Autodesk criticised by architects
extranetevolution.com
extranetevolution.com
I tried grabbing the site using archive.is, but the site is using something called Imunify360, which threw up a Captcha, which was promptly archived instead of the site.
Although the Internet Archive has a cache entry (https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetev...), it's returning a 503 (I don't know if the 503 is what it got from the site, or if it's the Internet Archive returning the 503).
It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody listened.
We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete, for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then... Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked also.
After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features.. they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete detailing sw).
For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.
If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company.
But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.
I would say:
Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots.
Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products.
Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products.
Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.
IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software background (so right-to-modify does nothing for them).
FOSS is just ... a bad deal for them. They want someone they can call and yell at when they're on a deadline and the software isn't working, and they want tools that get out of their way.
Look at the city government of Munich. They tried to adopt Linux and FOSS but failed after years of internal issues. Proper support and industry adoption are important properties not easy to emulate for FOSS.
There's a really nice lightweight vector design app for Mac and iOS called Graphic [0]. It was one of the first fully-featured design tools for iOS, and still the best to use.
It was bought by Autodesk back in 2015, who promptly did nothing with it at all. Pretty much all development ground to a halt. From being updated every few months, the Mac app has only been updated three times in the last five years.
It's since been spun-out to a different company, but development still isn't really happening – the iOS app hasn't seen an update since 2018.
The lack of attention this app has been shown is sad, as it's a good piece of software and I use it all the time. It had the potential to be the vector equivalent of software like Pixelmator or Acorn – lightweight but powerful alternatives to Adobe products created by independent, highly-passionate developers.
Instead, newer apps like Affinity Designer and Vectornator have taken any traction it might have had - and it's probably going to stop working with an upcoming release of macOS if they don't do anything.
I know your pain.
Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one.
I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.
At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.
It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.
For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem
Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.
Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.
I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires.
I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.
As for the prices...in 2014, 2 Advance Steel licences were something like 12000 euros and one Tekla license was about 18000 euros.
I remember in 1999, I was interning for a company that was getting into CAD, choice was to get 3D Solidworks that no one had heard of, or get the software that literally everybody used - 2D AutoCAD.
That company still uses Solidworks today and has never touched a single Autodesk product. I can guarantee the opposite would not be true if the other decision was made.
We knew in 1999 that Autodesk was never going to innovate, or allow us to.
Until they get bought by AutoDesk
Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."
Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be.
I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X" to almost anything outside software and you'd be hailed as a revolutionary genius.
For Revit specifically, version control for construction drawings or a package manager for Revit families would both be huge.
If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning.
The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers, the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.
The situation is way more severe than this makes it sound:
* The benefit you get from $10b is not actually 200 times as much as the benefit of $50m. (Economists would talk of a "utility function" - that's what you should actually be taking the expectation of - and what I'm saying is that it's nonlinear.) How much it's worth very much depends on your personality, but for most people (maybe all?) it's worth well under twice as much, maybe barely 10% more? Either way, you never have to work again, and maybe your kids never have to work again, and you can enjoy your lifetime retirement in a great deal of luxury, so the difference in experience is minimal. It's probably not a big deal if you have to be careful not to charter private jets too often. So even if the chance of getting $10b is 1 in 10, or even 3 in 4, you still might find the $50m option wins.
* The $50m is right now whereas the $10b dollar requires effort. Not just 9-to-5 effort either, but possibly a CEO-of-a-startup 90-hours-a-week effort. Again, the benefit of $10b is not actually that much compared to $50m, so you might consider that marginal benefit less than than the extra work. If that's so, you would take the money now even if the big win were 100% guaranteed!
The thing is a piece of software that could replace and update Revit is not going to be built by a lone developer. I know people have built some pretty amazing stuff, but for something to operate with that amount of polish and reliability it's going to take a pretty big team and some experienced people to lead them which means some hefty VC investment. While you or I might be easily bought off a group of VC firms are not going to let it go so cheaply.
The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])
Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".
In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]
If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...
Well as you said, no, is it better to have a company valued $50M growing 30% per year, or having $50M in your bank account ? Most entrepreneur will prefer the latter
I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...
The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under no pressure to sell.
"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5 billion."
That sort of logic is true if you're starting from scratch. But if you've already grown to a $50M company, your chances of being a $1B company are much better.
Put another way, if I pick a random person and ask you what the probability is that they'll finish a marathon, you'd probably say it's not very likely. But if I tell you they just passed mile 26, you might revise your estimate.
$50m realized, now... cash in your pocket vs. maybe $1B.... but you don't know - there's a very real chance the company will die before that.
50m now vs 1b later is way too simplistic of a view.
The list goes on and many different tactics are perfectly legal or can be ambiguous requiring proof of motive (nearly impossible). You're engaging in war with someone who has far more resources than you. Sure, you couod win and shift or supplant their market share but more likely you'll be crushed.
Choosing between that option and $50m retiring happily, I'll choose the second option every time. I like the idea of competing but let's be realistic, this is not your restaurant competing with the other guy down the street where it might really come down to your actual competitive advantage in what you're providing a customer. Many times it comes down to business strategy and resources to execute those strategies.
