Vladimir Malukh (1966 - 2013)

I regret to inform you of the death of Vladimir Malukh (1966 - 2013), one of the most recognized experts in engineering software of the Russian market, the author of the unique monograph "Introduction to CAD", and of about 200 papers at isicad.ru and isicad.net, and many other publications. 

Vladimir was one of the key members of the LEDAS and isicad teams. 

See Vladimir’s biography in English and more detailed and undated biography in Russian (with  a full list of Vladimir's isicad publications).

G.Depardieu and B.Charles (as Asterix and Obelix) are Against

Just released isicad.ru No.104 of March, 2013 has a cover page presenting Mr.G.Depardieu and Mr. B.Charles who both seem to have  some troubles with a recent tax policy in France. The headline below says: “Asterix and Obelix are Against”. 

As for Mr. Charles, it is about his recent interview to Le Monde also retold and commented at isicad.ru.

My editorial of March is entitled "CAD and Artificial Intelligence".

After giving a link to a regular isicad monthly overview "Global CAD will Grow ThroughRussia", I present a COFES update: nine persons from Russia go to Arizona; 33 participants from of outside of Russia have by today registered for COFES Russia 2013 scheduled for the end of May.  

The main topic related to AI was inspired by a speculative paper "Industrial Artificial Intelligence Has Been Built in Russia" recently submitted to isicad.ru and rejected by our editorial board. Based on my long experience of working in internationally recognized Soviet and Russian AI research institutions, I explained the difference between interpretation of "computer intelligence" by common people and comparatively modest achievements in expert systems, automatic understanding of natural language, speech and image recognition and so on. By the way, note that in Russian language "intelligence" is something far beyond logical inference, reasoning and such things, it is something which is expected to be able to feel, to have intuition - i.e. in Russia, the words "artificial intelligence" are commonly understood strongly anthropomorphic...  

I can hardly translate my almost belletristic Russian text... Well, one remark I made is that as science and technology will probably be developing more and more intelligent systems, we cannot exclude that average level of the mankind intelligence will continue to be falling down; and in the long run, the Turing test may become meaningless...       

What were the most important developments/events FOR the Russian market of engineering software in 2012?

This survey was organized by isicad-Facebook; it included several initial options and a possibility to add those preferred by the followers.

The obvious current winner is “ASCON entered the global market with its geometric kernelC3D”; the second is “The First Russian Autodesk University”, the next are “Release of Nanocad 4/4.5 with open API” and “Start of the Project on the RGK - Russian Geometric Kernel ”… - you can easily catch almost all the others from the key words at the screenshot below.  

Note that those who voted are mostly people of the expert level.

Current results of the survey were today analyzed by Dmitry Ushakov in his paper at isicad.ru. Interestingly, some people decided that an isicad-paper “On comparison of SolidWorks and TFLEX” is itself a noticeable event of 2012; as you can see from a chart in Dmitry’s paper, this comparison at isicad.ru was uniquely visited 14 000 times (and resulted in 1000+ comments).

 C3D, RGK, and some other products and projects mentioned in the isicad survey will be presented at COFES Russia 2013 (May 30 – June 1, Petergof-St.Petersburg ).

Two Russian Geometric Kernels will be presented in detail at COFES Russia 2013

I'm sure most of you know what is COFES - Congress On the Future of Engineering Software. May be some of you have participated in this unique event, which since 2000 has been  organized in Arizona by Cyon Research. Probably regional COFES events are less known; they are held in the regions that either can provide new valuable experience to the global community or can perceive new development impulse from the global community, or both. In autumn 2010, an experimental regional COFES Russia event was held in Moscow together with the isicad Forum, and a couple of months later COFES Israel was organized in Tel-Aviv.

The next regional COFES event, COFES Russia 2013 – now in a strictly traditional COFES format – will be held in Peterhof, a world famous suburb of St.Petersburg (its key elements  were created according to the plans of Peter the Great) . The registration  is already opened.  Let us take a quick look at the agenda which is being steadily extended step by step.

