Cadence (OrCAD) Capture vs System Capture

I suspect someone in Cadence Marketing did a deep dive why companies choose Altium.  Altium sucks, yet people keep buying it and basing their senior projects on it.   

In my experience, the decision is made by engineers looking for the easy button for Design Capture.  Arguably.  Orcad can be fragile at this. 

System Capture has a glaringly simple UI with very few buttons. 

As the guy answering questions for a dozen engineers who capture schematics during team whiteboard collab meetings and don't want to look like an idiot, this is so sexy.

Smart board design professionals do not choose P*DS.  System engineers do.   Cadence needs to let P*DS die.   

Altium does suck but it sucks a lot less than it used to...and it won’t suck forever at the rate they innovate and update the software. If Cadence's grand scheme is to make me use System Capture instead of spending less time posting to social media sites announcing what a great company Cadence is to work for and more time fixing the darn tool then Altium here I come. PADS is not a Cadence product and Siemens has been making upgrades over the last few years to the program, not huge updates but updates none the less. PADS still has its uses as it is still the best software to use if you need to recreate a customer's board from scratch without a schematic...which I have to do from time to time. Cadence comes off like a typical California company that knows best and unwashed plebs like me just aren't sophisticated enough to understand its greatness. The idea of just moving my company to System Capture is a perfect example of how they seemingly know nothing of what we're doing out here. Couple that with CCRs that go nowhere because they claim to not see the issues that I see and that I must be the only one on the planet having issues (even though every user I speak with says the same thing) then the idea of paying over double the annual maintenance costs of any other tool becomes tiresome.

Couldn't agree more with much of what Mr. Wood posted
IMHO (Cadence user of about 20 years), they do not listen to the customers for new development.  The software developers want to make the tool simple easy and shinny.  I would suggest the software team talk with the users about how they get their job done instead of trying to play to the lowest denominator and look like the competitors.

Well, I don’t want to come off like a hater…I really love the Cadence tools I just want more action and more interest in feedback. V17.4 is a disaster and they know it. Bring home the code writing instead of outsourcing it all and get moving. For example, I’ve been complaining about the removal in the RMB pop-up menu, in the Capture symbol editor, for changing the name of a pin. It worked great in V16 and for some reason they removed it in V17.2 . I’ve reported this many times and even sent videos of why I wanted it back…they refuse to do it. Creating schematic symbols with tons of different pins with different names now takes longer than it did before. It reminds me of the scene in the movie “The Master” when the cult leader is asked why the book changed, he replied “this is the new material” yeah but but…”this is the new material” And that’s it folks…this is the new material and sucks to be you for wanting to change it.

I don't think you're a hater.  You have to support your customers.  Altium is a competitor I credit for me being able to afford personal licenses (bypassing the which-tool-is-better argument.)

P*DS is dead.   Exp* is the future.  They didn't fix the zero width board outline divide_by_zero crash until two years ago.  Partial design reuse is impossible.  Netclasses only on the top tier.  No 3D transparency.  IDX is a cost-add.   I could go on.   Siemens paid $4B for them.   It is what it is.  Can't translate Allegro back to P*DS?    Do you have Allegro 16.3 working?   Tech support won't talk to you until you do.   It won't run on windows 10.

Cadence leads in the thing that matters most:  find blocking DFM/DFA/SI/powerSI/mechanical mistakes, in real time in some cases, before we fab it out so that it reaches the test bench as fast as possible.  Then, software can get started to find and complain about the rest of the mistakes.

I fully support anything Cadence does that discourages people from falling for the slick marketing of lesser rivals with my understanding of who is making the purchase decision.  Altium:  "ours has 3D!  Isn't it pretty?  Look!"   Cadence:  "our 3D has transparency and your board will actually work.."  Altium:  "online library!"  and so forth.

I am an Orcad evangelist with incoming engineers with HDL and Altium experience.  Worse, I am super conscious that twenty years ago, I personally fought really hard to keep Scicards around because routing in BoardStation really sucked.  I understand engineers love low-hanging fruit including sch/brd crossprobing with Boardstation. 

The most amazing projects I have completed were done on the worst software (including P-CAD, that couldn't validate negative power/gnd plane connections.)

We missed schedule by months on all of them.

I don't think you're a hater.  You have to support your customers.  Altium is a competitor I credit for me being able to afford personal licenses (bypassing the which-tool-is-better argument.)

P*DS is dead.   Exp* is the future.  They didn't fix the zero width board outline divide_by_zero crash until two years ago.  Partial design reuse is impossible.  Netclasses only on the top tier.  No 3D transparency.  IDX is a cost-add.   I could go on.   Siemens paid $4B for them.   It is what it is.  Can't translate Allegro back to P*DS?    Do you have Allegro 16.3 working?   Tech support won't talk to you until you do.   It won't run on windows 10.

Cadence leads in the thing that matters most:  find blocking DFM/DFA/SI/powerSI/mechanical mistakes, in real time in some cases, before we fab it out so that it reaches the test bench as fast as possible.  Then, software can get started to find and complain about the rest of the mistakes.

I fully support anything Cadence does that discourages people from falling for the slick marketing of lesser rivals with my understanding of who is making the purchase decision.  Altium:  "ours has 3D!  Isn't it pretty?  Look!"   Cadence:  "our 3D has transparency and your board will actually work.."  Altium:  "online library!"  and so forth.

I am an Orcad evangelist with incoming engineers with HDL and Altium experience.  Worse, I am super conscious that twenty years ago, I personally fought really hard to keep Scicards around because routing in BoardStation really sucked.  I understand engineers love low-hanging fruit including sch/brd crossprobing with Boardstation. 

The most amazing projects I have completed were done on the worst software (including P-CAD, that couldn't validate negative power/gnd plane connections.)

We missed schedule by months on all of them.