In fact, it would probably make more consumers better off than if your company had remained independent: Users who were unwilling or unable to abandon Autodesk in order to use your software would be able to use it if it became part of Autodesk's offering.
Plus you'd be rich.
In your example, before giving you an offer, the big software company will conduct an internal analysis to figure out how much money they'd have to spend to develop the bare-minimum featureset to prevent their customers from fleeing to your competing product, then they'll back that number off a little bit, and try to buy you out. This number will probably be significantly higher than the amount it costed you to build the thing, because for them to replicate your features, they have the added overhead, bureaucracy, and inefficiencies that come with being a megacorp.
If you accept the offer, it saves them money and time.
If you decline the offer, they'll just greenlight their internal projects and steamroll you.
We can handle this sort of thing in software because we can try compiling something, see it has errors, and fix the obvious syntax problems that have been introduced by a merge or rebase. We have tools that make it easy view and copy data from a previous version, and all of this makes things easier. For more structured data those low level conflicts need to be handled much better so that the user can concentrate on the higher level aspects. If they need to restore sub structures deleted in a merge then they need to be able to see those, so our version control starts to bleed right through the tool chain.
The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility.
But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.
Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.
Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.
Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.
I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.
If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.
They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.
I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.
That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.
Yes, C4D is fast and more importantly, extremely stable. It's crazy how often I got Maya or even Houdini to crash, compared to Cinema (which basically only crashed due to Octane...)
The pearl is the story, not the speck of grit.
I wonder if they moved to different solutions when they started bringing in subbies?
for a counter example. I'm currently getting a small house built and the near by land developers are mostly using the SAAS solution I worked at to manage the construction\design of each subdivision.
People who haven't used change control have a hard time imagining what they're missing.
Anyone on the inside, am I wrong? Would your company readily switch to a superior product, retrain its employees for it, deal with business partners who haven't heard of that new product, etc.?
The problem is the software isn't just used by one team at one company. Architects hire subconsultants- MEP engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, Landscape designers, Lighting designers, many others. They all need to share files so whatever you make has to be compatible with whatever everyone else is using (which is probably Revit).
There are some competitors like ArchiCAD, which some architects love and swear by, but it is a pain in the ass for their subconsultants to work with them, because the ArchiCAD file has to be converted to a Revit file and this doesn't usually work quite right and of course Autodesk has no incentive to make this easier.
We really need to stop with all that siloing going on. OpenBIM with IFC and BCF are the only way of going forward.
Revit is a mediocre product in all categories, but that's the thing: People are using Revit since it somehow can do all the stuff a bit. Architects love Archicad because it's a software tailored to their needs and far superior to Revit in that domain, but if you're a consultant doing e.g. MEP work you will be probably not so happy. You still won't be while using Revit, but since "everybody" is using it at least you won't have to deal with OpenBIM and correct file workflows.
Source: I'm an architect myself.
In the context of design projects that don't always have the most realistic schedule, it's just one additional hurdle to deal with that isn't there if everyone is using Revit.
True however, you need people who know what they are doing :)
Btw I'm glad we have options in the market. Same as with browsers, OS, etc. Mono cultures are hurting everyone.
Selling the product to some smaller companies is probably easier. I have some family working in industrial drawing, I think it's doable if you sell hard enough, as long as the software is as good and can import and export seamlessly.
I think it's quite doable overall but it's a 10 year endeavor. Need to start with $10M and a couple developers and play the long game before you can replace autocad at Boeing/Airbus.
In Adobeland, slowly Affinity Photo and Designer are gaining foothold. I don’t think at this point it is any danger to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. But a Affinity version 2 might be pushing the monopoly back.
Adobe is the Autodesk or 2D world. I’ve heard they don’t even have Dev teams in the US anymore, for the most part they have teams in India. Profit maximisation at its worst, since now they no longer deliver meaningful updates to their software. I haven’t had a significant update for Premiere/After Effects that made any sense in at least half a decade. If you go into reddit/r/editors you’ll see it’s full of people working their way out of Premiere, which is garbage software.
Cavalry is interesting and does a lot of things a modern professional app should do but it really isn't anywhere close to an After Effects competitor.
AE isn't just for animating some vectors, AE is non-destructive Photoshop with a timeline it's possibilities are absolutely vast.
Cavalry looks very interesting!
Inkscape has it and it’s free.
I’m stuck not using Affinity Designer because I can’t export to DXF.
I paid for Affinity Designer, just assuming it’s would have DXF export because why wouldn’t it.
So sad ),;
Productivity lost by adopting new tools would render firm non-competitive in this thin margin business, will likely make your P/L red.
[1] Some of which frankly should just be built-in, but either way it wouldn't make creating a replacement any easier.
Granted, it has also existed for a quarter century so it has its own network effects going.
It happens in all industries. For example InDesign currently has a dominant position as a DTP tool. However, after so many years it still doesn't support many basic functions such as multiple indexes (Index of People, Index of Places, etc.). Adobe simply doesn't care because there is no competition (Affinity Publisher is not there yet, and Scribus has its own quirks, although got much better recently; paradoxically Quark finally got competitive, but they don't support multiple indexes either...).