First, according to the regular structure of COFES events, you can see a number of Analyst and User Briefings. Without going into the details of this genre, I'll just give a list of the names of moderators and some of the topics: Allan Behrens (Taxal Limited) - Model-Based Engineering, Peter Bilello (CIMdata) - Software Delivery: Moving to the Cloud and Changing Business Models, Nick Nisbet (AEC3) - Learning from the BIM Revolution in the UK, Jon Peddie (Jon Peddie Research), Jim Brown (Tech Clarity), Chris De Neef (Fast Track Consulting), Alex Bausk (PSACEA) - Model-Based Engineering in the Context of AEC and BIM, Peter Thorne (Cambashi) - ALM and PLM Grow Closer, Marina Korol - What Mandated BIM Might Mean for Russia, Phares Noel (Cyon Research) - Integrating of Point Clouds into the Flow of Design and Engineering…

Second, you can see a panel discussion “Perspectives on PLM” moderated by Brad Holtz, the President of Cyon Research and COFES:

Third, the agenda includes a keynote of Jesse Devitte (Borealis Ventures) and Tech Soft 3D Customer Event: why not to find new points of investments and new clients on the definitely very active market of Russia and CIS?

I want to pay special attention to the forthcoming presentation of two Russian geometric kernels.

One of them is C3D - an original kernel of ASCON, which has been for many years successfully used within the company’s flagship product KOMPAS 3D, and recently, as a component, has been brought to the open market ("ASCON Releases C3D Kernel for the CAD Component Market").  The kernel will be presented in particular at the Labs Customer Meeting to be held in the morning of May 30 (COFES Russia will be officially opened in the afternoon). Note that ASCON will also use one of the key COFES options called Technology Suite Briefing which provides an opportunity to openly discuss C3D  (and maybe other technology achievements of the company) with all participants of the event who want to know the technology and business details.

Another Russian kernel  RGK  (Russian Geometric Kernel) is currently being constructed within a national project with a leading role of Top Systems. (see “Russian National 3D Kernel”). Top Systems is known by its advanced 3D parametric CAD TFLEX (see "The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling") and intensive development of PLM (see the above mentioned PLM panel discussion).  At COFES Russia, Top Systems will also use the opportunities of a technology suite briefing. In addition, Russian 3D Kernel will be discussed at one of the 90-minute roundtable discussions.

Both ASCON and Top Systems have very qualified development teams that confirm a well-known fundamental math and engineering culture of Russia at a full scale. Both companies are increasingly investing in their global marketing, and COFES Russia 2013 provides one more opportunity to present their offerings internationally. (Note that ASCON and probably Top Systems will participate also in COFES 2013 in Arizona). We are looking forward to seeing interesting discussions and maybe heated debates.  

LEDAS is always (especially after selling its IP for the component products to Bricsys) lucky of keeping a position of not being a competitor to any vendors. In particular, the company is a reseller (better to say - VAR) of ASCON’s C3D  ("LEDAS to Distribute ASCON’s C3D Modeling Kernel Internationally") and at the same time is an active developer of RGK (see "LEDAS Assists STANKIN to Develop a New 3D Modeling Kernel" and 

"LEDAS Experts: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel".
Three or four leading LEDAS experts will participate in COFES Russia 2013. 

As for the environment and cultural program of COFES Russia 2013, you can find some hints in the agenda, take a look at the pictures in my blog, or of course look in the Internet for a huge amount of information about Peterhof and St.Peterburg.

3D Geometric Kernels as Fishes

Today, the leading Russian CAD/PLM portal isicad.ru announced its 93rd release. As always, this release is completely presented in my editorial (in Russian).

Here I just want to attract you attention to the cover page of this release. The key point is about geometric kernel C3D of ASCON which the company recently presented at COFES-2012.  The page is designed similar to the poster of a well-known movie “Arizona Dream”  by Emir Kusturica. You need not read Russian to catch the plot, except only one thing: the letters at the moon denote Russian Geometric Kernel – the project in which Top Systems and LEDAS participate (see “LEDAS announces its involvement in development of Russia’s 3D kernel”.

