Thinking Wildfire? Wildfire 2.0 Makes You Think Again

I have been using personal computers for about a decade now. Some 5 years ago, I used to own a Pentium 100, with 32 megs of RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive. Now, I run an Athlon XP2400+ with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. In the world of mechanical design, this would be the equivalent of upgrading from a 2000i to a Wildfire 2.0 package. And yet, come to think of it, I used to get more or less the same things done with my old PC as I do with the new one.

Sure, the XP 2400+ is about a zillion times faster than the old P100, but more often than not, it only gets used for logging onto the internet, writing emails and other documents, and messing around a bit with images shot on a digital camera. Sometimes, I think it’s just one big conspiracy, hatched to make us keep maxing out our credit cards and keep PC manufacturers minting money. We end up buying bazookas when all we need, perhaps, is a shotgun. Which is where the new Wildfire 2.0 comes in – it gives you just enough.

The MCAD industry in the world saw a fair amount of action this year. The market got new contenders like Solid Edge v15, AutoCAD 2004, Solid Works 2004, and the new CATIA V5R12. And though they haven’t been launched yet, Autodesk Inventor 9, SolidWorks 2005, Pro/E Wildfire (probably to be badged Wildfire 2.0) are lurking around in the very near future.

If that weren’t enough, there have been numerous price corrections and revisions across the board in all segments, and MCAD developers and dealers are striking various kinds of packaged deals alike. The MCAD market in India still has a long way to go before it can be called mature (by Western standards, of course), but we are at least steadily on our way.

So, why a Wildfire 2.0? Why not stick with Wildfire, which is already doing fairly well. Well, it comes down to simple mathematics. With Wildfire 2.0, PTC hopes to take advantage of the blurring line between SolidWorks 2004 and Solid Edge V15. While Wildfire goes head-to-head against software like SolidWorks 2003 and Autodesk Inventor 7, the new and more user-friendly Wildfire 2.0 is pitted directly against the new SolidWorks 2004, which is its most likely competitor.

With the new Wildfire 2.0, PTC decided to field refinement, few mouse clicks, and easy use in place of the previous version’s power and FTD (fun-to-design) factors. And PTC realizes they stand a chance of making a killing here. To give an example of one of the new capabilities of Wildfire 2.0, it can now create rotational patterns using the new Axial option. Hence, you do not need to create Datums on-the-fly to create rotational patterns. A full test of the production release of Pro/E Wildfire 2.0 will confirm things, but on the face of it, the pre-production seems to be in a good position to win the battle of the spec sheets.

Article Date: April 2003