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Autodesk criticised by architects

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111–120 of 387 posts

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#111
post #74

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 deca…

You mean something a bit like - what's the word? - a patent?

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#112
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"…

Spend $20 million paying Blender and FreeCAD/CalculiX developers to build an open-source system.

Add another $10 million and take advantage of overseas rates and create a marketplace for support, bug fixes, plugins, etc.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#113
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics. I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?

I haven't used 3ds Max much. My impression is that it is more heavily used in games and maybe TV/commercial work. I have over a decade of experience with Maya, which was purchased by Autodesk in 2005 and looks to have been used on every Best VFX Oscar winner since 1997. Machine capacity only relates to the amount of data you're working with (workstations can have between 16-128GB of RAM and may have a gaming GPU or a…

Oh man, you're giving me flashback to days spent resetting max's preferences over and over trying to fix a bug. Like, how does the config folder keep getting corrupted? Why? It makes no sense.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#114
post #94
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?

Trust me - you never want to work on a job where the new owner wants Issue For Construction in Bently Microstation and you have 10, 000 Autocad files from 30% initial engineering. It's not fun.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#115
post #61

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 and Fusion on the geometry editing level are completely different beasts. Blender uses and edits meshes. Fusion360 and other CAD software primarily work on boundary representations which effectively represents a volume as a set of equations for surfaces and topological graph data. It allows for some neat operations but also makes it extremely difficult to handle correctly and a lot of the work in handling these operations is covering edge cases.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone who was working in the physical engineering world when that video came out ... I am not convinced that design software specifically actually empowers engineers to be any faster at designing new and novel engineering (over pen and paper -- with isometric style drawings, etc.). Both software and paper design require a huge amount of training upfront and a huge amount of effort per project. Anything that is s…

and next year, chinese companies have that cheap Autodesk-compatible-software out there (like the online-office featured recently on HN) and everyone jumps there, because it's sooo cheeeeap. It seems like communist-painted authoritarism finally wins.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#117
post #95
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).

EDA is at least simple text formats that work well with git, etc. I've seen lots of good version control of EDA using standard tools. I don't think I've ever seen good version control of mechanical CAD. The files are large, binary, not really diff'able, and almost every file is touched in every session.

And the proprietary "Product Data/Lifecycle Management" tools are expensive, bloated and hard to use.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#118
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#119
post #90

I don’t really understand SaaS for such mature products. 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…

> 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 busines…

> If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...

You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD UI.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#120
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…

The problem with open source is that developers mostly want to scratch their own itch. Understanding someone else's problem requires communication, which is something most developers prefer to avoid, so it seems.
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