Re: TriSpectives

From: George Sachs (sachs@pipeline.com)
Date: Sun May 11 1997 - 19:30:11 EEST


Funny you should inquire about Trispectives (which in 1995 was introduced as
the Pro-E killer... talk about HIPE!). I just this week sent out a pointed
inquiry concerning the companies much overdue 2.0 version of the product. I
hope to get a better response than I got when I pointed out numerous bugs in
their first release. Turns out 3D/Eye was acquired by Visionary Design
Systems VDS in February (none to soon!). As an early user of Trispectives
1.0 I was sadly dissapointed by the lack of robustness of the product. I was
even more dissapointed by the total lack of commitment by the companies
management and technical support people in trying to correct these problems
or even acknowledge them (I predicted to them in early 96 that the product
would fail to sell as projected). There were NEVER any bug fix releases or
improvements and it took over 1.5 years for version 2.0 to be made available
(it was supposed to ship November 1996). I had early on also pointed out to
them that I felt the product was priced far to low to provide a professional
level of functionality and support but I think they thought the product
would catch on and sell in the millions, and then they could fix all the
problems later (I guess that strategy didn't quite work out). In any case
after spending (wasting?) a great deal of time trying to use the product for
any kind of serious work, I gave up and only use it on occasion for simple
things. In my opinion it's a case of a company haven bitten off more than it
could chew and convinced that delivering high level CAD was no big deal. A
pointed example of this type of arrogance was exemplified by their claiming
that they could support IGES, STL, and STEP! Needless to say these did not
work (I found after much time and aggravation that even their STL output
occassionally put out incorrect normals!).
But to add insult to injury, the new company has decided to up the price of
the product from $400 to $1000 and to charge 30% for annual updates and $300
for technical support (so $1500 for product + support, 3X original product
price). This may infact be the correct formula, but it will probably anger a
large number of prior 1.0 customers (unless they can get an upgrade
cheaply). I would recommend that anyone interested in spending this kind of
serious money should probably take a wait and see approach to the product
and find out if it will infact deliver on it's promises first (I don't think
you can get your money back if you're not happy).

In the end this may yet be another case of you get what you pay for and
that's maybe why SolidWorks has done much better. I think Rhino's approach
of slow and deliberate Beta testing/development in the process of developing
a new low cost CAD product is a much more prudent approach (but this can
take years and lead to serious cash flow problems). I will keep you posted
if I learn of anything new in regards to Trispectives though.

Auguri!
Georgio Sachs

Yakov Horenstein wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>At the 1995 Autofact show, two new CAD products were launched which aroused
>a lot of enthusiasm. One was SolidWorks and the other was TriSpectives.
>From all accounts SolidWorks is selling well, but TriSpectives seems to
>have disappeared from the scene. What happened?
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:39:33 EEST