Breaking News – ZWCAD Buys VX

I have just got information from a highly reliable source that ZWCAD Software Co. Ltd has bought VX Corporation. The news is supposed to become public in late September. In an earlier post titled “ZWSoft Going 3D“, I mentioned that the Chinese AutoCAD clone developer was going to announce its entry into 3D market. Looks like it has decided to buy its way into it.

VX has quite an impressive product line that spreads across CAD as well as CAM. There is VX Designer for advanced 3D design ($4,000), VX Mold & Die for mold and die design ($6,000), VX 3D Machinist for advanced CAM ($8,000) and something called VX End-to-End which is a fully loaded design and manufacturing system ($10,000). ZWCAD has been making noise about 3D for some time. And now with Dassault Systemes unleashing its free DraftSight the AutoCAD clone market does not seem to be that lucrative anymore.

I hope the first thing that the Chinese do is give the VX user interface a complete overhaul. I see that they have done a pretty good job with the ZWCAD interface. VX also needs better graphics performance, especially when it comes to handling large data sets.