The Tragedy of the Core Segment Of Engineering

There was a time when the Engineering word indicated the core segment. Well, that time is long gone. These days, the world is all about Software, Apps, Data Analytics, and the likes. Sometimes it seems that the core segment of engineering is losing the race against the IT focused segment in terms of disruptive innovations and development.
During the mid 90s, the world saw the WWW revolution. The focus started shifting from the automobiles to pieces of electronic items, from the design of bridges and buildings to design of websites and so on. The number of people using computer, internet and web based services started to grow. However, the community remained confined to specific segment of users who were enthusiastic about internet and its potential to change the world. Many web based communities started to develop out of which most were based on the coders' communities.Mechanical Engineers were quite untouched to these changes. Actually the only people in the core segment who were related to this boom were the people relating to CAD/CAM/CAE. 

Then came Web2.0. This actually shifted the span of internet and web based services from that small segment of people to the multitude. With the expansion of facebook, linkedin and the likes, common man(even the core segment people) started using internet. But the use has more or less remained confined to using these common platforms only. When the coders were starting to post their problems on stackoverflow, the mechanical engineers could only make Facebook groups and communities which almost never generated any value adding content and no problems were ever solved on those communities. When the coders were working on open source projects and working to spread knowledge, the core segment was still busy in keeping their technologies a secret. When the coders started using free operating systems like Linux and version control systems like Git, the mechanical engineers were still using highly priced CAD and PLM software packages like Catia and Teamcenter. 

So, what went wrong and what was the effect. Well, nobody can tell what is the effect of all this as nobody has an idea as to what would have been the condition of the core segment, had these change hit them in a common way. The SMEs are the worst hit in this case. Their growth and development have been severely hampered due to lack of access to advanced technologies at affordable prices. Life of an SME would have been easier if they could use these CAD and PLM packages at affordable prices or for free. The development would have taken a much higher pace if they could avail the services of consultants for free and discuss and share problems and solution globally.

If you still have confusions, just imagine how many startups would have been created and succeeded only if they had to pay some $20,000 for using MySQL or any DBMS and $50,000 for using python or java on day zero. This is the real condition of Small and Medium scale industries in the core segment and they don't even know about it.
We have created CoreLogs to solve these problems for the Core segment and create a collaborative environment for the SMEs where they can connect with the large scale industries.