Anything that is standardized (engineering-wise -- and many things are) does not actually need a designer working with design software. It needs a generation algorithm (a script) with input parameters.
The biggest problem of why this area does not get more attention? We just don't build shit anymore. So, there is less money and opportunity than ever in it. Like really. We don't build shit. We need to fix corruption in politics long before we fix the lack of a proper marketplace to create incentive for maximizing the engineering potential of our society.
I don't adhere to a luddite attitude. It's my opinion Autodesk's tools are deeply lacking and this is based on my experience and knowledge on software.
When I first starting learning AutoCAD, I was very annoyed at the slow snail pace to designing things (as to pen/paper). I used to be a web designer/developer for a handful of years, those tools are much more refined and allow a person to do more with less time.
Revit is a step in the right direction for the building industry but it has many drawbacks too. I strongly believe this is due to lack of competition and innovation on Autodesk's part. Adobe should be seen as the model. They've developed many tools that empower it's users and they continue to push the envelop forward.
Autodesk will be unseated, if they don't continue to push their tools forward like Adobe has with many of it's products. The software isn't terribly hard, just needs a lot of investment upfront for a MVP competitor that chips away the market, then reinvest back into improving the tools with AI/DL/ML. I.e. One agency may use specifically a specific contractor, the AI recognizes revisions and highlights them to the architect. Or using specific materials. Etc. Etc.
Construction industry is stuck in the 1940s, IMHO. Hopefully a competitor arises to bring it into the 21st century.
I guess actually swinging your hands around in air like Tom Cruise in Minority Report was too tiring for most people. I wish Apple had bought them and integrated them into the macbooks instead of the touchbar.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Motion
[1]: https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap-motion-controller/
His tweet before that video was "We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator. Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium". That's really disingenuous. First of all, it looks like a typical demo made by an intern and some toys. Second, mechanical engineers don't need or want that type of interface. Actually manipulating and rotating CAD is such a small part of the process the time sink (aside from all the design and documentation aside from CAD) is adding dimensions and relations to geometry and relations. This video is the equivalent of a software developer's manager showing off a visual programming language and declaring text-based languages and keyboards are obsolete.
Google actually one-upped Leap Motion with Project Soli that's in the new Pixel phones It can track minute finger gestures in a much smaller form factor using radar. It similarly doesn't have any killer app that actually makes it useful for much of anything.
I had one when they first came out and while the tracking accuracy was quite good, it wasn't good enough for doing any precision work. Every so often the tracking would skip and glitch.
I bet the Index has potential for that with the finger control
Horrendous name though (for English first language speakers anyway), 'do' is the fallback - most primitive - verb for any kind of action implying a lack of precision or importance: "I'm doing the dishes" vs "I'm polishing the cutlery". There is also an unfortunate embedded word in there too.
Every time I think of how great the tools for building software (IDEs, etc.) are, that’s what I think next. What could help is having more devs with knowledge and interests in other domains, and not only focused on software itself, for example by interleaving software and non-software courses in students curriculums.
Same is true for many other industries. I've been hoping for a Quickbooks contender for years, but Intuit has proven to be very adept at shutting down the competition by virtue of the fact that relatively few CPAs will work with any other software.
I don't know CAD but in 3D software for movies/games most studios use expensive software (Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini, etc). The market for that software is relatively small and the effort to create and maintain it larger than many many other projects. So, the price is high. But, if they didn't make it hard to copy most companies would arguably not pay because they see it as a large expense. Especially for smaller companies if it was easy to copy and they could they would (and often do).
My point is getting that same money out of them instead for an open source solution (because the open source solution will require just as much income to maintain) is unlikely.
Blender is eeking by so maybe the tide is turning.
Maya is the default for animation pipelines, since it has the more robust animation tools.
Houdini is for FX and sims, and Houdini is STUNNING in its development speed at the moment. Each of their software updates has 100+ features a year, and these are complex overhauls or entire new toolkits. I don’t know anyone in 3D who isn’t salivating at what’s going on with SideFX and Houdini.
Such an underrated / understated feature.
Add another $10 million and take advantage of overseas rates and create a marketplace for support, bug fixes, plugins, etc.
It can be done though, maybe a foundation approach where high tier members get increased input into the product roadmap.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software provide such features.
PLM software exists since a long time but I agree that it might not serve user needs optimally. But this is more a market failure than a technical problem.
Most are the equivalent of JIRA, i.e. lots of features and bloat that sell well to managers. They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.
Something simpler and more standardized is needed in the physical engineering space to become part of standard practice, like git has for software.
This is true for most business software and very true for something like a PLM, and double super extra true for Autodesk PLM where it’s so unintuitive, clunky, “ Enterprisey” that no one wants to learn or use it without being required to.
Now, consider it like a really bad JIRA but at $75-150 per month. I’m probably overselling it still.
And the proprietary "Product Data/Lifecycle Management" tools are expensive, bloated and hard to use.
The industry standard version control here is Perforce. Perforce being Perforce, there even are 3rd party solution to de-duplicate users' workspaces in order to save gigabytes of disk space.
