Its with no certain amount of shear, unadulterated joy that I can announce that think3 are back. For those that aren’t aware, think3 has been one of the most entertaining companies to watch in the CAD industry for years. They started out decades ago, as CAD Lab I seem to remember. Went through a rebranding excercise, ran a competition to find their new name (think3). Hired a big shot CEO (can’t remember.. Joe Costello) and started calling themselves an upstart MCAD company. That CEO caused a bit of stir because he ripped into the press for not covering his products and came unstuck. They also released training tools that used a video game to teach 3D modelling – The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy.
But the shame of it is that they had some interesting tools, some technology that was uniqe. Many vendors couldn’t touch their styling and surfacing tools, particularly the Global Shape Modelling (GSM) tools.
These were pretty unique back then – but if there ever was a story of a loss of potential, then this is it. Times have changed and with today’s technology, new players on the market, and the old guard doing innovative stuff, I wonder if this is a last gasp attempt – at what, I’m not too sure – acquisition?
I wonder if the users on the web-site are still using it – are the design teams at Alessi, Buel, all those others, still plugging away with ThinkDesign? Who knows.
The Press Release says: “Think3, the only supplier to offer technology solutions that combine product concept, development and design implementation environments, has launched new release of its CAD and PLM product lines ThinkDesign Suite and thinkPLM Suite 2008.1.”
Quite.
Welcome Back.
