Is it me or has PTC lost it's way

My updated opinion, if you need more fodder:

http://communities.ptc.com/message/222647#222647

I agree with a lot of the posts on this issue. When I complained about the GUI, I was called old and unable to move with the times. I have been using Pro Engineer since the mid 90's, and I have seen very little change to the core functionality of the software. The only changes that have been made were to the GUI. Some of these changes have been good, but since Wildfire 3, everything has gone downhill.

I resisted changing to Creo until I was forced to change about 2 months ago, and I still hate it, every day I am modifying the ribbon, to make it faster to use.

PTC needs to spend some time watching users working on a normal, everyday job that they do, and see how the GUI should work. My biggest problem with the GUI is the amount of extra mouse clicks and mouse movement that you have to do when doing routine modelling and drafting. For example, if you are modelling and want to change from shaded view to hidden line, in Wildfire, it was just one mouse click, in Creo there are at least 3.

I would like to see the next release, with a more usable ribbon, but more importantly, they need to fix some of the core functionality with sheetmetal, Pro NC machining and other modules.

I didn't read the whole thread but the ribbon can be customized.

What's your experience about the ribbon customization?

Another thing that does not work properly is the pattern command.

This morning I grouped two features and patterned the group, the first feature patterened correctly, but the second feature didn't pattern. I ungrouped them and patterned them individually without any issues. By the way the second feature was a simple hole constrained in one direction to a plane and dimensioned from one end of the block.

Come on PTC this is basic stuff!

FULLY AGREE, You give a good summary of the bad performance of PTC since the marketing invention 'CREO'

This is my slogan:

CREO is cruely bad because the Ribbon UI is Rubbish.

I am convinced that PTC has to offer, urgently, at least one alternative in the style of Wildfire 4 (NO Ribbon)

After reading all these posts tonight I have to say the "frustration" expressed by everyone is very real and very familar. I am in no way trying to mitgate the validity of the issues. Take my ideas as opinion. I have been an active Pro user since the late eighties and it has ALWAYS been the case, year after year, release after release, bug after bug, hit after hit, and miss after miss, these frustrations have existed with Pro.

In a nut shell, PTC listens but only when it's within their best interest. I like the idea of buying stock to vote out the special interest. However, remember PTC is a 30 year old company with preferred voting stock nowhere near us regular folks buying ability. That train has left the building. Sadly, my opinion is all your frustration is most likely falling on, not necessarily deaf, but indifferent ears. Hope is not lost though.

Having my PTC dance card for 26 years now, I believe it puts me in a postion to offer the following suggestions:

1. If you are able to have a Champion, a few Champions, a team of Champions in your respective organizations that are the Go-To people when people have questions...Do it. You will be better off for it. Pave the way for them to get trained to be Super-Users. Train as many as you can...as often as you can. Always be a learning organization. Do not rely on PTC or the Help line to give you the answers. 1989 was the last time I called 1-800-4PRO-HEL. In fact, I am not sure that is still the number.

2. Have regular internal User Group meetings. Be informed, be open, share your challenges and better yet, do not withhold your stellar techniques from your team or company. You will not gain any special recognition for being stingy or exclusive. Get really good at being good and staying as good as you can be on your particular release with your particular product/processes. Find five or six ways to get to an answer.

3. Humbly I offer this....re-direct the time your are expending attempting to get PTC to listen to the gripes getting great at navigating the obvious landmines within the software. I know it sucks that the code has always been half baked and rife with counter-productive boondoggles. It's always been like this....and unfortunately it always will be so. Learn the work-arounds, don't cheat, don't hack your way through if you can avoid it. I can safely say in my 30 plus year career, on a dozen or so CAD programs, I have rarely found there was no solution to a problem. Granted, we deal with GUI stupidity, ribbons, retina burning white backgrounds, copy cat functionality and other CAD hype...stick with it as no software is perfect.

4. Engage an outside Trainer or Super User once a year to give you a critique. They will have the fresh un-biased eyes that will see things you may have missed. At the very least they will ask questions that will challenge your processes and methods in the same way ISO auditors do.

Hope I didn't Flame On too much.

Creo has become a confusing software.

previously we knew exactly what a command would do, its not the same story now!

Ribbon..hmmm..can't say much....i hope they don't change the ribbon to something else by the time we get used to it .

hope Creo 3.0 brings some relief from bugs!

Pro/E used to be good and different..but now Creo ..huh!

oh PTC suddenly stopped our maintenace for the new license we bought only after 3 months, there is a new rule they say (PTC never cared to inform us when we were buying the license) we should have 51% license under maintenence..for maintenece to work..........so no Creo 3.0 for us...

When I kicked of this discussion in 2012, I had no idea that the PTC community also felt let tdown with the advent of CREO.

CREO 3 is now out in BETA, I haven't seen it because we dropped our maintenance back in 2012 also, so have saved a packet in maintenance payments over the last couple of years.

We have discussed wether to re-instate our maintenance with PTC but all our customers have stuck with wildfire 3, 4 & 5. Not one has moved to CREO, saya a lot that does.

We have no need or desire to move to CREO 3, its probably just a bug fix of CREO 2 anyway. Unless, of course, PTC have the balls to send me a copy with a temp license so that I can give them an honest and frank review. But we are talking about PTC here, where nothing is for free! So, come on PTC, put your money where yout mouth is.

As an aside, I would like to thank the PTC community for its support over this post. Your comments have been interesting and amusing. It has also amazed me that some people like the CREO interface. So thanks guys, I will keep you posted.

As a user with experiance of almost all the 3d cad systems, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Inventor , Catia, NX...

Creo is utter crap!

It's about 5 years behind Solidworks in terms of functionality and simplicity.

Everything is long winded.

The only offical benefit ive seen is that it is not as memory intensive as SW or inventor.

My biggest disapointment however is the inability to do a 3d sketch line.

I've heard peole say "it makes you think and capture design intent properly". Absolute rubbish, it just makes you think twice as long to complete something that should be done in seconds not minutes.

Short answer: YES

Long answer: as a Pro/E user since 1995 (!!), I have seen Pro/E go from THE hottest cad out there to an also-ran. The latest abomination they've foisted on us is embarrassing. Just plain embarrassing. The folks who started Pro/E and built it into a powerhouse, I guarantee they are ashamed to have any connection to this mess.

The functionality has not changed. For that I am grateful: I still contend Pro/E has the best pure modeling abilities in the cad world. The problem is, engineers don't live by modeling alone. We have to make tedious crap like drawings. The drawing portion of Pro/E, never very good, is now practically unusable.

None of our old mapkeys, some going back over a decade, don't work anymore. I'm not talking about the exotic mapkeys, just our simple ones. 'VR' for 'view right', how hard would it have been to leave that alone?

On another job, I had to learn a little of Autodesk Inventor. The basic modeling functionality shows heavy influence from Pro/E. But the similarities end there. The drawing portion is EASY to use, with lots of built-in time savers. Going back to Pro/E was like stepping into the Dark Ages of drawings.

Creo is a sick joke played on Pro/E users who don't have any choice. It requires more clicks to do the same things. I'm not a click-counter, I go by how fast I can actually work. And Pro/E today slows me down, period. Not just because I can't find anything anymore, but because the basic ideas about where to put things are screwed up.

If we could change cad packages, I would. Inventor, Solidworks, anything else but Pro/E. I am sick of PTC screwing around with a good product. They are rearranging the deck chairs while the ship is sinking.