SolidWorks World 2012 Expectations

I couldn’t make it to SolidWorks World this year. Work got in the way. I attended the previous two in Anaheim (2010) and San Antonio (2011) and the event his year in San Diego would have been my third consecutive SolidWorks World.

This year I look forward to know more about SolidWorks V6 which was announced two years ago at the 2010 event. Here is a picture I took as SolidWorks V6 was being shown on stage. At that time SolidWorks executives denied that the next generation of SolidWorks was being developed on Dassault Systemes’ V6 platform.

Here is a picture of SolidWorks running on a Mac.

I guess a lot has happened with SolidWorks V6 during the past two years and I hope that the company is now ready to reveal more about the next generation of SolidWorks. Last year’s SolidWorks World had no worthwhile mention of it.

At last year’s SolidWorks World, the big news to me was the announcement of SolidWorks Live Buildings (video), something which I referred to as SketchUp on steroids. And speaking of SketchUp, there is a rumor floating around on Twitter about Dassault Systems acquiring SketchUp from Google. If it is true then I believe it will be a good thing because I really don’t see Google pushing SketchUp like any other CAD vendor would have. And understandably so because Google isn’t a CAD vendor.

What do you think will be the big announcement at SolidWorks World 2012?