- Feature3, hole: diameter 3.0mm
+ Feature3, hole: diameter 3.1mm
- Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 400mm
+ Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 425mm
- control read/write access to files to prevent unintentional file changes due to rotated views, etc. The user would have to manually select which files are checked out/active. This might require a plugin to the CAD programs, so I may rethink this.
- Upon commit, the user adds comments, then all changed files are exported to the new interchange format
- text based diff is generated
- CAD with color highlights is generated
This is a pretty intensive operation, but it doesn't need to be instant. I think I would allow branches and make a workflow to automatically show conflicts based on diffs and CAD, then the user would manually resolve conflicts, declare a branch merged and select the files to go into main branch. After typing that, I am wondering if centralized control of read/write and one branch is the only way.
In the short term, I think an MVP could be scripted: - Before commit, user selects which files are to be kept and other files are rolled back to previous version and writes the commit message
- Updated files are exported to STL (there are many tools available to compare STL files visually)
- A tool generates combined/subtracted STL files for each updated file
- git commit
- git notes to cross-reference the combined/subtracted STL to the commit message
- Nice to have: built-in STL viewer
Github is supposed to have STL Diffs but it took me forever to find an example on github because everyone commits files as _v1, _v2 (highlighting my complaint that version control is not part of standard practice). Only to find out they removed this feature.
Grabcad has been great for me but I need to find an on-premises solution.
I have been working on STEP (ISO 10303) for 35 years. Every few years someone comes along to a meeting and declares that we need to start again and adopt their new model, they waste everyone's time for a bit then go away again.
PlanGrid was bought in 2018/2019 by Autodesk for 875 million, though, so good luck escaping the Autodesk family :D
oh, is that all
My work (woodworking) is about making pieces of furniture. Using software is only a part of the process. It is not the actual goal.
I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original price of the software.
Of course you do. So do I!
However, the bunch of developers wants you to fund them noodling around indefinitely, and sadly they're the ones that choose the business model.
If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...
You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD UI.
FreeCAD is based on OpenCASCADE. I've used both libraries and OpenCASCADE really left a bad taste in my mouth. It's not a project I'd want to contribute to due to the technology.
That's what $$$ upgrades are for. No need for a subscription if I'm happy without the new features and happy using it on an old OS. I'm happy to pay for new features I might actually use. I'm happy to pay for upgrades for a new OS. As an example though, I used to get by upgrading Adobe Photoshop at most about once every 4 years at a cost of about $200 or $50 a year. Now they extract out of me $480 ($120 a year) for features I don't actually use. In fact I'm pretty sure I use zero features past CS2 (2003) and like I said was fine paying them $200 every 4 years for the OS upgrades but now I just feel taken advantage off.
Unfortunately yes, I've tried the alternatives and PS is still the best by many measures so I'm stuck paying for nothing but permission to use the software.
1. It is a decision point so requires reselling at every new version.
2. Old Versions must now be maintained for n years.
3. Features and sometimes bugfixes) are now kept on hold to bundle to make a big bang version release.
4. Multiple devices now add additional decision point, should you buy and iPad pro version of the app and a mobile one. Value of these would vary for users.
With a subscription model: companies can reduce the maintenance window, have a 3 months release cycle, support multiple devices and have only one decision point for the user am I making enough to justify $ / month.
Having been through this cycle a few times at different companies, the bean counters always love OPEX until you move everything to OPEX causing that annual budget to explode then all of a sudden they want to "Reduce costs", so people start shifting things to CAPEX until that budget explodes then they want to "Reduce annual capital spend" so people start shifting thing back to opex.....
And so the cycle goes, over and over again
bean counters and MBA's live in this mythical land where $100,000 over 5 years or $20,000 a year is some how different
There are differences and they are far from mythical!
A big one: Liquidity. If you spend $100,000 today, you all of a sudden have a $100,000 less in your bank account. That may limit what you and your team can do this year - because budgets are finite. If you have the option to pay $20,000 each year over 5 years your liquidity goes down by that amount each year. Much easier to plan and usually less risky.
Another one: Flexiblity. If you don't need the product or service after year 3 any more, stop it. You paid $60,000 instead of $100,000. Less. Money. Spent. (And yes, it also goes into the other direction (pay more than $100,000 if you use it longer) but that's a trade off many businesses are willing to make. 5 years is a long time, things change.)
Last but not least: Opportunity costs. Paying $100,000 at once is expensive because it means you can't invest the money into something else that generates interest. If you pay $20,000 each year it means, that you still have $80,000 in the first year, $60,000 in the second and so on. Use this remaining money to invest it into something that creates interest for you (bank account, stocks, index fund, ...). That's another win! (And also the reason why big companies pay their bills as late as possible - it adds up for them!)
While it’s easy to blame the developers of a product for real or perceived flaws, even if operated entirely offline software products interact with their environment.
Hence, a bug you’re having might be due to an operating system update, another third-party application, or even a specific hardware configuration.
I’d want the software company in question to be motivated to investigate and - if possible - fix the issue nonetheless, even if the underlying cause of the issue isn’t their fault.
Also there is often no longer an option to stop paying and just continue using your version, even if you've been paying for the subscription for years. Or they only let you use an old version so you'll need to actually downgrade if you stop paying. This innovation in user hostility I first encountered with Jetbrains.
