Let the Flames Begin...

First, let me put my flak jacket on under my flame retardant suit...

I still have my 5-1/4" disk of Mathcad 1.0 from 1987.  I LOVE Mathcad.  It has served me well my entire career.  For a long time I have been right there with the other Mathcad 15 zealots on this forum.  I had the opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with the Mathcad product managers and developers about 10 years ago in Latham, MA and I told them across the conference table, "Until Prime can provide the basic requirements of a high school 2D plot (Title, labels, legend, readable axis, etc.), Mathcad Prime will be nothing more than a toy!".   There was palpable silence in the room, I can tell you.  Reflecting back, I was seriously angry because I could see that my beloved Mathcad was coming to an end and the only replacement for it was inadequate.

Then I waited.  Ten years.  Nothing.

I teach a corporate Mathcad course to get our engineers to use Mathcad to hep document their work, avoid errors, and be more efficient.  Although I evangelized "real Mathcad", I made Mathcad Prime 3.0 available to our corporate users, and later Prime 4.0, so they could "try it out".  Well, last year, several of my students showed up for class and were seriously disappointed that I was not teaching Prime.  Really?  Monitoring our our license server, I can see that we have 33% of our user base (in the hundreds, closer to a thousand) using Prime.  What!?!?  Time for a paradigm shift.

I made a decision to stop teaching Mathcad 15 and convert all my training material (hands on .xmcd files) to Prime format.  I also made the decision to start using Prime exclusively for my own work.  If I was going to teach it, I needed to immerse, get proficient, find work around solutions to limitations, and provide leadership by example.  It was a risk.  I have not looked back.  I actually enjoy the more modern font presentation and printing.  Was it painful?  Sure!  But I have found work around solutions to just about everything. 

The tipping point for me was the new release of Prime 6.0 with a spell checker, hyperlinks, and enhancements to the new 2D Chart Tool.  I'm now pushing hard for full corporate adoption of Prime so we can stop supporting Mathcad 15.  As an internal corporate trainer, I have successfully converted all my training material to Prime files with only minor issues.  As an open-source developer for the CoolProp materials library, I have no trouble with converting demo worksheets and surprisingly little effort to compile add-ins for Prime instead of Mathcad 15.

Sure, an eBook viewer would be brilliant, but I've found work-around solutions by posting our Prime handbooks on our intranet with html front-ends.  Are there little annoying things that Prime falls short on, sure.  But it's not Mathcad 15; it's something new.  When Microsoft moves their buttons around on every single forced update of Office, we don't go down and picket outside Bill Gates' house.  We adjust and adopt the way we work and eventually get used to it.  Did PTC take too long?  Sure.  Should PTC have worked harder to retain the product experts and developers from MathSoft?  Maybe.  However, to get a new china pattern, you have to break the dishes; otherwise, you're just rearranging the plates.

I've started to notice a few forum users getting annoyed that every single post degrades into a diatribe on the shortcomings of Prime.  I'm tired of it myself.  It's probably why PTC no longer pays attention to this forum anymore and why the enhancements forum is locked down tight (the Creo enhancement forum works just fine).  They are tired of all the negativity and frankly, I don't blame them.

It's time.  Mathcad 15 is not moving forward.  It is only a Windows update away from not running at all.  It's 32-bit, it's old, and it's tired.  Get over it.

Who's with me?