@ivelin.peychev, I think you are making a lot of assumptions that don’t apply to how we run the company, how we work and to the type of work we do. But like you said, it might be a regional/professional difference.
If you have worked enough years with industrial designers you should know that if they don’t like the tools, culture, environment, compensation, natural light of the place where they work, they just leave. There’s only a few thousand good ones in the world, and they have a lot of upward mobility. So imposing bad tools, bringing-in shitty/boring projects, paying average wages or anything else that seems tolerable in other jobs, it’s enough to make them go away.
You are right about that approach, But you are wrong about the assumptions you are making here too. The list of tools I provided you is our chosen one not because they are cheap tools, it’s because they are absolutely the best to do what we do. I’d love to hear of a better choice to any of those in that list. For what each of them do. The Rhino-Modo combo is our best example of tools that work well together. Not well integrated with each other, but the sum of their output is very good.
About a year or so ago Alias folk reached out to me to learn more about how we use the tools we use. Mostly about Rhino>Grasshopper. We are nerds, publicly so, so I can understand their interest. This person was talking from the point of view that Alias was a much superior product (obviously lived in a bubble and kept saying what things Rhino could not do, while I kept correcting by simply showing those same things working on my screen), and they genuinely thought the reason we didn’t use Alias it’s because we could not afford it. Of course what they don’t know is that in 2019, no client could pay me enough money to have me use Alias again. Even if Alias was free. It’s a shitty way to spend your days. I know because I’ve done it. And I’m not doing it again. Better surfacing? yes, in a handful of cases. Better tool? Not even close.
So you are making misinformed correlations that the price of software is in any way a reflection of its quality. This is very common in big software resellers, paid analysts and elitists cultures. This is something that I’ve never subscribed to. And I find it utterly silly, kind of laughable actually.
We have a lot of tools and software discussion in our team. Nothing we do comes ‘imposed’ by me, it’s based on what people want to do to excel at their craft, while we also excel at having the best deliverables for our clients. All our clients use Solidworks/NX/Creo/etc. They can’t care less we don’t use them. And they even tool from our files. In fact they love that we get them right and their people can’t touch them.
We had considered also bringing other solid modelers in the past. One was Creo, reason it was shut down? It’s a shitty way to spend your day. So again: this isn’t mostly about price, but about quality of life. I think NX is very good, and it sucks a lot less to use than other solid modelers. It also has great surfacing, better than Alias IMO. Is it pleasurable to use? Not even close. But we are still considering it. And you are right about the single/few seats approach and about price negotiation. All being considered.
A related challenge is that right now we cannot bring any more work, we are usually booked 1-3 months out. And we also need tools that are easily to hire/train for. Rhino is one for the best at this. Modo and Grasshopper one of the worst. Also the biggest cost of these other ‘enterprise’ tools is not licensing, but switching costs or training people to be proficient at them. It’s an interesting balancing act. For now we are staying with the tools we have, despite all my complaining here, they are quite good. I won’t be returning my Rhino licenses anytime soon.
G