Please take a look at the animated version of the cover page of N93  (made by Anna Kotova, the isicad executive editor and designer) where you can at least enjoy wonderful soundtrack from the movie.

See also «A detailed informal report on COFES-2012» by Alexey Ershov, LEDAS CEO.

They have had a chance to see SolidWorks 2015

Every month a Russian CAD/PLM web portal isicad.ru produces a virtual release by publishing a market review, distributing an editorial column, designing a special cover page, composing a pdf with the most interesting articles of the last month, and other. Although all this is intended for those who can read Russian, I hope some of the others will not consider as a spam the information I am giving below.  

The yesterday-issued cover page of February was inspired by SolidWorks World 2012 and obviously by “Back to the Future”. The key title under the picture says: “What will happen with SW in the future?”:

By today, our collection of monthly cover pages contains 40 pictures always intended to reflect some important monthly market developments: please take a look at them here (some of them are flash animated). Our monthly reviews are typically composed by Vladimir Malukh, the LEDAS/isicad leading CAD expert. His review from February “SolidWorks 2015 will be implemented!” as well as the full long list of his articles since 2007 can be found here.

My February editorial was called “Love for a software system: is this the engine or brake of its progress?”, the title inspired by a recent Randall Newton’s remark about the problems SW has with its customers who adore the system. The links to my previous monthly papers can be found at this page.

The monthly pdf digest as usual contains the most visited articles (but not news neither press-releases), the 105 pages issue of February is here.

If you decide to use any automatic tools for translation of, say, my editorials, please don’t be too surprised or disappointed: usually these texts are quite sensitive to the context/ discourse of Russia and national communities.  

    

Note that the isicad project also supports a modest English version of the isicad portal. At this web site you can easily find some English articles/reviews reflecting developments of the Russian and CIS market. Recently I’ve outlined this web site in my paper “NURBS, BIM, orRevolution: which topics are most attractive for the readership?”. This is a small collection of the English cover pages (see the page with this set of pictures):

Who should pay whom? An AECCafe-isicad dialogue

This (see below) response from AECCafe seems to me unreasonable if not ridiculous. I believe media is interested to expand its readership especially to a huge not English-speaking country, isn't it? However I may be wrong because not fully comprehend the laws of this business... And would it be a violation of IP rights if isicad.ru will just retell this article of AECCafe? BTW, what could be the price for translating into English and publishing, say, of our own review of the market trends or its update for Autodesk Forum 2011? Would appreciate any instructive comment. 

Hi

We're running a leading Russian CAD-portal isicad.ru. Recently, I've read your article "Top Ten AEC Technology Trends of 2011" and found it quite interesting. So far I ask your permission to translate this article into Russian and publish it at our isicad site.

Kindly,

Vladimir Malukh, isicad.ru editor, LEDAS director for PLM services

Hi Vladimir ,

Yo can republish this article for US $500. Let me know if you are interested.

Thanks, 

Sanjay Gangal, AECCafe.Com

1600+ pages of almost the whole truth about all of us: The Russian PLMpedia

The Russian Web Encyclopedia PLMpedia.ru was founded by LEDAS during the preparation of the forum isicad-2008 as the online version of the vocabulary section of the monograph "The Encyclopedia of PLM» - the book which gradually became a rarity. To give you an idea about this web site, I will show some screenshots to begin with a front page whose some components randomly change from time to time (click to enlarge all pictures):

Over the past four years, PLMpedia became well ahead of its printed version, now in contains more than 1,600 articles (all in Russian) on engineering software​​ divided into more than thirty subject categories. Very probably, one of the most valuable sections is "Industry Terms and Concepts", a fragment of which is shown in this figure:

Now, a fragment from one of the largest categories "Vendors and their products":

In addition to the descriptions of products, technologies, services, and terminology, most of the articles contain references to the vendor websites. Here is a sample article "3D Geometric Kernel" relating to the "Industry Terms and Concepts" (the section which was substantially enriched thanks to the information kindly provided by CIMdata):

