Why do PTC continue with MathCad Prime?

I believe that if you own Mathcad 15, you can use it forever without any further payments for maintenance. Mathcad 15 works on Windows 10, so as long as you have this latest version, you should be able to end future payments and use v15 until your computer systems do not support running this version or the licensing software required. I do stay on top of each release of Prime to see what has been improved/added. My wild guess would be that Prime 10 might be close enough to consider migrating from v15? Time will tell.

SMath is an option to Mathcad...interestingly very similar in UI and functionality to Mathcad v15. It will read v15 files too, but it is not without limitations. Worth a look when you consider the cost at $0! Migrating from Mathcad v15 would require very careful considerations of all pros & cons.

Hi G.,

Before PTC bought MathSoft/Mathcad, it had a very large user base of 'consultant' level users who used mathcad at a higher level that would be expected in a typical drawing office (DO) type environment. This included a lot of professional engineers and scientist types who were pushing the leading edge of their applications in a local sense and needed to extend the maths that was in their text books to the new environment and scenarios.

A lot of that work fed down to being 'regular' computation, and in many areas matched up with 'standard' calculations used in DO environments e.g. Work Instruction Sheets (WIS) giving the formula for thread engagement based on load and screw size, for both imperial and metric - we had lots of them covering all the regular arithmetic calculations. These computations were done in the DO and needed no more than a calculator.

Meanwhile the advanced design concepts and specialist engineering were done in different departments, such as computing the photon flux from a black body source over a TBD waveband and deciding on a lens f/# and aperture. Those specialist computations need more than a calculator if they were to be done correctly, and human error being what it is (roughly equally distributed..), a method for capturing the complicated equations and doing the calculations accurately, to leave the thinking for the specialists, was very important. Mathcad leapt that hurdle and still does. It can also do the WIS computations, but there was an established process method for them, so wasn't picked up that well by the DO fraternity..

Meanwhile PTC saw that, especially in the USA, there is a requirement to 'show all working' for the computations both at WIS and Consultant level, and that Mathcad was the tool every one was using for the documentation of the computations and values used in drawings. PTC bought Mathcad to bring the WIS level capability to their DO fraternity (hence Prime), but had not realised that they had also bought the troublesome consultant level community who still need all the power (and more) of Mathcad, even if no-one individually will use all of it.

I have quite a few Mech Engs, especially those that are in Stress and Thermal analysis, who do some quite powerful analyses via mathcad, and would like (and benefit from) the integration with Creo a lot sooner that 'the other crowds' who are at arms length to the rest of the PTC tool set.

One example that came up on the old collaboratory was vibration absorption modelling via [a few] cascaded spring dampers. These give adequate solutions but aren't continuous, because the overall net frequency roll off can't be modelled by extending the damper cascade (there is always ripple on the curve as different dampers take up the load), but having the ability to investigate within Mathcad did give a much greater insight into how to approach the problem, and where the text books reach their limit. If I locate the sheet I'll post it as it was public.

I hope that helps clarify why (in my eyes) the split in the community has happened. My colleague who manages the Creo side says that PTC do this every time they buy a company - the assimilation process to be swallowed into the PTC code base taking typically 5 or more years.