You pay a yearly fee to get the latest stuff within that year and you can use the current or any previous version forever if you stop paying.
There was a bit of mob forming with JetBrains first announced the subscription model and the current one developed by working with their customers.
This subscription model, combined with the largely open source codebase for their products means I'll probably be paying JetBrains for the rest of my life.
It's not a situation that can be solved by individual, I know. But a profession as a collective should group around open tools.
I had the idea to create a company that helps organizations create these niche open source governance structures. While I love the result (more open source), I have no business or non-profit skills, and it sounds like a hard boring job. I do recommend someone explore this space, who knows it might not be that difficult.
A lot of people will subscribe for $50/month for something they'll be using for the next 5 years but won't pay anywhere near $3000 for it.
Particularly for work, where smaller monthly purchases are a lot less hassle to make than big once off purchases. It can be the difference between chucking it on the work credit card and having to go through the purchasing people.
Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it. It was essentially game over by the mid 1990's and since then they have only further consolidated their position. BIM hookups and the very large amount of software that somehow interacts with Autocad or has been written in AutoLisp are the kind of lock-in that newly minted start-ups can only dream of.
Improving on Autocad is going to be very hard, it will take a long time and even then you will probably lose the game. Acquisition is probably your best bet, unseating a dominant player that doesn't make any major mistakes is super hard.
I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than forcing the opening up of all file formats and interoperability information. And lots of that is already open.
The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.
And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn.
As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.
And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.
Fusion 360 on the other hand is not a scratch-built product, but uses the same kernel as Autodesk Inventor, ShapeManager - which is based on ACIS, of which version 1.0 was written in 1985. That gives you an idea of how friggin hard it is to write a decent CAD kernel - all the commercial ones are decades old.
The only real free software CAD kernel is OpenCASCADE.
I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.
I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.
I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.
[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...
Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.
I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?
That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs.
Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.
Most people in the industry see it as the equivalent of the Microsoft tax: it's a license to do business.
Nobody cares about AutoCAD any longer. For whatever task you have at hand there are better alternatives. Only people stuck in a time loop use it.
That being said: The AEC has a deeply troubling problem – It's full of people living in yesterday. There is no innovation. Technical advances are ignored.
In the aviation business CAD was started as early as the 60s, with the auto business following soon. Architects still drafted buildings with a pencil in 2D until the early 2000s. There is just so much resistance burdening everything.
What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.
Here's John Walker's history of Autodesk:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience
The Autodesk File chronicles the history of Autodesk, Inc. and its principal product, AutoCAD, through contemporary documents edited and annotated by Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker. The book traces the company from the first glimmer of an idea in the minds of the founders, through start-up, initial public stock offering, and growth from a loose confederation of moonlighting individuals to a leader in the industry of computer aided design. The book is available in several different editions, suited for on- or off-line reading with various tools. Click on the titles of the section describing the edition you prefer to view it or download to your computer.
Buildings are getting worse and worse, perhaps people should be creative again, throw their computers away and literally go back to the drawing board instead of pushing buttons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-conference-...
>Blender Conference: Ton talks about Autodesk, ceiling crashes
>While Ton was talking about Autodesk during the Blender Conference, part of the ceiling of the Balie came crashing down, hitting him on the head. So remember folks: Autodesk is watching! ;-)
>Here's a picture of Ton after the event:
https://media.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/T...
But if I had to pick one, it's AutoDesk's systematic attempt to build a closed ecosystem à la FaceBook / Apple.
They do it, among other things, via tight control of the data file format, and an ever-changing unpublished specification for those.
There was a time when there was decent exporters in AutoDesk products, so you could move the data out to other (better) tools.
That era is long gone, they have been removing exporter modules to all but their own formats.
Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare.
One thing that I find really frustrating about this is the bitrot that ensues. Better not hope to load work you did 10-15 years ago to get something useful out of it. That use case is not part of the AutoDesk plan.
At least you can do it on a non-Autodesk affiliated software stack that more-or-less works https://www.opendesign.com/
Open source is really great for innovation. I don't see much innovation or excitement in reverse engineering a stone-age proprietary black-box format.
It would be much better if those efforts were spent in an open source data interchange format.
There are several open source alternative formats, but I never warmed up to them. They look very overarchitectured, like XML. But maybe I'll have to do some IFC converters later.
With all the constraints, dynamic blocks, mesh and solid formats it's very diverse, and Acad's new constraints system is extremely baroque and undocumented. A big C++ mess. Dynblocks and meshes also.
ACIS is extremely nice though. I recently reverse engineered their new ShapeManager format, which is just binary ACIS (SAB) plus history (ACSH).
Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Blender is frustrating as heck to use in comparison.
Also it is 4-up by default and designed around that paradigm. I don't understand how people stand using modeling programs that only have 1 viewport, but they are common enough that I presume everyone gets by.
Somewhat unrelated, but Rhino's SDK is really solid and gives a ton of access to the software. It's amazing some of the things that can be done with it, and Rhino as a whole, but at the same time it's producing construction documents that's where the rubber meets the road as far as Architecture is concerned.
