 23:41

How hard of a fit was that ? Because that , because ?

Michael 23:48

I got the impression that most everybody else at Dassault Systems is very much technical . It was a rub she left in 2018 because it was definitely a challenge . There was a lot of rivalry between R&D , which is its own center of power . She was potentially a second locus of power , so there was a bit of a power struggle . It wasn't easy , although I think people came around to understanding the revolutions she did and appreciating it . But there were moments of tension because people were like who is this person ? Why is she so outlandish ? Why is she dressed like that ? Sometimes they would just look at her rather than think about what she was saying , because she was saying was really interesting and important some of the things that happened and tell me if this is not during that era .

Roopinder 24:21

But I recall campaigns , ad campaigns meant for the world , not just cat people , but it was ice birds being towed across the ocean , things like that that was the if we stuff .

Michael 24:30

Monica hired a company in the docklands and in london right on the tams it's they're called the frameworks , so it's basically the guys at the frameworks that came up if we idea , and so I guess the lesson there is she didn't rely on the internal people that were doing the same marketing stuff for the last 20 years at Dassault . She went outside , found a very experienced outside publicity company to redesign the advertising and to democratize the message into the iceberg thing , the commercials , the stuff in the Wall Street Journal , the stuff in airports . I think once or twice I was walking to the airplane like HSBC always has those cool . I think we had those once for 3dx for very briefly no it was .

Michael 25:09

It was an interesting period because it really was a lot of moving parts and a bit of a sea change in terms of the way dasso saw itself and it coincided with the fact that banger had ibm to lean on , because for their first 30 years of existence , ibm was always there to pick up the pieces .

Michael 25:23

You know , the ibm was doing all the marketing , all the service , all all the go-to-market . So Dashiell had to pick all that stuff up , figure it out and then realize , hey , we've got all these things that don't talk to each other . What if they talk to each other , wouldn't it be more powerful ? And surprise , surprise , they're now worth $6 billion instead of $900 million . I think they went to $2 billion in what ? 2017 , 2018 ?

Michael 25:42

It wasn't all just from acquisitions . From acquisitions , it was also , you know , just for selling more A lot of Katia V5 , a lot of solid work , but also this other stuff around the industries . The first billion dollar PLM deal was Boeing . That was the first billion dollar PLM deal . A friend of mine at Airbus confidentially told me that Airbus spends almost a billion dollars a year just on service , on all the software they have , because they have a ton of Dassault software as well . Renault has made a huge investment . They give it some funny name the Renault Experience . That whole industry approach is at least somewhat responsible for this incredible growth that they've experienced over the last 10 years .

Roopinder 26:14

It sounds like you're American by birth , but you moved to France a while back .

Michael 26:17

I'm from Miami originally and I moved to France in 1996 . I moved from IBM to HP because HP needed a guy to tune the graphics adapter for katia v5 , so that's that's why I ended up in france how come you didn't pick up a french accent . Well , the americans can't figure out where I'm from . Usually they're . They think I might be british or something because I don't have a very mark florida accent . I don't say y'all and reckon all that much unless I'm home for a while when I speak french .

Michael 26:45

I sound like an no French person has ever been fooled into thinking I was native French .

Roopinder 26:51

How did the French accept you specifically , and how did they accept an American company like SolidWorks ? What were both absorptions like it's ?

Michael 27:00

complicated . The French are a rather arrogant culture . I think I can say that they do believe that they've got the best minds and the best history and the best literature and the best this and that . So as an American , it is not always easy , particularly when you're an opinionated American as myself . It wasn't always easy . I mean , you remember after SolidWorks was bought , jeff Ray was the CEO and he only lasted about six months and he left . He couldn't stand it . There is Eric Swedberg , the American guy who runs North America for Dassault . He's been there for about 15 years

SolidWorks acquisition and channel strategy

Michael 27:35

and he's survived .

Michael 27:35

EXCOMM for that long I haven't talked to Eric in a while . I knew him back in the day . I think that him and Monica might be unique cases of people that were not French that survived in the oxygen-deprived areas of the higher , higher up levels .

Roopinder 27:45

It does so , yeah the story is that bernard came and saw solidworks , went back when solidworks was just a little startup customers and he bought them for what was then considered a enormous amount of money 700 million right or 600 sticks in my mind , less than 300 , but it seemed like he had to .

Roopinder 28:04

The French might do fall in love , seemed like that to me and , before they had much of a promise , fell in love with this young American company and then had to convince the board that this was going to be something . And now , of course , the irony is that it's one of the biggest revenue streams . It's as much in one quarter as the acquisition price of SolidWorks .

