On the other hand, SolidWorks may simply wish to keep its main competitors in the dark as much as possible. Not letting a customer base down is an important part of what you say about your company and its products. Not because they can’t but because they may have chosen not to. Their care in managing this is likely an indication of just how complex their initiatives really are and they wish to not promise the community anything they can’t in the end deliver.

Of course the community loves it when companies say they will do “X” and deliver it. The way SolidWorks is handling this is consistent with what we have seen with developers in the past who were working on Mac versions of their software in secrecy and wished to “manage” that process. The blog posts seem to back up the enthusiasm that the product design and SolidWorks community does indeed wish to see a Mac version in the future. We’ll take Kenneth Wong’s word that the eruption of applause concerning Jeff Ray’s comments about cloud, multi-touch and Mac futures with SolidWorks’ technology was indeed correct. He noted that some such changes have been recognized in the recent past. Some types of key changes could very well indicate that another licensee of the kernel is at work in the Mac space. He noted that changes to that kernel that could affect his Mac application are important. I personally had the chance to talk to a software developer last night who utilizes the Parasolid geometry modeling kernel. More likely however it involves software programmers digging into the technical details of making such a port over to Mac OS X feasible. How does one work on the concept of a native Mac application? That could just involve non-programming planning.

I guess the word “working” is the key verb in the remark by Joe Dunne of SolidWorks above. We are here and available to talk to SolidWorks Corporation about what their future product plans are. One of those concepts is definitely running SolidWorks as a native Mac app, in addition to the no-install (browser-based) version…So you can run it on a Mac or run on a Mac machine using a browser–take your pick.” Here is the quote as written in Wong’s piece: We wrote back that our article was referring t o Desktop Engineering’s Kenneth Wong’s story which quoted SolidWorks’ director of technical marketing, Joe Dunne. Shortly after our story ran yesterday SolidWorks’ PR department wrote to us to address the issue of SolidWorks running natively on the Mac and any such claim that a native product is in the works.

Solidworks mac