Source: Former architecture student and Rhino plugin developer
For automotive and even ship design a lot of studios are using it (even not openly, but in a "secret" manner).
In AEC many students nowadays use it during university. Some offices use it as well, and if only for Grasshopper. GH is a really great piece of software and you can e.g. even use it with Archicad nowadays.
All the big studios might be using Autodesk products in the front, but I know of some who have a senior engineer who has a secret PC in some attic with Rhino installed. If you need more complex tasks to be done the engineer goes to "smoke a cig". ;)
Yes, there is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, but every time I try to use them, I give up in the end and whip up something in Fusion360.
Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran.
Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains.
In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in collaboration with IBM tend to make use of xlc.
No JIT compiler, or GC implementations, for the pure open source managed runtimes tend to be on the same ball park of the work going on Java, .NET and JavaScript, all sponsored by deep pockets corporations.
No CUDA based open source clone beats NVidia and PGI compilers targeting NVidia hardware.
What most open source compilers have is good enough performance so that a large part of the dev population, that isn't willing to pay for tooling, doesn't care anyway.
As for GC implementations: did you consider ZGC in that statement? It's GPL 2.
Take their money out of the equation and the quality would be as the "state of the art GC" that CPython and MRI Ruby enjoy.
OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.
Assuming you don't rely on compiler-specific features.
That is meaningless if they don't support the same language features, which is why other than Google's inhouse Android Linux fork, the Linux kernel is hardly compilable with anything else other than GCC C dialect.
GNU/GCC might have enabled and unleashed a movement, but thanks to the mass adoption of non-copyleft licenses, its time has come to pass, and in a couple of generations we will be back to shareware and public domain software packages.
You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels. You won't even know what the common edge-cases are until you start getting user reports of things failing, so you'll need to be doing this development with a large community of users.
There is no closed-form formula to tell how long a NURBS curve is. Offsets of NURBS curves are not NURBS curves. Likewise, intersecting NURBS surfaces produces intersection curves that are not possible to represent as NURBS curves.
So something as simple as a fillet is impossible to exactly produce in like 3 ways. Booleans then add the joy of topology to the mix. It's all heuristics and approximations and dirty hacks.
I tried to use FreeCAD but gave up. It is too limited even for simple designs. I would rather use paper and ruler since you can't easely change stuff anyway.
Unfortunately since I have only used FreeCAD and no other CAD tool I may not know what you are talking about but it is possible to create a spreadsheet inside FreeCAD and give each cell an alias which makes the spreadsheet basically act like a hashmap/dictionary. Every input field in Freecad can be filled based upon a formula. You can just <SpreadsheetName>.<variableName> as the formula and then changing the value of the spreadsheet cell will change the part.
>No assembly either or sheet bending tool.
There are addons for that and I agree that having a dedicated addon for everything is bad because now you need to know whether an addon exists for your usecase and how to find it. Someone who fires up FreeCAD for the first time is going to get disappointed.
Honestly, my biggest problem with FreeCAD is that it crashes and freezes on basic operations like chamfers and fillets. When an operation takes 20 seconds the entire application just stops responding. If the fillet cannot be created there is basically a 25% chance that it will crash. If your fillet radius is too large it will simply show nothing so now you have to play around via binary search to find the maximum value for the fillet.
The other problem is that curved surfaces are hard to do in FreeCAD in general. Of course there is an addon for that which makes it easier but I already have a backlog of addons to try out...
Honestly my biggest problem with FreeCAD might be that I have already learned Solid Edge and Solid Works in school and at work.
Learning to use CAD software is a nightmare and I rather not do it again.
Since I only do wood work out of work it is just simpler to draw by hand than trying to learn FreeCAD properly to maybe learn that it can't do what I want anyway.
The "auto dimension tool" (I do not know the real name) is a magic ruler that let you change dimensions and inter object relations by just clicking stuff. It introduces constrains too. I understand why it would be a nightmare to program.
Yes Fusion 360 is very easy to use but it is because it’s basically sketchup with basic CAM, simulation and parametric modeling baked in.
The softwares (autocad, revit, maya, etc., many others) itself is complex, require domain know-how to build competing product. I don't see how anyone can compete with them anymore.
They have the industry by the balls, and they know it. Competing against Autodesk is like competing against Google in search.
Gatekeeper demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o
Ryan Singer's talk "Christopher Alexander: A Primer"
Compared to other design fields where technical tools are everything for actually making the thing, there's a lot more excitement and experimentation in software progression in those industries, many of which are _tiny_ compared to the behemoth that is global building/construction industry. That said, Arch software aren't bad, they're serviceable but extremely unexciting. Adobes SaaS is pretty shit but they occasionally introduce "thank god" features that makes tasks 10 years ago 10X easier, can't really say the same for Revit and associated arch software with exception of ArchViz software since that just cannibalizes from rendering industry.
Autodesk sold Flint/Flame/Inferno, which are high end compositor systems (Think photoshop but for movies) They were expensive bis of kit.