Michael 28:23

I wasn't there yet , but I heard the stories and I've talked to Mike Payne and John Herstig and Scott Harris various versions of the story . But yeah , bernard did fall in love with this idea of something . And I don't think it was solely the software . It was also that they came up with an extraordinary channel strategy that nobody else has ever done before no direct sales , everything would go through the channel , and then we're going to have a very close relationship with those partners , and that nobody had ever done in the CAD industry .

Roopinder 28:47

Autodesk did , but this was the first MCAD company .

Michael 28:50

You're right , but in MCAD it was SolidWorks that just knocked it out of the park .

Roopinder 28:55

PTC was selling directly with their own salespeople . But here comes , SolidWorks is going to copy the Autodesk model and do it through VARS . Vars turned out to be the best salesman you could get and also they had a really good hardware and third-party network that also jumped in .

Michael 29:11

Once you got off of Unix and it was only Windows , then it was a lot easier than trying to get IBM to change AIX in order to get this bug . It was just Windows and the graphics vendors . It was a lot easier .

Michael 29:21

In my book that I've been publishing article by article on LinkedIn . I talked to Mike and to John about the origins of SolidWorks and also Blake Corder , but mostly with Scott Harris who had the Geometry Hell book . John and Mike decided they wanted to do ProE only on PCs because they knew that was where the art was going to go . And Scott said , well , I want a really good modeler . So he created this notebook with the most difficult problems , like how do you make this surface touch that surface , with these different parameters on it , and he measured the asus kernel , which was the default the sales guy was really pushy from asus . Then they measured parasolid , since they were all xptc . They had a copy of pro e and they measured pro e and we're actually one . But scott said they were cheating . They could find places where they were cheating , like when the surface didn't touch . They would just extend the line a little bit . Even if they had wanted to use Granite , there was no name . Mike Payne told me it was never really a kernel , it was more of an engine . It would have been hard to separate the graphics core from the rest of Pro-E at the time . Nonetheless , Mike and Scott went back to Dick Harrison , who was running PTC and asked to use the PTC kernel , he said no way . So that's when they contacted Tony Affuso . They called Chuck Reinstaff and Eugene and said , hey , we love this parasol . Can we use it ? He said sure , I talked to Tony Affuso . He said we knew it was going to be competition , but we figured the kernel should just be plumbing . It shouldn't be a differentiator , it should just be the thing that allows people to have software that interacts . His problem was I want all these different disciplines to be able to talk to each other . Tony was already thinking about NBSC and digital thread . Back in the 70s and 80s it wasn't even a thing . So it's interesting that that happened In parallel .

Michael 30:56

Over at Intergraph they had also seen the writing on the wall for Unix and created a team to create this new product that was going to become Solid Edge . But they were also being pressured by the Asus guy . So the Asus guy was saying oh , you've got to use Asus . And so Bill McHugh , who was running the thing , had to rent an apartment somewhere in Huntsville Alabama . Have an employee come in , shake hands around the office so people couldn't deny he was there and he would go off to this apartment and poured everything to Paris Solid there and he would go off to this apartment and poured everything to parasolid .

Michael 31:29

When scott was doing that exercise , scott found that asus was like maybe 35 to 70 for parasolid , like 90 for ptc . Basically , bill mccure's team found the same thing . It was something like this was more or less broken . It could only do 35 of the things . The sales were going nuts because it was broken , whereas they put in parasolid and everything just suddenly worked . So when when they went to Tony and Chuck , Tony and Chuck said you know , we don't have a mid-range cat solution , Instead of selling you Parasolid , we'll just buy your company . So in fact they'd already switched to Parasolid and then UGS bought them .

Michael 31:57

Most people think it was the other way around . They bought Solid Edge and then they made them change . It was actually the change happened and then they were about .

Roopinder 32:03

Surprising thing I learned today . So tell me this then how was that a shockwave in the industry ? That here's the engine we're all going to use or are using , and now it's been bought by a cat company . Are we going to be out in the cold ?

Michael 32:15

No , no , no , the parasol . I think UGS bought ShapeData . Much earlier than that , though it was around 1985 , something like that . They bought ShapeData , so it was already part of UGS for a while . It did make people think what is the value of spending all the money it takes to create a graphics kernel when I can just use the one that Xemans had , or what's now Xemans , what UGS had , which is extraordinary . It was already a great kernel . Dassault decided of course they're French , they're going to do their own thing . Ptc already had Granite , so why bother ? They ended up buying co-create hp's direct modeling and they let it live on . Solid designer lives on as creo elements direct . But they also integrated that direct modeling into creo parametric , so now creo is able to do both direct and parametric inside so it's interesting , everybody arrived at different ways , but I mean it was .

