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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#91

Post by darkwater »

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"…

Some users implement version control using the NTFS/Windows file history feature on shared drives where the projects are saved.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#92

Post by SenHeng »

heimatau wrote: post #56
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"…

As an emerging EE, I fully agree. I honestly believe it could be done with solid quality. Early today I saw this very old video of Elon at SpaceX with their design software [1]. It's amazing to me that this video was six years ago. Revit is the prized gem. Whomever creates it, focus on Revit and focus on the pain-points. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY

I saw that Leap Motion [0] video almost 10 years ago and have wanted to have one ever since. Sadly, it seems they didn't sell enough to sustain theirselves and have mostly concluded their incredible journey [1]. I had a few friends that worked in 3D modelling them and they really wanted to try it out for sculpting.

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/

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#93

Post by dirtyid »

Most buildings today can still be effective designed and constructed from pen+paper drafting technology that adhere pre computer-revolution standards. They're not F35s. My understanding from architects/professors 20 years ago is the education pipelines has dramatically shifted away from practical training (i.e just solid drafting skills) while remaining some of the longer professional/masters programs. Most graduate simply aren't very technical in the first place and nature of work allows you to get away with it. Trades + associated industries involved in actual building aren't much better. Many in the industry, most are not what you consider "developer" types eager to adopt new technical features and workflows. There's just too much conservative regulations and stubborn old hands at the top of the industry.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#94

Post by amelius »

wappa wrote: post #79
clusterfish wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if the software has an almost identical UI?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#95

Post by amelius »

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"…

The same holds for EDA (electronics design automation).

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#96

Post by imtringued »

rightbyte wrote: post #66
donquichotte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess there is a silly amount of work to make a usefull CAD program. FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge. No assembly either or sheet bending tool. 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…

>FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge.

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 . 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...

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#97

Post by omnimus »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #58
cosmotic wrote: post #11

You could swap Adobe in for Autodesk and almost the entire letter holds true. High cost, few improvements, few alternatives. There's a little more competition these days with Adobe at least.

I agree, Adobe lost me to their competition. Affinity Designer, Publisher and Photo replaced the Adobe Suite for me and while I miss some functionality, I don't miss the monthly payments. Maybe if I was a fulltime designer I would not have a problem with Adobe.

I dont know full time designer who doesnt have problem with adobe. They take monthly fee and updates to software are so minor especially on classic tools like indesign and photoshop. They dont tackle the important hard problems like performance and stability instead they add some new gimmicky features 5% of users ever use and make new software that again anyone rarely uses (except XD i guess). Adobe classic software has been on life support before the subscriptions even started. Nobody was upgrading CS3 even ran much faster than CS5 and had most of the features. Its probably the reason why they made the subscriptions.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#98

Post by tannhaeuser »

Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software, but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and expensive, a key step is settling on a standard format for data exchange. When and during the time Google owned SketchUp, they made Collada/.dae export part of the community product, and eg Blender has really great support for Collada import (worked out of the box for a non-trivial project of mine - thx Blender and SketchUp/Google!). Of course, meanwhile SketchUp has been discontinued as a free desktop product (being offered only as online hobby software for 3D printing models, like Tinkercad, instead), and Autodesk has introduced FBX as oh-so-much better alternative. I'm just saying that if you want competition and innovation, as a customer you must demand open standards and use workflows based on open file formats to get anywhere.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#99

Post by piva00 »

amelius wrote: post #94
wappa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if the software has an almost identical UI?

It doesn't matter if you can't simply import Revit projects into it and work as usual. That is how Excel got its foothold into the spreadsheet market dominated by Lotus 123 at the time, you need to support the current de facto file standard for that industry/task.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#100

Post by magicalhippo »

summitsummit wrote: post #86
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…

> 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. Obviously that would be a better deal for you, that's why it's not an option.

Indeed. One of our main competitors when I started 6 years ago is no longer one, mainly because they kept doing the traditional "buy the new version" routine, while my boss had transitioned to subscription-based contracts.

They spent a large amount of effort rewriting their main product, but struggled to sell it afterwards. Why would you buy the new version with inevitably more bugs for lots of $$$, when the old version works just fine? Hit them really hard.

I think it benefits our customers though, as we don't have as much pressure to focus on flash and bling and can spend time doing things right and fixing old cruft, making our product more solid. Finance departments also seem to love the lower, fixed recurring cost rather than a huge bill every other year or so.

Another thing that's been good is that our price has a fixed component and a component that scales with use. Since our customers can charge their customers for the work done with our program, that means our price can be competitive both for companies with low activity and high activity.

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