What Adobe's acquisition of Figma might tell us about PTC's acquisition of Onshape

S1mon

This Twitter thread is pretty telling about the complexities of trying to take a legacy application and make it collaborative and cloud based. Legacy desktop applications like Photoshop have file formats which were developed over many years to be good for loading and saving from disk. Making them work for multiple users over the internet is not an easy task. PTC could see the value not just in what end users see, but also the back end and how geometry data is managed and distributed over the web. Making Creo collaborative is likely something that they want to do, but without that backend...

nick_papageorge073

I've been a ProE/Creo user since the mid 90's. Its a fine program, and has been near the top of the heap for 35 years. I think Onshape sales will eventually overtake Creo sales. Existing, large corporations will keep renewing Creo. But I think new corporations will go for cloud based Onshape. It was a smart move of PTC to acquire. We are in a new cloud paradigm, and starting from scratch is probably easier than modifying.

Solidworks overtook ProE sales years ago simply because it was way cheaper, and it ran on Windows from day 1, while ProE originally ran only on Unix (which made the hardware 4 times the price). But ProE still reigned king on midsized and large corporations that had the cash for it. (of course, the automotive and plane worlds are the highest tier of NX and Catia). Now, we have Onshape that is cloud based, so the total price of entry is much less than Solidworks.

The only people I run across that are against cloud based programs are hobbyists that worry they won't be able to do their work from their garage with spotty internet. If internet goes down at my dayjob, I'm going to leave the building and go see a movie. Its the same as electricity going black in today's world.

S1mon

I started with Pro/E version 6 in the early 90's. Around mid 2000's I was working for consultants where some things would be in Wildfire and some in Solidworks. After that, everything I did was Solidworks until I started flirting with Onshape a few years ago. Now at my latest job, I transitioned our team from Creo to Onshape. 

One of the big selling points for me was that I had been the Solidworks PDM Pro admin for 8+ years at a previous job. Getting servers to sync between the US and China was such a huge pain (and cost) and there were so many stupid issues that I was fed up. At the same time, Onshape was adding functionality a rapid pace, and some things were overtaking Solidworks' capabilities. Even though overall, Solidworks (and Creo, NX, Catia, etc) are still broader and deeper, Onshape is showing a trajectory which means the potential is there for everything that I need to do.

There are some people out there that don't trust things in the cloud, but as you say, there are so many things that we've all come to trust and rely on which need an internet connection to function. At a previous job, our China team wasn't so positive on being dependent on an internet connection. I get that. There's often factory visits where the internet is spotty at best there. Thankfully for my current job, our ME in China has been very happy to use Onshape.

The reality is that worldwide, internet connectivity is getting better and better. About the only place that it's pretty useless is on a plane or out in the middle of nowhere.

nick_papageorge073

I can't believe the price is 20 billion USD. For context, the Nvidia acquisition of ARM that was cancelled this year was 40 billion USD. ARM is in nearly everything, and the future keeps looking brighter for them. Figma, I never even heard of until this thread.

Reading the comments on that twitter thread, the main poster said MS bought his company in 2016 to improve MS Office online collaboration. Whatever they did, it is really nice. You can open an excel document on either the browser version, or the desktop version, and can see people typing in other cells simultaneously.