Note that at the end of encyclopedia articles there usually are links to relevant fresh publications at isicad.ru. Such links can also be found in other sections, for example, in the sections that describe companies (here - ASCON):

Obviously one of the largest section is about products (note: placement of banners at isicad.ru automatically implies their putting at  PLMpedia):

"Persons" section is also supported (but worthy of a radical extension). An example is an article about John Walker published at PLMpedia long ago and these days widely circulated in the web due to the 30th anniversary of Autodesk:

We try to carefully maintain and expand the section that represents the Internet and paper media including analytics & consulting, here is a a fragment, I hope, in fact, all are presented:

Today in Russia, and, perhaps, and in the world (could somebody correct me?), there is no analogue of such PLM Encyclopedia which by the way is attended quite actively. All comments, corrections, contributions, recommendations are welcome to info@plmpedia.ru or info@isicad.ru.

Direct Modeling and other Top 10 topics of CAD/PLM at isicad.net

isicad.net is a modest English version of the most popular Russian CAD/PLM web resource isicad.ru published by LedasGroup. In contrast to the Russian version which aims to cover all key news and trends of the world and Russian markets of engineering software, isicad.net briefly reflects what happens at the Russian and CIS markets and from time to time publishes English translations of some original Russian articles related to the CAD/PLM domain.

Below you can see a list of Top 10 most visited articles. 

1. How to Express Design Intent in Rhino 3D :11.2009 

2. “The Future of MCAD” Roundtable Organized by isicad and upFront.eZine :09.2009         
3.The prodigal son of Autodesk :05.2009 
4. New Armor for Rhino :07.2011 
5. A brief interview with Steffen Buchwald (Siemens PLM Software) :06.2009 
6. Synchronous Technology: The Third Attempt :10.2010 
7.CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts :04.2011 
8.Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD :10.2008 
9.The Future of MCAD: Round Table in Moscow :07.2009 
10. Bricscad Enters 3D Solid Modeling for Mechanical Design Market :01.2011  

Note that some of listed items are comparatively new and still have chances to move to the higher positions. By the way, an article “Direct Modeling -Who and Why Needs It? A Review of Competitive Technologies — by Dmitry Ushakov” published just couple days ago, judging by Google Analytics, can move to the very top of the list.    

Why COFES? Today ASCON knows the answer

Look at the passage from a recent press-release  of Lightworks:

 SHEFFIELD, UK (9 August 2011) - Lightworks, the world's leading supplier of rendering solutions for developers of advanced 3D computer graphics software, has today announced their partnership with ASCON, a developer and integrator of professional CAD/AEC/PLM solutions.

   ASCON, one of the first CAD developers within the Russian market, produces the KOMPAS -3D modelling software sold to over 40,000 customers all over the world. ASCON has licensed the Lightworks Artisan product and will be offering their customers a plug-in to this from KOMPAS-3D. ASCON will become the first company in Russia to sell an Artisan-based product when they release in September...

The case itself is ordinary for the global market but note that Russian software companies were so far typically inclined to do everything in-house. This can be explained by several reasons: survival of Soviet mental and actual isolation, references to Russian industry specifics, lack of international communication and foreign language skills, side-effect of really good high tech education and competence that in contradition with business and common sense prompt to believe that "we can do everything ourselves and better than any others"... During couple recent years ASCON seems to clearly overcome this defect and is intensively trying to be included into the global market with its specialization of labor. I think this is a clear sign of ASCON's maturity.    

Now look at the post by a very popular Russian blogger cadovod - Oleg Zykov - who is  the manager for innovation projects at ASCON (nice and meaningful position, isn't it?): 

When in my blog I promptly reported the visit of our ASCON delegation to COFES 2011, some readers justly reproached me: where are business issues? it looks like COFES is something which enabled you to visit Hollywood! Then Vladimir Malukh (LEDAS-isicad) rightly pointed out that COFES is not for spectators, it is for participants. Today I am at last able to tell you about one of the results of the ASCON attendance of COFES 2010: it is about our contract with Lightworks...