Michael 33:01

there was no way that pro ptc was going to change from their kernel and it was . Was just these newcomers . You know they have a decision to make and this was a decision that was done by Mike Payne and Blake Quirter's next startup , which was SpaceClaim , now by Ansys , and that was on Ansys for a while , until January of this year . I found a service note that they were changing the entire stack to Parasolid , changing the entire stack to Parasolid . So Discovery , which is the rebranding of SpaceClean , which is now for all the products at ANSYS , the visualization platform and the CAD platform is all based on Parasolid . Now , that was a relatively recent development .

Roopinder 33:35

I will give you some trivia . What CAD company uses both IronCAD , ironcad Very good , the only one I know of .

Michael 33:42

I don't know the other one . The guy actually reached out to me because he saw my articles and he wanted to give me some more background on that . So that'll be another interview I'll do later . But yeah , ironcat does use both .

Roopinder 33:51

I want to get your opinion on this . When I first saw IronCat , I fell in love with IronCat . I thought this is a really good UI . They had that little tri-ball thing you could push and pull on things to make them move . I thought , wow , this is brilliant . This was about the same time that SolidWorks was coming around . So was IronCat . In fact , I remember at Autofact could have been Autofact . I saw one booth and I saw the other . I was more impressed with IronCat . Got to say , not the first time , I bet on the wrong horse , but I thought IronCat is going to be the future . What happened to them ? They never really made it .

Michael 34:21

They never really penetrated one of the big oems or one of the big supply chains . Because that's really what made the other three I mean dasso already had dasso aviation , their mother company , so from day zero they were an aerospace cat right made inroads at boeing . Siemens immediately jumped on the automotive industry in germany and of course that was an easy one . Ptc got into a lot of and accountsD accounts , lockheed and folks like that and a lot of luxury industries . So Rolex from the beginning has always been a windshield trio of Ramichakos and once they were stuck it was really hard to get them out . I think IronCAD just found themselves kind of boxed in at one point .

Roopinder 34:59

Sounds like a lot of them were adopted by rich parents , but IronCAD remained an orphan and never really prospered . What about Autodesk ? Autodesk was like first cat company on a computer , and now it's like the second , third or fourth biggest .

Michael 35:14

Fourth or fifth . Well , it depends if you consider them a real cat company , right , because they're really a BIM company . I mean , their flagship is BIM AEC , it's not , you know . And entertainment , well , that's the thing . They're kind of a strange company . They've got this huge entertainment thing for which everybody knows them because of alias and maya and 3d max and all the movies , alias and terminator 2 . They're the hollywood company and then they're also the bim company . You can't build a building without having revit or autocad .

Roopinder 35:40

It just doesn't happen they kept more to their roots in architecture , making floor plans and then buildings , and then , as an added thing , they added a mechanical version of autocad , then a kind of desktop that's when they worked the source code of asus .

Michael 35:52

Just I think it's actually after the daso acquisition of spatial they did the fork to do a shape manager they bought their license agreement with Spatial predated that .

Michael 36:05

Autodesk was sued by Dassault for doing that fork in 1999 , 2000 , and it was thrown out of court in 2003 . I think it went to jury and they said no argument . I even talked to the guy behind that , John Owens of DQ . He was working with them doing the parametric modeling

Parasolid vs ACIS kernel competition

Michael 36:22

. That was his thing at DQ . Dassault tried to say they were showing the source code to an unauthorized party , except John also had worked with spatial . It was a spurious lawsuit that would never have happened and HP was never sued because the HP agreement to use ACES came from the ME10 back from the Romulus days to ACES for ME30 . I think the problem with Autodesk is that it's really hard to be great at three different things when you're already great at two of them the third thing would be the MCAT stuff , the manufacturing , because they did a great job with motion pictures .

Roopinder 36:52

They're into CG . Is that the third ?

Michael 36:54

number one would be AEC , bim . Number two would be in media entertainment , which is alias 3ds max and Maya . And then you have this other fusion stuff and a whole bunch of mold flow and a whole smorgasbord of acquisitions . They made what's really hard to get over . You know , sometimes you say something and you regret it and it's really hard to roll the tape back . And that's when Carl Bass said that PLM was worthless . The market is never forgiving him and maybe will never forgive him , because you just can't say that PLM is a foundational part of the industry . And he just said , no , it doesn't matter , because it's a foundational part of the industry . And he just said , no , it doesn't matter , because , honestly , I mean Fusion 360 , there's good stuff . They also have a decent data management . Vault is a really solid PDM . Origins are from two different acquisitions and true innovation , but there was one before . Was it DataStay ? It was another acquisition that became Vault .

Roopinder 37:39

The company I follow them . They happen to be a few exits down the highway from me , so I can't help but notice them all the time .

Michael 37:45

Yes , drive up the 101 and you see them there on the right , on the hilltop right .

