Vender or Partner: What is the difference?

A company I know of in Wisconsin recently stopped using Creo and opted instead to migrate their entire company to Inventor. If you know me you know I can be quite opinionated and I've heard it all. My favorite is 'Bart, you don't understand. Our vendors use Solidworks". "We should be using solidworks" So where am i going with this? Let me try to explain the difference between a vendor and a a partner  I will also try to explain the difference between a mid range modeler such as solidworks, Inventor and a high end modeler such as Catia, Creo and NX.  

When did the progressive manufactures quit empowering their vendors to take full leverage of the tools we now call Creo? 

This image shows curvature in the combplot 

Lets take for example that you have Creo and your a fortune 500 company. Maybe you group or team does not own all the various modules but if you mature to the point that you realize you need Creo Simulate or Creo Style or Sheetmetal's Progressive Die extension or any other module that when you first purchased Creo you didn't know you need, at least there exists a module you can purchase but did not when you made your initial investment. With Solidworks, Inventor and the like your only get what you get. These mid range tools mentioned are a one module systems.  There is no other module that you can purse if you had the desire. You simply made a mistake or you wait for the developer to write in the code for more functionality.

This happened to Tesla. They purchased their seats of Solidworks and later figured out they needed more. (smart people are smart because they know they don't know everything) When Tesla matured they realized they needed more out of Solidworks than the two module system that it came with. Like G2 and G3 continuity among about 600 other things that Creo and Catia can do with their hundreds of modules. The same sales person who sold them Solidworks sold them Catia. They should have purchased Catia instead. Or Creo! 

In my classes I like to explain the difference between a vendor and a partner. You tell vendors what to do not how to do it. A partner you invite to training with you. Not to many companies think to invite their design firms for training. Even as it's a day rate it doesn't cost more. Caterpillar purchased Pro/ENGINEER for select vendors converting them into partners in the late 80's. The ones that refused to quit using AutoCAD went out of business quickly as Caterpillar trained the one vendor to be a partner. Trained them to use Pro/ENGINEER and many went for 30k per month of business to 230k per month in business. 

Converting from Creo to Solidworks or Inventor both tools are a 'one module system' is one step short of going out of business.