Alibre Blog:

In the words of Albert Einstein, “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

A college friend of mine used to have a poster with that quote and a picture of Einstein hanging in his apartment at school, and it recently came to mind.

Now I, nor any of us at Alibre, would claim to be the “great spirits” Einstein speaks of, but I think our vision is a great one: to put powerful 3D CAD on the desktop of every engineer, in fact, in the hands of anyone who can benefit from it, small machine shops, consultants, inventors, woodworkers, hobbyists, students, etc.

On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people in this industry look down their noses at us and say what we’re trying to do won’t work. I even had the pleasure of sitting in a presentation last year at a gathering of movers and shakers in the CAD industry, where one pundit gave a presentation citing Alibre as an example of what didn’t work. Strange, I thought, things are going pretty well for us. Moreover, although none of his facts were correct, and he’d never actually spoken to any of our customers or anyone at Alibre, nor likely ever tried any of our products, this was his considered opinion. Now I wouldn’t necessarily call that violent opposition, but you get the idea.

Some things just take time, hard work, a relentless pursuit of the goal and a steadfast willingness to put aside the naysayers. It’s happening. I wish I could say it’s happening just as predicted; it’s taken a few years longer than we initially envisioned, but many successful companies that appear to be “overnight” successes have actually been at it for years.

In Clayton Christensen’s book, the “Innovators Solution,” he states that innovators should be patient for growth but impatient for profit. That’s become one of our mantras, and we have built our business model to be profitable at the aggressive pricing we offer.

Daratech had their PLM summit last week, and after filtering out the obligatory prattle about Dassault and UGS being “thought leaders,” I found the following interesting:

“Where growth in CAE investments was viewed as a significant contributor to PLM market growth just a few years ago, it is the demand for value-priced 3D CAD that seems to be accelerating today. In fact, according to Daratech figures, the market for 3D CAD for the masses (high volume, "low" price) appears to be exploding. With this in mind, the question posed by Daratech was, "Should the providers of high-end (that is, higher-priced, lower volume) 3D CAD be worried?"

Whether or not these vendors are worried is of little significance, but the fact that 3D CAD for the masses is exploding is very exciting, and corresponds to the increasing interest we are seeing for our products.

Alibre Design is indeed 3D CAD for the masses. There were over 5,300 downloads of Alibre Design Xpress from Download.com last week.

Even though we’ve been at this for a while, the activity we’re seeing feels new, full of energy and enthusiasm. Particularly rewarding is the increasing number of interesting and exciting designs from customers. So on that note, I thought I’d wrap up by including some images of a few of the cool things some great spirits are doing with Alibre Design these days.

Rotationally Molded Canoe

Check out the case study on the Avalanche Blaster pictured below at http://www.manufacturingcenter.com/dfx/news/archive/03-07-2006/stories/feature_4.asp

Avalanche Blaster Inflated balloon,beforethe blast...

Blasting away!

The Speedster Gas Cap designed by Crime Scene Choppers pictured below (along with the finished part on a Cyril Huze custom chopper www.cyrilhuze.com) is also described in a recent case study at www.alibre.com/news/articles/200601-PDD-CrimeSceneChoppers.pdf. The leaf spring fork with friction shock was also designed by CSC.

Speedster Gas Cap Gas Cap on the Cyril Huze El Mirage