Foundry's nuke is a program that runs on normal workstations and doesn't require any special hardware to run (it also means that it can't run in real time like the Flames could)
What was the secret to Nuke's success? It was cheaper than flame, it was equally as capable, and apple killed Shake. We worked closely with the artists to put in features that wanted. Offered discounts for volume (standard) offered brilliant support[1], and was generally far more responsive than autodesk (who basically only shipped a patch if you were ILM)
Foundry is the incumbent now, and is being eaten by fusion (ironically, considering we pretty much drove them out of buisness)
[1] including fixing a script that made a "magic wand" for a sexy version of harry potter.
It might have changed, but when I was there the support was top notch.
There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes
Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.
But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep changing it slightly every year, so a third party implementation would always be slightly behind.
This type of moat is exactly the type of moat every business dreams of and tries to create, and the only reason it’s bad when Autodesk does it is because they are so big it actually hurts competition on a large scale.
I can’t see a good “open” replacement for DWGs (DXF, IFC, ...) on the horizon, sadly.
Not sure I understand how JSON fits into the discussion tbh. Our users don’t decide which format they receive drawings in. They need to handle all the major formats. Our users can’t ask their customer “can you send me a dxf/step/ifc/... instead of the dwg you sent me?”, sadly it’s just not possible.
LibreDWG is also GPL I believe with no option for commercial?
Afaik only LibreDWG matches Acad and ODA/Theiga, the rest does only DXF, no DWG write and a minimal numbers of objects.
LibreDWG only offers GPL, but many CAD packages thrive with the GPL: Qcad, FreeCad, SolveSpace, Blender.
We are developing a proprietary bespoke program, it’s not possible to use GPL style licenses, nor will the niche filfilled by it ever be filled by an OSS program.
I’ve switched some users at my work away from Autocad for 2D stuff to DraftSight and have had no problems opening dwg.
An annual DraftSight license is $180 or something similarly trifling.
If DraftSight opens the latest dwgs correctly I’d expect it to contain Autodesks dwg dlls.
This is the type of setting where open source simply cannot subsist: the professional users are usually not programmers, the number of people using the features is limited (but for them, they are essential) and the expertise to develop them is very specialized. Furthermore, clients rarely need customized development done. Therefore, no developer community can form around an open-source competitor, comprised of either enthusiasts or professional providers of open source solutions. Photoshop vs. Gimp is a good example of all these pathologies.
I think the solution to such problems would be marrying the open source philosophy with the commercial solution that allows developers to charge for licensing. We give up the „free to use” liberty for a limited time, allowing the "open" source developer to charge for the software like a commercial software vendor. Source is provided, and all contributors can operate on similar terms, charging for their patch for a limited time.
After 3-5 years, the license reverts to a GPL compatible, that allows anyone the full four liberties, or, at their discretion, fork a commercial-open-source competitor for another 5 years period.
This way, a flagship commercial product could be developed by a company that attracts the most users and has the best features, and that company has a number of years to recoup it's investment by making it's userbase pay for those features in licensing fees. Once it's exclusivity period ends, in order to maintain it's commercial dominance the company must innovate and improve the product, otherwise people would use an older version for free, or a competitor can emerge that can disrupt its rent seeking by forking the old version as a new „commercial open source” project with it's own 5 year exclusivity period.
That won't solve the problem, because this is not a software problem. It's an economic problem.
To maximise profit you need to dominate a market by 1) locking out competitors 2) forcing customers to give you money 3) spending as little as possible on continued development.
This happens because that's how capitalism works. It's an inevitable consequence. Effectively it becomes a form of rent-seeking, where corporations charge their "tenants" money for access to a resource. And as long as the product sort of works some of the time corporations can claim customers are getting something of value.
But really these corporations are like bad landlords, charging users a huge monthly rent and never fixing the leaky roof.
The answer would be more along the lines of a user's association - effectively a "union" for users which was prepared to fight aggressive and expensive class actions to challenge ridiculous licensing terms and make corporations accountable for consequential damage and lost time caused by bugs.
This may sound extreme, but when there's no competition - because competing products have been bought and shut down or left to rot - it's a de facto antitrust situation. Governments are unlikely to enforce this, so class actions to challenge unreasonable contract terms and assert that in fact there are obligations towards users may be the only way to fix this.
So there is something particular with, say, operating systems, webservers or browsers that allow open source alternatives to thrive, while the same is not for tools aimed at professions outside the software/programmer/IT realm.
Governmental solutions are unlikely to help.
What I mean by my proposal above is not to reinvent patents, but to make copyright work for the benefit of society. A limited form of copyright, adapted to the digital age, with a much shorter duration and source code available.
The operation of free markets is Intro to Econ material. You should pursue a remedial course that you may understand this before proposing remedies, because while some of your proposed remedies hit near the mark, I think this is by accident.
The most effective remedy is competition, achieved once you can dismantle the barriers to entry. You mention antitrust in passing, which is the key policy-based approach, and regulatory provisions against trusts are mentioned in passing in the article — but mostly you focus on a "union" of customers, and I have grave doubts to its efficacy in practice. There is a massive coordination problem here, thousands of firms and their legal departments who must agree to risk substantial consequences individually in order (denying themselves key software) to achieve the collective goal.
This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government interventions to "fix" this concentration of power, delivering it into the hands of even-more-powerful politicians.
