Disqus - Latest Comments for MatthewWest

Re: The Competition, War or Football?

MatthewWest — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:22:01 -0000

I completely agree. So much that "respect for competitors" is a part of our social media communication policy.

Sincerely,

Your competitor

Re: One Week From Yesterday. Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference 2009 #DSCC09

MatthewWest — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:06:39 -0000

Not sure about everything else, but I'm pretty sure that CATIA is an acronym standing for “Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application.”

And all-caps for the last name is a traditional French thing, albeit one that is slowly starting to fade away from what I understand. I have a French coworker who writes out her name that way.

Re: 4 Ways to Share Content Stinkin’ Quick, The Best and How They’ll Totally Advance CAD/PLM

MatthewWest — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:52:16 -0000

It's my job to watch this stuff. And by and large, i spend a lot of time doing just that--watching. The problem I see universally is fragmentation. Silos. Whatever you want to call them. Everything exists separately, and while technology companies are developing API applications to pull things from there to here, it's still fragmented. It's hard to have a conversation across platforms.

To some extent, FriendFeed tries to do this by pulling in things that you're doing all over the social web. But still, you're not getting a narrative. You're getting a series of disjointed things that are happening in various walled communities. So what if I posted a YouTube video of the Dinosaur Jr. show I saw last night and then replied to you on Twitter about buying a minivan? Where's the correlation? All that's happening is that we're increasing the amount of noise we generate, and for the most part, our lives aren't that dynamic.

What we're missing, and what we're badly in need of (and what I think we're moving toward), is a master platform. Something that lets you do everything you do in Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, etc. in one place. I think that's what Facebook is moving toward, slowly but surely. Will they get there? I don't know--they have maybe another 2-3 years before the next big thing comes along. But someone will. A few years ago I thought that Google's OpenSocial initiative would get us there, but these days I'm not so sure. The new Wave thing they're pushing now looks interesting, but again, it's just trying to one-up FriendFeed essentially. Yes, you can see conversations threaded across platforms, but they're still taking place on separate platforms.

With regard to the CAD/PLM space, we need to stop thinking about technology and platform and think about needs and purpose. What do design teams need? I could be wrong here, but the way I see it, design teams need the ability to communicate easily with all of the other groups that touch them, from R&D to sales to marketing to vendors and suppliers. The trick is to develop a system that allows these disparate groups to communicate with one another in ways that are natural to each, yet easily understood by all. How do we provide marketing with the tools to communicate with design in a mutually-understood language? How do we give the designer the tools to communicate design intent with suppliers using different CAD platforms? Do we somehow convince the various CAD vendors to supply open APIs so things become interoperable? How does that work?

I think you had it right at first when you said "crapalicious." There's a lot of crap out there. On the social web, the signal to noise ratio is extremely weighted on the noise side, and one of the things we need to ask ourselves is if it's even worth it to aggregate all of these conversations. Crap + more crap =/= quality. Maybe what we need are filtering tools, not aggregation tools...

Re: Dassault Systèmes DEVCON 2009. New Campus, New Tech, Little Info.

MatthewWest — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:52:37 -0000

I can tell you about the blueKiwi thing. Had a meeting with one of their VPs yesterday. What do you want to know?

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:03:18 -0000

I think that's the biggest challenge facing a lot of companies, especially ones that don't have large amounts of young people. One of my biggest goals is trying to get more people from areas like R&D, development and product definition active on blogs, Twitter, etc. We have a few tech guys in England blogging now that are posting some awesome stuff.

Re: The Vault Door Designed in SolidWorks. A Cutting Torch and Some Drama Please.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:55:03 -0000

Great sleuthing, detective Mings.

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:09:08 -0000

Sorry, I misread what you said there. Maybe *you* should talk to development. ; )

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:01:57 -0000

Point taken. Create the ability to initiate a support ticket in-application. I should mention that to development.

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:52:42 -0000

I think there's a way to handle support online. The folks at Javelin, for example, have set up a Twitter account where their customers can initiate support tickets without having to email or call on the phone. And until we could find some way to route a user to his or her reseller automatically, allowing someone to send a support issue directly to a "SolidWorks support"-type account would be a bear to manage. But is something like Twitter really the best way to initiate a support call? Might it not make more sense for a reseller to provide a form on their website that allows for more detail?

