SOLIDWORKS

What do you like best?

One of my personal favorite things about the software is that they put a LOT of effort into maintaining a very efficient user experience. SOLIDWORKS has been a leader when it comes to putting commands as close as possible to your cursor. The vast majority of your commands are accessible through a mouse gesture, a right-mouse click, or a keyboard shortcut. This puts the user's attention on the modeling screen and away from distracting command menus. Even when a command menu is in use, there is often considerable effort to make the design of those menus as unobtrustive as possibe.

What do you dislike?

The transition towards cloud-based solutions on the SOLIDWORKS platform has been long in the tooth and has changed a lot over the years. In some ways, they're an early adopter, and yet it's taken such a long and convoluted path to get to the current state that it's hard to feel confident that the platform won't go through more radical changes. The risk of SW evolving into a SAAS model with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is real, if hard to define or justify.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

The one and only thing worth considering is the state of cloud-based CAD. I personally think there is still value to the desktop environment (and locally stored servers instead of company data being put on cloud platforms), but that landscape is rapidly changing.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The primary benefit is its utility as a modeling/CAD package. Without digging into the cloud-based SAAS packages, it's clearly the best-in-class when it comes to model power per dollar. The primary benefit of this package over others is its utility: it is easy to learn, easy to use, and cost-effective compared to packages that might be considered to have "better" surface modeling capabilities. The direct results are a very good market share for the platform (which means it's easy to find talent that uses it) and in the rare case that you find talent that hasn't used the platform it will be very easy to train.