One of the best things about working at SOLIDWORKS is getting to see the amazing things our customers create with our tools. Whether it's a flying robot bird or a life-saving medical device, these tangible products are what makes us different from other software companies. It is great to get to see examples at SOLIDWORKS World (once a year, for those of us who are able to attend), but shouldn't we be surrounded by them on a daily basis?

In the old office, we had a showcase of customer products in the first floor entryway. We also had framed renderings, engineering drawings, and snapshots of products in action throughout the building. These daily reminders helped make SW a fun and inspiring place to work. They also kept us better connected to our customers. Rather than simply talk about a problem with hole pattern spacing or plastic fasteners, we could actually play with real, physical examples.

We could go far beyond what we had in Concord: rather than keeping customer products sequestered in a glass case, we could have them on shelves in conference rooms, in the collaboration spaces, in the employee coffee lounges. We could have tools for disassembling more complex products, to get to see their guts and how they work. We could have a library of models from different industries, or making use of different manufacturing processes, paired with the original SW files used to create them. When I'm working on a new sheet metal feature, I want to have fifty different sheet metal products to look at, to have some real examples of how the feature will be used. I want to be able to invite the customers who made those products in for Alpha testing, to test a real replication of their workflow, rather than a simplified, canned example. I want a machine shop with raw materials for employees to create their own designs and use SW MBD and inspection tools!

Is this alone going to turn SOLIDWORKS into a \$1B brand (as is the goal of the Bamboo initiative)? Well, that's a hard case to make. But I do think it will help tremendously with our culture, our connection to customers, and the pride we have in what our tools can do. It's also a relatively small investment: customers might give us examples in exchange for showcasing them in the SW splash screen or marketing materials. At a minimum we need someone to curate the collection, a place to put things, and perhaps a small budget for purchasing and displaying cool examples.