by Josh Bernoff PTC is a company with 5,000 employees and 25,000 customers. It makes CAD (computer aided design) and PLM (product lifecycle management) software. The story of what it took for PTC to create a customer community is instructive, because it's not a straight line. In real companies, it's not easy to create social applications, so there's a lot to be learned from PTC. This is a good example of the kind of management stories we have in Empowered .