We have just got SolidWorks PDM at work and I am in the process of setting it up. I know a little about it.
There is two different solidworks PDM products, workgroup and enterprise. We went with workgroup which is cheaper and probably better for smaller teams. Workgroup is about £1000 + £200pa per seat and no cost for the server. Enterprise from memory was about 50% more per seat and you have to a few grand for the server, plus pay someone to 'configure' it for you.
PDM workgroup is actually pretty similar to SVN, you check files out, work on them and check them back in again. Except it understands relationships between files and their meta data so you can check out an assembly in its 'as built' state and it will checkout the correct old version of the parts.
Enterprise goes much further and creates work flows for you company. Documents go through different stage gates with different people being able to make changes and approve them. It is very much design for large teams with rigourous QA. It also appears as a network drive with some nice shell extensions on Windows.
Suprisingly neither of them have a Diff built in, although solidworks does itself have that sort of tool.
As a market it is definitely ripe for disrupting, although to succeed there would need to be tight integration with the software packages (solidworks, creo, inventor etc)
I anyone on here is looking to do something in this area I would love to hear from you.
But as we all know it's been a ripe area for disruption since the 1970's. :)
At the moment it's less to do with software as it is to do with the way we share the resultant information, of which there are emerging international standards. MCAD is not my speciality but I don't think I've seen a standard for handling parametrics. Unfortunately closed standards are hard enough to get governments and industry to adopt let along open ones.
If you want a solid object modeller with parametrics that's open source and you can compile yourself, check out BRL-CAD.
You can bet it's thousands of US dollars, if not tens of thousands. Just a single seat of Solidworks is $4000 without any extras. Believe it or not, that was actually crazy cheap for parametric CAD back when Solidworks started becoming popular ~15 years ago.
As much as people give Solidworks flak, it actually is really, really good software for what it does, and it does a lot of different things. There are other pieces of software that can match or exceed it in single matters, but very few can do all the things it does. While it's not cheap by an means, it fills a role at which little else comes close.
In other words, it may be $4000, but it does what would take four or five $1000 (plus training) pieces of software to do.
As a near-daily Solidworks user, I totally agree. The problem in my mind is just that the barrier to entry is so high due to cost that it prevents the kind of open collaboration on mechanical design that's been possible for years in software and electronic hardware. Just like 3D printers, prices will come down to better serve hobbyists and individuals -- it's just a matter of time.
Solidworks is a great 3d modeller software. It's a pleasure to do most things in, and gets out of the way when you want it to.
The only modeller I like more for certain operations is OpenSCAD, but that's because I can understand the math operations in printed pieces in complex curves.
The one program I want to see die a firey death in source-code hell is ProEngineer, now called Creo(sote). It is patently user-unfriendly, and requires so much PITA setup to even do things like regular polygons. "Oh, you want to fillet? You better do it in the right order, or the last fillet _WILL_ fail!"
That's exactly what open source can change about a field. Opening a field to contribution from people with less money but just as many ideas can only be a good thing.
