the milestone revisited
A few weeks back there was a lot of buzz about SolidWorks selling its 1,000,000th license which is a huge milestone in my opinion. I did some further investigating as to how exactly these licenses were broke down between educational and commercial mainly thanks to a comment that was left on my initial post about this topic. Here is what the breakdown is.
| Cumulative Seats Shipped | Q1-2009 |
| Total Seats | 1,003,300 |
| Commercial Seats | 368,700 |
| Educational Seats | 634,600 |
Now you are probably noticing the huge disparity between commercial seats vs. educational seats. Educational seats account for better than 63% of the total SolidWorks seats out there.
My 2 Cents
Yes, these numbers may be a little shocking to you and there has been some criticism about the ballyhooed milestone press release and what not. Here is what I take away from this. This means that there are a lot, and I do mean a lot of students that are learning SolidWorks in school, whether that is college or high school. These are the engineers of the future. These are the people that will be working along side of us in a couple of years and they are learning this software early on so that they are able to step right in when the hit the work force. THIS is why I personally have no problem seeing these numbers skewed as much as they are towards the educational side.
I would be interested to see what these same numbers look like from the major 3D CAD software companies (i.e. Inventor, Pro/E, Catia, etc.). If you have a link to where I can find this information I would greatly appreciate it.
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3 Responses to “the milestone revisited”
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Jason,
Major CAD companies have always included educational seats in their numbers. SolidWorks differs from it’s closest competitor Autodesk in that the SolidWorks Student Edition is not given away for free like the Inventor one is. That makes the fact that there are so many SolidWorks EDU seats out there even more substantial because an educational insititute could have just as easliy choosen the free Inventor, but saw more value in investing in the cost of SolidWorks.
mike, thank you so much for the clarification!
Actually, schools do need to pay for Inventor and it is a higher price that SW. The students get it free, but the school does not. I also checked the Inventor numbers from their last conference call and their educational seats are a lot lower than SW. Couple that with the fact that seat counts really don’t matter (I have 20 seats that SW counts but after downsizing we are only using 5) since they are not a great indication of actual usage.