Terminology and maturity of the CAD/PLM market

Oleg Shilovitsky wrote in his comment: "I hardly believe Autodesk will go toward PLM route. At least Carl Bass will need to withdraw his "anti-PLM rap" video from youtube first". For a more detailed Oleg’s opinion on the topic see his recent post PLM for Individuals – Integrate or Die?.

I think every person and every company have all rights to name themselves as they like (of course being careful with orange rectangles and so on). But perhaps mature industries and other domains of human activity should somehow follow an example of science – its fundamental resting upon a system of notions and standardized terminology. If PLM, digital prototyping, and other notions are already sufficiently defined then the community can more or less precisely determine whether somebody is inside or outside, moving toward or outward… – independently on a whatever video at youtube…

Following the example of science does not mean that we should artificially and arbitrarily define and freeze notions and terminology before they naturally become stable and mainly accepted: a process of elaboration/improvement/adjustment/refinement of terminology is natural and inevitable for any evolving branch of human knowledge. On the other hand, playing marketing-terminology games is something that can hardly help increasing maturity of industry.

My opinion is that the notions in question are far from the final definition, but they, on the other hand, are already sufficiently defined to enable understanding of whether Autodesk is in (or moving toward) PLM, whether PLM 2.0 still remains PLM, whether DS is fruitfully doing digital prototyping, etc. I think yes is a reasonable answer to all these questions.

Another illustration to the problem of notions is given in Paul Hamilton’s post 2009 - The Year of … Confusion?. This seems even more interesting and more associated with example of science – although of course not so exciting for the mass market.

Paul explains that while introducing Synchronous and Fusion technologies Siemens and Autodesk confused the market by groundless playing with terms of parametric and history-free modeling, direct and parametric workflows, digital model, and others. You may oppose to this by saying why should Siemens care about different terminology system – especially when it comes from a competitor? Nevertheless, I prefer Paul Hamilton’s position: he has proposed a detailed, reasonable and so far unique classification of important hot notions, which is likely useful for the CAD industry in general and it is not harmful for any particular producer of new modeling technologies…

So my opinion is that basic notions and terminology should at least be always respected, referenced, mentioned… which absolutely does not contradict to discussions and critics.
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