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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#131

Post by slim »

pyb wrote: post #33
geokon wrote: post #25

Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal? I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is

Not everybody likes to hear it, but archive.is is an illegal operation. In some countries, posting archive.is links may even be illegal as well (it might be interpreted by a court as "Aiding and Abetting Criminal Copyright Infringement")

is it still illegal if it's the exact same page including ads (revenues go to the source) ?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#132

Post by babayega2 »

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…

Crazy enough, in my country in Africa, we aren't trained to use Revit or AutoCad but Archicad primarly.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#133

Post by Hokusai »

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"…

> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity

If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning.

The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers, the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#134

Post by johnwalkr »

klft wrote: post #109
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, first hand experience here, Autodesk’s PLM is IMO quite awful.

I do not want to question that, I was rather questioning the statement that "you'd be hailed as a revolutionary genius." if you introduce version control or package management. PLM software exists since a long time but I agree that it might not serve user needs optimally. But this is more a market failure than a technical problem.

I only know of one system (grabcad) that just offers simple version control for CAD.

Most are the equivalent of JIRA, i.e. lots of features and bloat that sell well to managers. They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.

Something simpler and more standardized is needed in the physical engineering space to become part of standard practice, like git has for software.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#135

Post by simonh »

Narkov wrote: post #121
ilaksh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

And that’s £30m that benefits your competitors just as much as it benefits you. Hard to justify the ROI on that.

It can be done though, maybe a foundation approach where high tier members get increased input into the product roadmap.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#136

Post by rjsw »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #98

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…

There is a standard format for data exchange [1], what became BIM didn't have to be different to it but at least they kept the geometry definitions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#137

Post by rjsw »

johnwalkr wrote: post #117
amelius wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mechanical CAD doesn't have to use binary files.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#138

Post by prox »

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.?

I only know 2 parallels, one is Blender, which is really gaining traction. Lots of huge sponsorships, increasing adoption. Thats the open source road.

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.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#139

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

krautsourced wrote: post #101
thdrdt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Revit but people are looking to switch to Blender from 3dsMax. The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility. But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.

People are always talking about switching to Blender (me included) - but they don't. Because as sad as it is, once you start to actually work with it in serious projects, you noticed all the things that hobbyists who hail Blender as the second coming never care about. I wanted to give Blender another got at replacing Cinema 4D for us (since their new licensing). I got used to the UI, though it's not nearlly as intuit…

Which license change? Last year? Blender technical and financial situation has changed very much since then.

Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.

Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.

Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#140

Post by stadt »

An interesting counterpoint comes from Autodesk Life Sciences which outlines the need for Bio/Nano software development: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-018-2009-5

Abstract: "There is a digital revolution taking place and biotechnology companies are slow to adapt. Many pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and industrial bio-production companies believe that software must be developed and maintained in-house and that data are more secure on internal servers than on the cloud. In fact, most companies in this space continue to employ large IT and software teams and acquire computational infrastructure in the form of in-house servers. This is due to a fear of the cloud not sufficiently protecting in-house resources and the belief that their software is valuable IP. Over the next decade, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, with agile software teams, will quickly become a compelling competitive advantage. Biotechnology companies that do not adopt the new regime may lose on key business metrics such as return on invested capital, revenue, profitability, and eventually market share."

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