The catia developer Dassault Systemes is so clever! He put lots of resources onto the aerospace & the automobile fields and won a big portion of these two most-profit making markets. Hehas plenty ofmoney to do R&D. On the other side,he acquired Solidworks and used lower price to beathis competitors likeproe & ug.No one deny that solidworks is weaker, but it is functionally enough and cost effective for many small and medium companies. We can see many of these companies switching to use solidworks. Besides, Dassault donates lots of Solidworks & catia and provides training support to so many educational institutions around the world, thus further preventing the offspring from learning other softwares. if you were a boss, would you give several thousand dollars to buy a software training for a junior engineer and then wait for several months until heis comfortable enough to use the software to start a design project. Surely not if you have an applicant who is ready.
Proe is deep but catia is wide. The new coming V6 catia draws all parties, including designers, engineers, customers, suppliers, manufacturers and even consumerstogether to add values ontoa design on the same platform. Strong but simple is the characteristic of catia, designed for all parties.
Proe is strong but his situation is not good. Look at the current situation of another giant Unigraphics then you canunderstand what i mean.