There are obvious significant commercial advantages for engineering companies to embrace and utilise numerical simulation in their design processes. If the democratisation of simulation means the development of bespoke software tools for the design of a particular product that encodes sound simulation governance principles then this is a laudable aim. If, on the other hand, it means the selling of cheap and cheerful generalist finite element software then that is another matter and raises the spectre of all sorts of verification issues with the software and the possibility of finite element malpractice by the user.