John, The first question is:
Who else plays in the $750 range in CAD? The second question is,
How is someone getting away with a $750 program when most of the market is playing in the $5000 to $15,000 range? You need to think that one through.
I will be the first to admit that Alibre has its problems. However, as someone who goes back and forth among and between Catia, SolidWorks, SolidEdge, ProEngineer, and Alibre, I can assure you that they
all have their weaknesses (as well as strengths) and problems. As someone who started using CAD in 1971 (Gerber IDS), I can assure you that this is nothing new. The thing about Alibre (and most CAD companies) is that their
users provide most of the
real support for other users. Try posting your question/problem in the forum at
http://forum.alibre.com and see who answers. This often alleviates the need for an official answer from Alibre -- and will often
spark action from Alibre itself.
It is a real PITA to constantly use
work-arounds to do things that
should be functional in the core kernel of the program. I have my own list of bitches in this regard for
every CAD product I use. As somebody who worked with Mark Eyelander (the programmer who created the original kernals for
NURBS,
ACIS, and
ParaSolids), I understand how poorly many things have been implemented
and how often the
terminology used by such systems is
just plain wrong! Unfortunately, John Walker established the
norm back when he created Autodesk. He
insisted that none of the programmers or testers have
any experience in engineering drafting -- and that is still the
norm today! Thus it is that
every major CAD system on the market today calls what traditionally was known as
transforms by the term
loft (there being no
true lofting operand in
any of the <$30,000/seat CAD products on the market today). Yeah, it is a real PITA.
However, having said all that, just think what the
market for CAD products would look like
without Alibre? There are really no other low-cost CAD systems that have the
grandfathered licenses that allow it to work towards competing with the high-cost systems. (Here in the U.S. it costs a non-grandfathered (i.e. something on the market since prior to 1997) CAD company more than $150,000/year merely to get the testing done to qualify under ISO-10303 (aka
STEP).) TurboCAD, just about the only other program with this kind of
history has changed hands so many times that I doubt all their code exists in one place anymore (this being an
opinion and not an actual
fact -- but I was quite aware of what happened to TurboCAD when they were controlled by IMSI).
If David's assertion is correct that you do
not have a currently
active for support license for Alibre, then
you need to ask yourself if
you would be providing support to a non-paying customer?
Without ongoing (positive) cash-flow
nobody stays in business, right? If you are
not supporting the low-cost entry into the competition, you choices are rapidly going to devolve to paying the
premium, right?
