Solidworks Interview: Bill Taylor, Solidworks Community Marketing Manager

At Solidworks World 2008 in San Diego, a group of CSWP’s, and bloggers were given what has been termed Solidworks On A Stick.  To get a better understanding of what this project is all about, I recently contacted Bill Taylor who is the Community Marketing Manager for Solidworks.  I submitted a few questions to Bill to answer in regards to this new project.  The interview follows Below:

 

1.       What is Solidworks on a stick?

SolidWorks on a Stick is simply a portable version of SolidWorks.   The storage device that we happened to use was a USB thumb drive.  The idea would be to give our user’s access to SolidWorks when they do not have access to their desktop.

2.       What is the concept idea behind this project (how did it come about)?

The idea originally came from one of our technical support Team Leaders.  At SolidWorks we hold regular innovation meetings and encourage people at all levels and departments to participate if they have an idea that could benefit our customers.  One of our Team Leaders showed up one day and proposed the idea and everyone thought it was an interesting concept.  I think it’s a great example of why empowering everyone in an organization is an important part of the innovation process.

3.       If Solidworks can be successful in delivering their product on this type of platform, what is the next step in this process?

I’ll be honest, we are really just trying to gather feedback from some of our users with respect to how useful they think the concept is.  Internally we have come up with many uses that we think would be valuable both to our users as well as our resellers.  The idea looks promising but at the moment we do not have any official plans to develop it for the masses.  So the next step at this point is to monitor the usage, collect feedback from our users and VAR’s and evaluate the data.

4.      Some people will say that this is just a gimmick or sales tool meant to get Solidworks nerds and geeks excited about nothing.  How do you respond to that?

We’ll I think we would want to separate the concept in general, and what we did for some of the CSWP’s at SolidWorks World.   I think the concept in general (being able to access Solidworks when your not at your Desktop) is a very interesting concept that I think we are going to explore it further.  The initial feedback that I have received is that it would be something of value to our customers.   

The reason we gave some out at SolidWorks World was two fold.  First,  our users have been telling us for years that they recommend our software to others they know.  We know this and understand that there is both a benefit to our users to do so and obviously it benefits SolidWorks as a business.  In talking to our users they have told us that it would be useful for them to have a portable version of SolidWorks and that just one of the ways they would use it would be to show the software to others.  So one of the reasons we passed them out was to see if people did in fact use it in this way. We’re simply trying to help enable what is already occurring today and has been occurring for years.  Word of mouth is obviously an important part of growing the SolidWorks community.   We appreciate the fact that this is happening and is why when we gave out the USB drives we also introduced a new rewards program so that we can start rewarding people for sharing their passion for SolidWorks software and 3D CAD in general.

Another reason we did this was simply to start getting some feedback as to weather or not this would be something of value and hear how people might use a tool like this. We want to know what people think. 

So, there might be a third reason.   It’s a cool giveaway, and I’ve got plenty of that feedback so far.

5.       During his press conference, John Hirstick noted that he believes one of the future goals of 3D Cad is to deliver a product that is 100% web based meaning you don’t install anything, you go to a website, login and have access to the interface much like Google or Yahoo mail.  Is this a first step in heading in that direction for Solidworks? 

Although we don’t have any firm plans with respect to the USB drives I think it is a step in that direction in many ways, sure.   I think installing software is just something we have grown accustom to, I think a time will come when we just don’t need that step any more.  I know I’ve said this a few times earlier but my biggest interest right now is to get feedback and is the reason I gave out my direct e-mail address with every drive.  Obviously having managed that project I am passionate about it but see no reason to limit our thinking to having to use a storage device.

6.      Finally, is there any other fun stuff like Solidworks on a stick in development right now that we can all look forward too?

I can only speak for the projects that I’m managing directly but I know there are plenty of innovative ideas under development so I am confident you will see some other exciting concepts as time goes on.  I can tell you that I am going to be focusing on the SolidWorks community and creating things of value for everyone involved.   I personally have some exciting projects planned and really want to focus on bringing our users in early in the design phases to ensure we introduce things of great value.  Talking with our users and getting them involved is one of my favorite things to do.  There is so much passion out there.

Comments

[Josh]

Great interview Mike. I like where they're going with this. although the thumb drive is a slightly slower, it's still quick enough to do show off.

Good luck with this Bill.