I can assure you that the agreement with Lightworks is not the only one ASCON brought from Arizona.

As for LEDAS and isicad, we are definitely aware about unique importance of COFES events: Vladimir Malukh (LEDAS Director on engineering consulting) in 2009 and Dmitry Ushakov (LEDAS CEO) in 2011 were among the participants,  see a COFES report of Dmitry who came back from Arizona also not empty-handed. Moreover, we have organized in Novosibirsk three COFES-like events - isicad 3-days multi-vendor forums (2004, 2006, 2008). 

And in September 2010 I was very happy to have a lucky opportunity of combining great COFES experience of Brad Holtz with isicad popularity in Russia: we have prepared and held in Moscow a COFES-Russia seminar combined with a one-day isicad event (NB: Oleg Zykov made there a presentation about ASCON's practical results on cloud-based KOMPAS 3D). 

There in Moscow, Brad has remarkably presented both the COFES idea as well as his unique personal competence and charisma. (At the picture - opening of the Moscow event: in a moment Brad will put a Russian fur hat on a cactus, a symbol of Arizona).

The presence of Russians at COFES has thereafter multiply increased and in future will likely increase more. Besides Arizona, people seem to be eager to attend next regional COFES which may be held in Russia or somewhere around... 

Russians in Arizona, April 2011:

Oleg Zykov, Dmitry Ushakov, Galina Chernyak (CSD, Executive Director), Maksim Bogdanov (ASCON, CEO), Vladimir Panchenko (ASCON, Chief Analyst).

@levin_david        (English)

@TheDavidLevin  (Russian)

Direct Modeling, Horseradish Leafs, BIM, and Google Translation

Yesterday, in my Russian blog, I published post “The CAD company, which is guided mainly by the opinions of current customers, will not be needed by them tomorrow” which was inspired by some hot discussions at isicad.ru. One of the discussions was about BIM (see "BIM Discussion Gets Heated in Russia", upFront.eZine #692. The second debate which is currently actively evolves is about direct modeling and it was initiated by a recent article "New Armor for Rhino"  by Dmitry Ushakov .

One of the readers advised me to translate my post into English, at least in order to please the mentioned CAD vendors as well as Martyn Day and Francis Bernard whom I quoted. I am not able to do this because my Russian original text is rather artistic:).  Maybe Google can help? However note that the same reader draw my attention to the wonderful translation proposed by Google for two particular words related to my post. Google seems to properly  translate Russian words list hrena into horseradish leaf but if you ask to translate hrenovyi list it gives you something different. Some explanation and excuse for this is as follows. On the one hand, reversing list hrena into hrenovyi list just corresponds to transformation of leaf of  horseradish into horseradish leaf (so that hrenovyi becomes precisely an adjective which in Russian is explicitly indicated by the ending). On the other hand, a Russian word hrenovyi, for some (strange – or natural?) reasons also means rotten, lousy… . Seems Google loves this variant much more and thus translates hrenovyi list as  f*cking sheet :).

You may ask what does direct modeling and BIM  have to do with a horseradish leaf? Well, in the acknowledgement part of my post I thanked Vladimir Talapov, the author of a fresh Russian bestseller book “Introduction to BIM” (392 pp.) published with a support of isicad, who (Vladimir) presented me not only a copy of his book but also a very important supplement – a bottle of liqueur based on horseradish leafs… See here a picture of both the book and bottle in "What Do You Need to Understand BIM Better" . I can definitely confirm that Vladimir is not only a brilliant expert and promoter of BIM but also an excellent specialist in Siberian liqueurs. As for Google Translator, everyone can judge for himself: this is Google's English version   of my Russian post in question.

Bricsys in Novosibirsk – 2. Shashlik under Tent

TechnoPark, Armenian restaurant Anait, and camping Bylina are the key attractions of Novosibirsk Scientific Center:). To say nothing about LEDAS-isicad, which, by the way  is somehow related with the mentioned three places.