Architects can use Blender. It has better BIM support than all the commercial offerings, better rendering, is free, stable, cross-platform, etc. Not brilliant on drawing output, but that is under active development and is already OK. You can also export to FreeCAD and then do drawings from there.
Abstract: "There is a digital revolution taking place and biotechnology companies are slow to adapt. Many pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and industrial bio-production companies believe that software must be developed and maintained in-house and that data are more secure on internal servers than on the cloud. In fact, most companies in this space continue to employ large IT and software teams and acquire computational infrastructure in the form of in-house servers. This is due to a fear of the cloud not sufficiently protecting in-house resources and the belief that their software is valuable IP. Over the next decade, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, with agile software teams, will quickly become a compelling competitive advantage. Biotechnology companies that do not adopt the new regime may lose on key business metrics such as return on invested capital, revenue, profitability, and eventually market share."
Architecture is a protected profession in the EU and you’ll be surprised just how many architects from construction firms do nothing more than to trace plans they got from interior design and other architecture firms in a PDF format in autocad.
There are a few gems on the autodesk forums where people asking for line trace capability then getting replies that basically saying well if it did that well be out of a job.
Also, trying to communicate with them with anything outside of a PDF is damn near impossible. The very idea of them sending a 3D file to their customers scares them shitless.
And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives.
The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form a threat to European citizens is because for some reasons we have zero local alternatives.
Best thing there is if you want a head trip back to the 70's
There is no obvious good economic or technological solution to this, short of heavily regulating software vendors so they are responsive to customer needs or stripping vendors of their copyrights and open sourcing everything. Neither choice is politically possible.
Archicad is Hungarian, Allplan is German, Tekla originates from Finnland.
(Also please note: the offices which signed the open letter to Autodesk are mostly UK-based, so strictly speaking are not members of the EU ;))
https://www.allplan.com/us_en/
Not an architect myself, but heard good things.
I never saw website, where homepage is pdf.
You presume architecture firms would have any sort of capability to operate in software development. You might as well say they should create their own ink and papers. Software engineering companies are savvy in software.
Other companies aren't, and it is not expected that they would have any competence beyond their core offering.
Do you have any idea of the AEC industry? Does not seem so.
Funny enough, those big offices signing the open letter are so big they actually have in-house devs. But this is only feasible for the top 0.1% of offices.
Architecture is badly paid and most offices are in the size range of 15–30 people working there. Also CAD programs belong to the most complex software imaginable with really big code bases grown over many years. It's not like you "just write a new one and make it FOSS". You HAVE to rely on others. Also most architects (and even engineers for that matter) are scared by code. They want someone to call and yell at, not looking for workarounds or making a bugfix.
sob's will bend you over a barrel without hesitation.
Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse experience to start with you'll have to spend a few years just building the initial team unless you find a really good headhunter.
In CAD you have to combine at least two non-trivial[0] discipline, computer graphics and and computational geometry. And they are completely unlike 'normal' software fields where you can just plug in various third party components and call it a day. You have to write your stuff to a great extent. And you have to design it - there are not that many public examples of how to put such a thing together.
It's not magic, it's not intrinsically very deep, but it's complex in the sense that the systems that have to interact are far and wide. It needs a lot of work.
And there are lots of things that are not in books, you just have to understand how they go together and which ways to do things are better than others.
[0] Non-trivial as in "I'll just figure it out" vs. "I'll have to pour through a few decades of academia and industry research and technical publications plus scour obscure websites" to get a clue on what the state of the art is and where it could go on from here
I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked up Maya.
Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid, which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.
Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.
Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade animation business.
A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it was ahead of its time 20 years ago.
On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much. This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and "just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing consistent.
(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the company for decades.)
The domain knowledge + software engineer skills + computer graphics skills needed are extremely rare.
"It is in this context that a number of practices, who represent a revenue stream for Autodesk of over $22m over the last 5 years"
A $22m over 5 years is not a large deal for the large CAD companies such as Dassault, PTC, Siemens, Nemetschek.
Revit as a software package started as Reflex and then acquired by PTC, PTC decided they couldn't make enough money off it, and basically let former employees leave and start Charles River Software with the Reflex code base. The amount of work required to create Revit, It would not be good return on investment for any company other than Autodesk to sell it. The only reason it makes sense for Autodesk is it keeps the AutoCAD DWG monopoly going.
There is nothing short or easy about writing Revit/BIM software and it couldn't be done with the 5 million dollars that these firms had been spending on ADSK products.
I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is
As you said, bona fide archiving happens on archive.org
It's generally not thought to be illegal, see for example: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
$4.4 million/year / 25 companies = $176,000 / year / company
So, these companies are complaining about spending $176k/year on the most critical software they use to run their business? I'd wager they spend more on company parties than they do on Revit. I'd also wager what they're REALLY pissed about is being forced to move to SaaS and the crackdown by Autodesk on pirating their software. Autodesk is arguably the most pirated business software of all time. They estimate something like 70%+ of their installs are pirated.
If Revit is really as terrible as they say it is, Autodesk should write an open letter agreeing with them and quadrupling the price to improve it. These firms make hundreds of millions of dollars every year and they're complaining about < $200k for business critical software. It's absurd.