Roopinder 37:50

They used to be a couple of exits away . Now they've moved to the center of the financial district , right across from the ferry building .

Michael 37:56

PTC did then . Like PTC , a nice building right on the most expensive part of the city and a great view next to the salesforce , one which is sinking into the ground right next to the salesforce tower .

Roopinder 38:08

It's the leaning tower of san francisco . I give too much credit to leadership . I was saying with bernard he's a phd mechanical engineer , I'm a mechanical engineer , you are very good . I said bernard has a phd . I always expected a lot from andrew . Andrew is a literally a rocket scientist . He's got degrees from stanford and aeronautical and space engineering . I believe I was expected a lot from Andrew . Andrew is literally a rocket scientist . He's got degrees from Stanford in aeronautical and space engineering . I believe this was after Carl Bass . Then it was Amar Hanspaul and Andrew fighting for the spot .

Roopinder 38:35

Briefly , I think for a year , andrew Anagnost . I became CEO . I thought , oh good , we've got an engineer on top of a company again . This is going to be great . And strangely enough , andrew is one of these people that doesn't listen to whatever I say . I'm just a journalist , of course , why should he ? But I thought , oh , engineer on top of a company , this is going to do great things and it's going to be a lot better for the mechanical side of things . But Andrew just embraced the AEC side almost I wouldn't say exclusively , but definitely favored that . That was his favorite child was the AEC side , the BIM side . I think he saw that's where the biggest opportunity was . He doesn't confide in me , but maybe he thought those were the guys that didn't have the technology and the bigger market for it . What's your thoughts on who the big leaders are right now in this world ? Would you say it's Siemens first ?

Michael 39:23

Tony

Market positioning of major CAD players

Michael 39:23

is an engineer , right Him . You say it's Siemens first . Tony is an engineer , right Himmelgarn . He's maybe the only engineer running one of these companies now , because Neil over at PDC doesn't know how to spell PLM .

Roopinder 39:31

I mean , he's a service Mac guy .

Michael 39:33

Pascal is finance , pascal is technical , pascal is a brilliant person . Pascal did all that M&A , metadata , solidworks . He was there for all that stuff . But he's not a people person At least he doesn't come across initially as one and he's not a visionary . He's not a charlatan . People are not going to bend over backwards and work long hours just to make Pascal happy , whereas with Bernard , people were naming their kids after him . So it's hard to say .

Michael 39:57

I tend to hope that maybe the days of the big three dinosaurs will ease off and we're going to start seeing the emergence of these smaller , more agile ones , assuming that there's a digital thread playing to it Eris , innovator . But there's just so many awesome startups I've cataloged 170 of them whether they're doing BIM or software and hardware really awesome simulation software , cam , cad , full lifecycle . I have a database of about 107 and growing . I think that's where the future lies and I think the real leaders are the guys in there , the guys like Brad Rothenberg of Intop Absolutely brilliant . He told me he went to one of the last COFES events and he said I realized I was the youngest guy in the room and I was like this is insane . This industry is just . It's got to change ? You can't . You know , the thought leaders can't all be 75 years old . There's got to be a couple young guys that are hungry and women especially .

Michael 40:47

We need more women in the industry . There's got to be some changes . I don't think it's going to stay . The big three , adam keating of colab is they raised ? Was it 12 or 24 ? I think that they've got the amazing israeli team of maor at leo ai . I mean that was absolutely spectacular . I talked to him . He comes out with that software while he's doing his military service for Israel and having his he was an amazing guy and very personal .

Roopinder 41:12

We had him on the show and I was quite impressed Amazing .

Michael 41:14

The interactions I've had so far , he's just really , really exciting . So I think those are the new leaders .

Roopinder 41:19

Developing three tiers the old guard , which is the big four companies .

Michael 41:22

Where do you put Oracle and SAP then ?

Roopinder 41:24

Yeah , the overarching data monsters . Where are they ? I appreciate your generosity with your time . Next time I'll be in my studio with a nice mic , instead of just my laptop in a rented apartment in Marseille . Very good , all right , raffito , I loved having you . It's great . Thank you for sparing the time . What time is it in France ?

Michael 41:43

My son and his girlfriend went off swimming , so I'll be meeting up with them to eat and then probably going to see the movie Eddington , which I heard was really good . We found there was a showing tonight .

Roopinder 41:54

Peter , great having you and thanks for your time , my pleasure . This concludes this episode of the History of CAD Podcast . Please join me in our next episode as we add to the rich history of design software . If you'd like to be a guest on the show or know someone who has stories to share , please let me know via email at repinder . At engtechnicacom , Companies can sponsor an episode

Future of CAD and emerging startups

Roopinder 42:13

of the History of CAD . Get the details on our website engtechnicacom slash sponsorship Outro Music .