I have already reported about visiting TechnoPark and Anait. Some part of my (especially, Russian) readers know Bylina: there, we have organized an essential part of cultural program of the 3-days forums isicad-2006 and isicad-2008. At the indicated pages you can see some noticeable actors of the CAD/PLM market in relaxed atmosphere - including dancing:).       

Here is a fragment of the Bylina camping:

Guests from Bricsys started their excursion with a dinner in a big tent:

The excursion included barbeque (more precisely - shashlik):

prepared by the two professionals:

and decorated by the girls from SibCongress, the company which organized all our Siberian isicad forums:

Looks like the guest are happy:

Belgium is a recognized world beer leader. That's why the guests are vividly interested in the Internet-based review of beer situation in Russia and Novosibirsk:

Btw Bylina is equipped not only by Wi-Fi but by a lot of other elements of high tech (doorplates: toilet and chief engineer):

Before desert - a 15-minute walk to the Berdsk bay:

Eugene Kuznetsov, LEDAS CFO, proposed Erik De Keyser, Bricsys CEO, to bathe in the bay, however Erik refused because he wants to make some more development to his Bricscad:):

No more information:) (Bylina information panel)

Shashlik with Oleg Shilovitsky

Today, in Raanana, Israel, I met Oleg Shilovitsky. We ate several types of shashliks/kebabs and discussed some issues of mutual interest. Among them (the issues, not shashliks): semantic methods in data management, prospects of PTC, Autodesk, DS, ASCON, TopSystems, what are chances of SolidEdge, business of Inforbix, business of LEDAS, iPhone-4, Twitter, COFES, isicad, and many other.  

Our conclusion: life is hard but very interesting. 

Just our thoughts:) 

How Extreme Sport Help in Organizing PTC Innovation Forums in Russia

All I ever heard about marketing managers (at least in Russia) proved my impression that they are the most busy people, constantly organizing something important, moving in space-time with cosmic speed. Last week I was lucky to interview Elena Krasnikova, Marketing Manager, PTC Russia, and this confirmed my impression once again. A formal reason for this interview was an invitation to isicad.ru to become the main information partner of the 7th (in Russia) Annual PTC Innovation Forum , but I also wanted to better understand the nature of work in marketing, difficulties, joy, motivation, etc.

In May-June the PTC Forums will be held in four cities of Russia and CIS: Elena gave a lot of details about their agenda, participants, and speakers. PTC plans to start distribution of localized Creo in Russia already in June. Besides the Forums we spoke about relationships with partners and competitors. Elena made her comments on a planned COFES-Russia-2012. It turned out, btw, that Elena is a fan of extreme sports...

This big interview was published in Russian, a Google translation is here.

CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts

isicad is proud of its fruitful contacts with CIMdata established at least in 2006 when Ken Amann, at that time - Director of Research at CIMdata, as a keynote speaker, participated in the Second International Multi-vendor isicad Forum in Novosibirsk. Since that time isicad.ru has multiply published in Russian summaries from CIMdata global reports and other materials that contributed to the PLM awareness and progress of the Russia & CIS market.

In March (USA) and April (Europe), CIMdata has held (and will in May hold in Japan) its PLM Global Vendor Forums where in particular presented its comprehensive analysis of the state, trends, and forecasts of the world PLM market. CIMdata has kindly provided isicad with the full presentations and permitted us to publish our own summary, comments, and conclusions that probably give to many readers a rather clear impression of what, according to CIMdata, PLM is today and will be tomorrow.

As far as I understand, until now CIMdata has published only a brief press-release about the Vendors Forums, therefore I hope that the isicad article "CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts" prepared by Vladimir Malukh, will be useful for many readers.

April 3: The Report of the Siberian Spring was Greatly Exaggerated

The report of March 27

Russian Social Networking: In and Beyond the CAD/PLM Market

Russia is often considered as actively growing in all Internet-related directions but still lagging behind in social networking - especially at the enterprise level. For example at COFES-Russia / isicad-2010 some foreign experts talked about this lagging behind as obvious while the Russian attendees supported this discussion by their explanations why total networking is premature for the Russian market.

