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Assessing the software's new Generative Experience.
Dassault Systemes, under its new CEO, seems finally ready again to embrace Solidworks. For many years, Dassault applied pressure on Solidworks users to switch to its more expensive and less compatible 3dExperience software, which runs on the cloud. On offer is a genuinely confusing array of new program names, such as Solidworks Connected, Solidworks Cloud, Solidworks xDesign and 3dExperience Solidworks. Solidworks users are, however, a stubborn lot who like their MCAD software grounded firmly on the desktop, and many don't take kindly to what they consider a distraction.
And so, at 3dExperience World 2025, new Dassault CEO Pascal Daloz, who trained as an engineer, announced that he is "A Solidworks lover. Really, I am!". Не and all other executives bore "30" pins, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Solidworks, famous for being the first MCAD program to launch only on Windows, back in 1995. By comparison, Autodesk came out with Inventor four years later.
But once the anniversary congrats ended, Daloz moved on to acclaim Dassault's big-iron software. The theme of his keynote speech was The Generative World, where designers take inspiration from nature to create digital twins of everything, and maximize the business at their manufacturing shops. "It results from the convergence of the Experience Economy and the Circular Economy," he explained, which, to me, wasn't clear at all. In any case, the slide accompanying his talk showed the generative economy not emerging until 2040.
Never mind. Daloz was keen to introduce Dassault's seventh generation of software, cleverly marked as "3D Univ+rses". He said it will combine modeling, simulation, and data science, with assistance from generative Al.
Dassault loves coming up with new eponyms and acronyms, and so I was not that surprised to learn that 3D Univ+rses is a XaaS (experience as a service) made up of GenXp (generative experiences), POWER'byAlI, VTaaS (virtual twin experience as a service), and Virtual Companions. The long-standing PLM (product lifecycle management) abbreviation is renamed IPLM, short for "intellectual property lifecycle management." In short, 3D Univ+rses is Dassault's new trademark for its form of digital twins.
New Generative Experiences
The term 'generative' is now ambiguous in CAD. It refers to 2D drawings generated semi-automatically from 3D models; but it also pertains to...