Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 18

In my last entry I touched upon how the opportunity to improve one’s social reputation would encourage some people to learn 3D modeling; especially as new, task-specific interfaces such as Spore‘s “Creature Creator” make traditionally difficult applications easier for novices. Social reputation – especially within the framework of the videogame community or popular online social networking sites – is one non-monetary incentive for learning 3D CAD. Personal empowerment – particularly within one’s “real” world community – is another.
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Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 15

In Part 10, I claimed “the future of CAD is cooperative”. This might seem obvious, but one look at current ongoing difficulties reveals the magnitude of the non-cooperative problem. It’s an inconvenient fact of life for too many of us and the reason I spent so much time examining the ongoing shift in the CAD industry; a shift which is arguably a result of efforts to circumvent artificial barriers and market reactions arising from those efforts. However, having spent a fair portion of that time discussing two of the three roadblocks – data portability and proprietary formats – I want to briefly touch on the third: extensible semantics.
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