On the topic, I've seen where some of the CRM vendors have actually developed systems that automatically search Twitter for complaints and create support tickets that support teams can then address. For companies that handle support at the corporate level (think consumer products), I think that's really cool.

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:42:05 -0000

I have to respectfully disagree, and I never intended to imply that anyone is wrong per se, but that a lot of people are using these "social" terms to simply describe ideas that are decades old. Things like message board and chat rooms existed long before we had terms like "social media" to describe the ways that people interact with one another on the Internet. And I think there's a real need in general to make distinctions between what consitutes something that's "social media" as opposed to a "social application," which is what Vuuch (for example) appears to be.

What I'm questioning is creating a collaborative work experience and tagging it with a "social" name just to jump on the bandwagon, and it's really something of an academic argument, not an indictment of any particular company. In the case of PTC here, I think the tag is actually somewhat appropriate because it describes the process, but I think that the word "social' could just as easily have been replaced with "collaborative." But kudos to them for anyway for giving their users the option to collaborate in-application. I'd be interested to see what people think about that in comparison to the Dassault V6 platorm once both have been in use for a while.

Maybe I should have gone into a little more detail before, but I was trying to bang something out before I left for a meeting. I don't think that trying to engage in conversations with the user base is necessarily promotion. I field questions, both publicly and privately, on Twitter all the time. That has nothing to do with promoting the company, but trying, in whatever way I can, to help the end users out there. We have a public forum on our website that we host specifically so users have a central place to connect with one another, and we're working on improving that experience so it's more meaningful and more useful to the users. Many of the videos we put on YouTube are tips and tutorials intended to help people get more out of the software, or do their jobs quicker or easier.

As far as integrating tools into the app itself, I'm not really at liberty to say what we may or may not be doing, but like I mentioned above, anything we do will will be done for the purpose of helping our users be more effective in their jobs. If that's achieve faster time to market, that's great. If that means doing something in half the time, that's great. But the end result is that we want to make sure that the focus *is* on the end user.

I'm not an end user, but I've watched your Vuuch videos, and it looks like a valuable tool, and from what I read from guys like Josh, people seem to like it.

Re: PTC/USER - SolidSmack on the Scene, Crispy and Cleeeeean.

MatthewWest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:51:50 -0000

Dave,

I'm not going to mention any names here, because I think this really extends to the greater software industry, but the way I look at it, a lot of companies are using the terms like "social networking" and "social media" as replacements for terms like "collaborative workspace." You're right that the terms are used mainly to generate buzz.

I'd like to think that we *do* understand social media since that's my job. But at SolidWorks, the way we approach social computing is an extension to the different ways that we communicate with our user base. We're active on places like Twitter because we want to take an active part in the conversations taking place. We post things to sites like YouTube and Flickr because we know that our users like to see them. We give bloggers press access at events because we know that the user base likes to hear things from a user perspective, not just a journalist/analyst perspective. We're not perfect, and we don't always have as much time to participate as we'd like, but we try to focus on communication and enablement.

Will we start to put some new collaboration & networking features into our products? I can't really make any promises one way or the other, but I can guarantee that anything we do will be done for the purpose of helping our users be more effective in their jobs, and not just something we can use to say "look how cool we are."

Matthew West, Social Media Manager
SolidWorks

Re: Up Next: SolidWorks 2010 Beta

MatthewWest — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:29:19 -0000

"I sent out some e-mails and a few Tweets via Twitter a few days ago asking if maybe the Whats New in SolidWorks 2010 Document could be uploaded at least a few days prior to the Beta 1 download. I havent heard anything back from SolidWorks yet but did get quite a few enthusiastic seconds to that idea from some in the user community. "

I replied to you yesterday--go back and check your @ messages. The idea is under consideration. I'll let you know either way when I get an answer.

Matt / SolidWorks

Re: Is SolidWorks Relaxin’, Code Waxin’ or Just “stuck in the past”?

MatthewWest — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:51:44 -0000

This may seem like splitting hairs, but something to keep in mind is that DS does not consider V6 to be a technology, but rather a platform. There are new technologies in CATIA that were released in concert with the V6 launch, including the editing features everyone is talking about, but the DS/CATIA naming system varies from the SolidWorks naming system.

