OK, I know full well this post might ruffle a few feathers but it's really not meant to do such.

This is nothing more than an observation on my part over the years.

I've got numerous years in the CAD field, from CADDS5 to Pro/E to Catia, CADRA, Inventor and Solidworks.

One thing I've noticed over the years and mainly in the pasrt few years, there really seems to be shall I say, a "wall" up when it comes to dealing with SW people.

Now hear me out. I'm not making a blanket statement, I'm just saying that in my experience of hiring people who have SW experience or dealing with SW resellers or just SW users, there seems to be this attitude that SW is king and everything else is pure horse hockey. Now, I can easily understand loyalty but this is or should I say, seems to be beyond product loyalty and has become downright hostile at times.

Personally, I was a huge CADDS5 guy, but we all know what Pro/E did with that package. But I've seen a vast difference between the 2 camps. I've noticed AutoDesk users for the most part tend to welcome or accept comments or suggestions from SW users. I witnessed this first hand at AutoDesk University when a few SW people attempted to "crash" the event. Yet when I was at a SW2009 demo and a user asked if he can see a demo of SW importing Inventor files as advertised, he was met with boos and literally given the bums rush out of the event. He was polite and made a simple request of the presenter and even offered up some files for the demo when the presenter claimed he didn't have any.

Again, from personal experience....we use both SW and Inventor on site so I have to support both equally But every designer or engineer we've hired on that used SW at their previous job, 90% of them completely fight using Inventor (which is our main CAD software), attempt to force Inventor to work or act like SW and of course, completely blame Inventor for what actually ends up being operator error. I have a few guys that have been using Inventor for over a year now and to this day, they still refuse to use it properly and blame it for everything that goes wrong. Funny thing is, the issues are user specific and not software related, thus it proves it's their process that's wrong. But don't tell them that.

We've trained them, but they refuse to learn still. I know, we should simply fire them. I wish it was that easy.

But seriously, what is it? Why does it seem that SW people can not admit that another software might do something better?

If you were to listen to these people you'd swear SW is the be all, end all of CAD software.

Here's how I look at it, being from the East coast this makes sense.

When it comes to sports rivalries you can't beat the Yankees/Red Sox.

SW users are like Yankee fans....anyone who plays for the Red Sox flat out sucks....unless they become Yankees..ala Johnny Damon, Wade Boggs and if you question that mindset they'll cut your throat.

Inventor users are like Red Sox fans......they hate the Yankees but they can easily admit that Derek Jeter is a damn good ball player and they'd love to have him join the team.

Again, this is just what I've seen and it does bother me because I have to deal with these type of people on a daily basis.

Solidworks and Inventor are mid grade CAD packages, each does something better or worse than the other. We actually wnet as far as to have an outside service compare both side by side based on how we needed a CAD software to work and it was decided Inventor was the better fit for us. I'm sure other places would have a different outcome. So why the hostility? Especially from general users? If your drive a Chevy and your co-worker drives a Ford, are you just as abrasive to him because of such? I would think not. So why when it comes to a tool you use at work?

OK, I'm stepping down off the soapbox.