Analysts estimate that Inventor sold 24,000 seats last year and Solidworks 70,000 seats.įlash forward nearly a decade and now Inventor needs to be killed off, just as MDT was. We don’t really know, as CAD vendors no longer report exact seat numbers. Today, analysts believe Inventor might be in second or third place after Solidworks and Solid Edge, maybe. Ultimately, the three-pronged Rubicon tactic failed. (Autodesk lost the orange rectangle lawsuit, and Dassault negotiated a settlement over DWGEditor.) an orange rectangle) and the use of DWG in its free 2D utility, DWGEditor. Autodesk next targeted Solidworks Corp (and parent Dassault Systemes) with lawsuits contesting its use of similar trademark design (i.e. For those first few years, Inventor’s marketing staff maintained a presence outside Solidworks World user events – displaying ads on nearby billboards, handing out boxing-motif leaflets and inviting Solidworks users to Inventor social events. The launch was followed by an aggressive twice-yearly update schedule designed to bring Inventor’s feature set in line with Solidworks’.Īt the same time, Autodesk undertook a similarly aggressive anti-Solidworks campaign of in-their-face marketing and lawsuits.

In the same way, Autodesk committed to challenging Solidworks’ dominance of the mid-priced MCAD market by launching Project Rubicon (now known as Inventor) in 1999. Since then, “crossing the Rubicon” has become an idiom for committing to a course of action past the point of no return. It was made famous when Julius Caesar, and the army he led, crossed it in 49BC, and thereby broke Roman law and irrevocably began a civil war that led to him becoming dictator of the empire.įigure 1: Defining the length of partial fillets in Inventor 2018 The word Rubicon refers the shallow river that, in Ancient Rome, marked the northern border of Italy proper.

So, instead, it launched “Project Rubicon” – a new MCAD system written from scratch. To compete with the Solidworks juggernaut, Autodesk first tried buying them, but lost to Dassault Systemes. The AutoCAD engine lacked MCAD necessities like constraints and assemblies and, in any case, it made MDT a hard sell to non-AutoCAD users. To this day, it remains such.Īt the time, Autodesk offered two AutoCAD-based packages to MCAD designers – Mechanical Desktop (MDT) for 3D modeling and AutoCAD Mechanical for 2D detailing. Self-funded by its programmers, this brand-new, mid-priced (roughly $5,000) parametric MCAD program seemed to “come out of nowhere.” In a couple of years, Solidworks had become the best selling Windows-based MCAD program, undercutting the high-end ($10,000+) market of Pro/Engineer, UGS and Catia. Autodesk began work on Inventor as a reaction to the run-away success of Solidworks.

Fusion 360 vs inventor