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.