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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#121

Post by Narkov »

ilaksh wrote: post #112
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"…

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.

You then (maybe) have a product...but no ecosystem. You can't just convince an entire industry to switch tomorrow and you've just sunk $30m+ into a "maybe".

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#122

Post by tyingq »

poseva wrote: post #50

As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. 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 liste…

"where software goes to die a slowly painful death"

Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#123

Post by dorkwood »

fireattack wrote: post #107
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Interesting that the criticism is levelled at Autodesk 'the company' rather than that it admits what people don't want to say: Autocad is pretty good, and it will take a large and well funded entity to take it on. Using anti-trust tools may be the right tool here but the industry as a whole was quick to adapt to Autocad long before it became a dominant player. Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of devel…

>Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.

I think they're saying if you put together the hours spent by all developers who have ever worked on Autocad, it would add up to hundreds of years of work.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#124

Post by peterbozso »

Keyframe wrote: post #62
sfvisser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US. 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…

Isn't ArchiCAD european?

It is, it's Hungarian.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#125

Post by bleepblorp »

sfvisser wrote: post #20
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #6

I'm surprised nobody in the Eurozone has raised similar issues about Adobe.

Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US. 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…

The need for friction-free interoperability combined with the technical challenges of competing vendors implementing fully interoperable software means most domain-specific software markets are an economic natural monopoly where only one product can dominate.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#126

Post by dTal »

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.

"Not constraint based" = not CAD software.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#127

Post by iagovar »

ur-whale wrote: post #83
iagovar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a common theme. Dassault owns CATIA and Solidworks tough, and they've been used a lot in Europe.

Ever tried to use CATIA? Best thing there is if you want a head trip back to the 70's

Probably, but Solidworks is quite well regarded.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#128

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #95
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).

[deleted]

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#129

Post by burntoutfire »

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…

CAD is both math heavy and UI heavy. Getting a good UI right is very hard for an open source project.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#130

Post by johnwalkr »

SenHeng wrote: post #92
heimatau wrote: post #56

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

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 fo…

I remember being really annoyed at the reaction to that video. Here's 2 headlines from the first page of hits: "Elon Musk Waves His Hand and Designs Rocket Parts Out of Thin Air" and "Elon Musk to build rocket ship parts with hand movements through the air, and 3D printing".

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.

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