That's why you see reference to things like CATIA V5R19, which is the 19th release of the V5 platform, and V6R2009, which is the 2009 release of the V6 platform. To Matt's point, there are still people using the V4 and V5 platforms, and will probably continue because their organizations aren't ready for the workflow changes that V6 enables. For example, the collaborative work environment is as much a part of V6 as the CATIA modeling capabilities.

There's a page here that helps explain why you'll continue to see the V5 and V6 platforms coexist http://www.coe.org/Default.aspx?tabid=846.

Re: SolidWorks on Mac: CEO Speaks Out. You Have Your Say. {Poll}

MatthewWest — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:35:12 -0000

For anyone interested, there's more on this from Shaun Murphy at Al Dean's MacDesign blog.

http://mac.develop3d.com/2009/04/solidworks-os-...

Matthew West / SolidWorks

Re: 3DContent Central - Have you been lately?

MatthewWest — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:54:01 -0000

Jeff - 3D ContentCentral is actually developed and run by the folks here at SolidWorks. We don't brand it that way because we want to encourage users of other platforms to contribute, but the leg work is all done right here in Concord.

Re: The Engineer Stimulus Package (Like that Big One, but May Actually Work)

MatthewWest — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:03:42 -0000

I've heard that you may be able to renew the license one time, effectively making it good for 180 days. We'll have all the details soon.

Re: The Engineer Stimulus Package (Like that Big One, but May Actually Work)

MatthewWest — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:15:42 -0000

Something I neglected to mention in the above-referenced post is that this is only good in the US and Canada for the time being. I'll go update tha tnow.

Re: 3 Dudes Gone 3D. Pure SolidWorks Hilarity

MatthewWest — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:30:35 -0000

Check YouTube for previews of future episodes.

www.youtube.com/solidworks

Re: 3D From SolidWorks. IT’S A BLAST. (As in Explosive… in a Literal Sense)

MatthewWest — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:21:37 -0000

>>I still have no idea why they are not putting these on YouTube or some other video service that allows people to embed the all over the webernet.

Who says we haven't???

http://www.youtube.com/solidworks

Re: My Girls

MatthewWest — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:39:35 -0000

"What do you do with three beautiful, happy, smart daughters? Well I guess you love and take care of them." -- That's probably the smartest thing I've heard anyone say all day. Kids are the best. Sounds like you have your priorities in the right place. Your girls are beautiful.

Matt

Re: SolidWorks World 2010: Sappy Self-Help? Nope, Just Get There

MatthewWest — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:30:18 -0000

If you're interested, we actually have a corporate account that some of the other ladies and gents use, or cut their teeth on. It's a Typepad platform, so you won't have the flexibility of Wordpress, but you also won't have to worry about the setup and maintenance. If you're interested, shoot me a line. mwest at solidworks dot com.

You may also want to get in touch with Gabi Jack. She's in California, and started a Spanish SolidWorks blog a few months ago.

Re: Design For the Future Charity Drive

MatthewWest — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:50:52 -0000

Nice work, Alex.

Matt / SolidWorks

Re: Ramping Up for SolidWorks World 2009. What Do You Want to See?

MatthewWest — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:59:29 -0000

No one gets a completely free pass except for those of us who work for the company. That said, there are ways of minimizing your costs. People who conduct presentations get the entry fee waived, for example. If you were to do that in 2010, that knocks $1000 off the total cost right off the bat, and also covers all of your meals at the event. All your company would have to pay for is airfare and accommodations, which can usually be found locally for less than what you'd pay at the hotel where the event takes place. I heard someone mention yesterday that he'd found a hotel in/near Orlando for $65 a night.

Matthew West - SolidWorks

Re: FaceBook Connect… Cause SolidSmack Loves You and Your Comments

MatthewWest — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:34:30 -0000

I'm getting an intern in here this summer to do some of my dirty work. Posting videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, and other things that I just don't have the time for. Good for you.

Re: FaceBook Connect… Cause SolidSmack Loves You and Your Comments

MatthewWest — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:33:32 -0000

Facebook has mechanisms that let you choose who can see which photos. My wife uses it to control who has access to the photos of our kids. It's a sad state of affairs, but I've heard too many examples of companies and individuals taking pics of people's kids and doing improper things with them.

As for Facebook having a professional side, that's why LinkedIn exists. But I see where you're going with that.