[May Kung]

One point I'd add to Marten's comment about file sizes being smaller is this carries over into needing less horsepower to model the same things in OSD over SW. With bigger file sizes, you need more RAM (or deal with a really slow system). I suspect OSD is coded more efficiently so it can make do with less. From what I've seen here, we need about double the computing horsepower to model the same kind of parts since we've converted from OSD to SW.

I still use OSD for quick modeling jobs because it's much more flexible during the initial design process. Once a design looks more stable, I'll port it to SW. I know I'm not the only engineer here that does that, although I suspect our management would frown at that.

I would also add it's much, MUCH easier to customize OSD than SW. I can write LISP scripts or just record macros, drag-and-drop them to test it, and then share easily with others. To customize SW, I'd need to learn how to hack the registry if I wanted to share customizations. I used to easily write new goodies for OSD and then put them on the network share so all engineers would see them the next time they started OSD.