Greg,
I was thinking about this a bit more and wanted to put in my $.02 worth. (which is probably what it is worth!
). I think the new strategy has a bit of a disconnect for me. You state that you have decided to compete with the LT's of the world yet it seems most of the focus is on "bells and whistles" that the big boys have, i.e. motion and pdf 3D. (Not coincidentally, these bells and whistles are what make the big boys so expensive.)
To me, these types of things are "neat toys" and can be impressive if you are doing a presentation for a client. In reality, I think they end up being in that catagory of 80% of the functions that you rarely use. I can do a pretty decent client presentation with just a print of the model, which is what most of us probably do. I think most are probably like me and don't have time to do a bunch of photorendering when the end product is not that much more impressive than a simple screen print.
I don't want to presume to speak for others, but I suspect that most users are interested in making money by cranking out paper drawings or solid models that can be sent to a machinist/fabricator to build things as quickly as possible.
I think a better strategy might be to get back to the original strategy. That being to provide a powerful solid modeling program that is easy to use and doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that you would rarely if ever use so that it can be offered at about the same price as Microsoft office.
I think if you put all of your resources into making the drawing portion of Alibre work (which has always been its achilles heal) and holding the line on price you would have the world beating a path to your door. Brand "X" loads models "lightweight" in drawing mode (I don't really know what that means or how it works because the drawings look the same to me) and huge asssemblies load in nothing flat. I recently did an entire line layout in 3D that contained about 12 different machines, platforms, columns, hoists, etc. in brand "x" and the drawing loads in a couple of minutes. One of the machines in the line is done in Alibre and the assembly drawing for it alone takes about one hour to load.
I could be wrong, but I think if you took a poll whether people wanted fast drawings or pdf and motion I think almost to a person the fast drawings would win out.
Anyway, I hope this is taken in the spirit with which it is offered, I really want to help. I can't stand the meglo-cad companies because they seem to be an endless hole you pour money down. For example, brand x doesn't let me use my seat at work and on my laptop at home without buying another seat like Alibre does. You guys have about 99% down pat. If you could just speed those drawings up you would have my undying love and admiration! (Ok, that may be a bit dramatic. LOL!)
