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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#71

Post by bfuclusion »

tsimionescu wrote: post #7
bfuclusion wrote: post #3

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

If you think it will take less time and money for a firm of architects to build an equivalent to the most powerful architecture CAD system in the world, even for their specific use case, and that they wouldn't run afoul of Autodesk patents when doing so, then you have probably not played around with CAD software to much.

Let me clarify. I absolutely, completely, think doing this would be painful and take years. But if it's line of business critical and someone has you by the throat, then you have to make the long term investments to survive. Even better, when you're done nobody can take it away from you. I just think by the time you get to the EU lobbying, regulator rulings, Autodesk dragging their feet, the appeals process, the fines that Autodesk will just build into the cost of the next version, etc, in the end it would be shorter and easier to write the software. Bonus if you make it open source so nobody has to go through this garbage again.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#72

Post by pjmlp »

asiachick wrote: post #53
numpad0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to establish a steady income for a stable and feature complete tool. They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy, or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway, as reasons why subscriptions cost the price they charge.

> They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway 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…

The problem, from shareholders point of view, is that upgrades don't allow for continuous growth and with time, as the potential user base is already covered, it makes very hard to keep that revenue coming in.

So unless you want to see your beloved products die at version X, or them ramping down the teams for maintenance mode, subscriptions are the only way to get them going.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#73

Post by dogma1138 »

numpad0 wrote: post #39
dogma1138 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion 360 isn’t a Solidworks competitor, not even close that would be Autodesk Inventor. 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.

I believe Fusion 360 is full AutoCAD engine with locked down GUI?

Fusion 360 was spun off inventor not Autocad, it also shares the same core with inventor - Autodesk ShapeManager.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#74

Post by yholio »

You see this pattern for all professional tools, which have a very narrow expert audience. After a period of open competition, that for most fields ended in the 80s and 90s, a closed source competitor emerges which becomes the industry standard. Massive moats, file formats, plugin investment, teaching of the tools in schools etc. prevent real competition, and the company becomes a fantastic cash cow. In the last decade most transitioned to the software as a service model, to better extract the rent they think they are "due" from the professional community.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#75

Post by dogma1138 »

muska3 wrote: post #18
dogma1138 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion 360 isn’t a Solidworks competitor, not even close that would be Autodesk Inventor. 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.

It's actually nothing like sketchup, it's a full fledged parametric modeler, which sketchup never was.

Now yes it began its life as a freeform and direct edit modeling, which it’s still it’s main focus.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#76

Post by jacquesm »

thdrdt wrote: post #61
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CAD software is hard . That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement. 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 pac…

Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad. 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.

Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#77

Post by pjmlp »

donquichotte wrote: post #23
muska3 wrote: post #9

The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.

It's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care about mechanical CAD is just too small f…

Except that they are not.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#78

Post by clusterfish »

nomercy400 wrote: post #67
asiachick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway 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…

Why not keep using CS2 (or up to CS5), if you are not using newer features?

Not the op but whenever I have similar gripes it's because the old version is no longer maintained and eventually breaks after an OS upgrade.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#79

Post by wappa »

clusterfish wrote: post #69
imgabe wrote: post #5

There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. 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"…

It seems to me that breaking into this industry, that is, defeating network effects that work to Autodesk's favor, would actually be harder than building the superior product itself. 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.?

No way - you would have to teach all your employees - new software, and existing know-how templates will be all gone. Plus compatibility issues with your sub contractors would be nightmare.

Productivity lost by adopting new tools would render firm non-competitive in this thin margin business, will likely make your P/L red.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#80

Post by jalk »

imgabe wrote: post #5

There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. 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"…

Was looking into creating some tooling for the construction industry perhaps 15 years ago as drawings were send over emails with all the version nightmares that creates. Some Danish government agency had a ‘Digital Construction’ project going on so I initially thought I was too late. After a couple of years all they had amounted to was creating a ton of convoluted documents defining common CAD drawing layers. I’ve since moved on but I would not be surprised if drawings are still send by email between architects/engineers/contractors. Perhaps that agency has created a 50 page spec for tracking versions in the file name ;-)
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