Recently I ran across a report of DigitalLife, whose study presented a global data on social networking and characterized Russia as one of the leaders:

... the study showed that online consumers are, on average, spending more time on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn than on email, despite the former only becoming mainstream in many markets over the last few years. In rapid growth markets such as Latin America, the Middle East and China, the average time spent, per week, on social networking is 5.2 hours compared to only 4 hours on email. Online consumers in mature markets remain more reliant on email, spending 5.1 hours checking their inboxes compared to just 3.8 hours on social networking. The heaviest users of social networking are in Malaysia (9 hours per week), Russia (8.1 hours per week) and Turkey (7.7 hours per week).

Usually I am quite skeptical about statistics in general and in particular about statistics gathered by global organizations in the huge Russian territory. However I trust my own impressions and they correspond to the DL conclusions.

I leave aside considerations about what percent of garbage information is circulating in the Russian Internet, instead I formulate for myself these two questions:

(1) What are the reasons of very high activity in the Russian social networks?

(2) Why social networking is sluggishly used at the Russian enterprise level?

As for the answer to (1), I believe that, ceteris paribus, high networking activity in Russia reflects shortage of other forms of social activity, including political.

There is a popular quote (almost saying) "A poet in Russia is more than just a poet" from a poem (1965) of Evgeny Evtushenko who meant that, when political activity is restricted, a poet can willy-nilly become a public figure with a political flavor. Note that in Russia this likely can be applied to practically all historic periods. Amusingly, in one of his inauguration speeches Putin used this saying as "The President in Russia is more than just a President" :) . Finally, a blogger in Russia is more than just a blogger :).

As for (2), a typical Russian individual (independently of what he or she is pretending to look like) is reflexively skeptical about any official orderliness or even rejects it. With this opinion in mind, I can consider one more question:

(3) Why CAD/PLM user forums independent of vendors are so popular in Russia?

Here are some possible reasons:

- Even the best vendor forums/blogs have some flavor of orderliness,

- There are still a lot of illegal users and they would feel uncomfortable at vendors web sites,

- Independent forums enable any critics making comments regarding any products and their comparison while vendors can hardly permit such discussions...

All main vendors have their Russian blogs, forums, twitters... and are doing their best to intensify communication with their customer communities. Note rather detailed Russian forums of ASCON and Autodesk-CIS, nice blogs of DS Russia and Autodesk-CIS, etc. However all similar networking vendor's facilities cannot compete with such independent forums like www.fsapr2000.ru or www.dwg.ru, which has 30 000 active daily visitors and 4 000 000 monthly views. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish between (a) people's forums that are independent and horizontal, (b) vendor's forums that sometimes can with great talent imitate informality, and (c) imaginary enterprise networking which seems to have some regulatory, formal, orderliness, and vertical features, and for which imitation of informality would be unnatural and hardly acceptable.

These differences, due to the above mentioned cultural reasons, are very pronounced in Russia and remain an obstacle for usage of the up-to-date enterprise networking infrastructures and tools (if enterprise networking is something efficient and demanded). Does this problem exist in the West? Hopefully mature experts of social networking can give me an answer or/and perhaps dispel my possible misunderstanding.

The picture above is taken from digitalstrategyconsulting.

CAD Revolution: Inevitable and Already Started

There are several more or less obvious objective and subjective reasons to systematize the main trends in CAD/PLM development at the beginning of 2011. The isicad editorial board has asked its leading expert and reviewer Vladimir Malukh to characterize these trends, and his opinion formed the basis for the article published two weeks ago at isicad.ru in Russian and just published in English at isicad.net.

To give a more pronounced position of isicad.ru, Vladimir’s paper is extended by the Appendix combining an interview with the author and some elements of a Round Table, involving along with Vladimir Malukh, also Dmitry Ushakov and me.

Vladimir has outlined 12 trends and then we commented some of them. For example, we discussed whether Autodesk, DS, or SpaceClaim can really be acquired. Dmitry added his opinion about future of direct editing. I espressed some concerns related to whether CAD could or should be used by everyone. Also I said something about a very simplified approach to a so-called sustainable design...