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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#171

Post by yholio »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #111
yholio wrote: 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. Eff…

Lock-in is not inherent to capitalism, see for example how open platforms like Linux competed successfully with closed platforms like Windows, with all their resources.

So there is something particular with, say, operating systems, webservers or browsers that allow open source alternatives to thrive, while the same is not for tools aimed at professions outside the software/programmer/IT realm.

Governmental solutions are unlikely to help.

What I mean by my proposal above is not to reinvent patents, but to make copyright work for the benefit of society. A limited form of copyright, adapted to the digital age, with a much shorter duration and source code available.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#172

Post by mihaaly »

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…

Sounds like economists run the company not engineers - Boeing comes to mind by some reason - where in place of competing with real inventions the money making has sole preference so killing of competition early using big piles of money is a perfectly decent and honorable way to go.

Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#173

Post by rathel »

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.

If we're talking about IC EDA - then the OpenAccess library format (anything but, more like InteroperableAccess at best) is binary.

The industry standard version control here is Perforce. Perforce being Perforce, there even are 3rd party solution to de-duplicate users' workspaces in order to save gigabytes of disk space.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#174

Post by alkonaut »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #156
alkonaut wrote: post #150

If people didn’t use Autodesk’s software I wouldn’t have to pay a surreal amount of money to use their binary API so my cad program can write DWG. But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep c…

What CAD program is this? I’ve switched some users at my work away from Autocad for 2D stuff to DraftSight and have had no problems opening dwg. An annual DraftSight license is $180 or something similarly trifling.

A “narrow” cad+fem package for building components. It’s not a general cad program even though it can be used as such.

If DraftSight opens the latest dwgs correctly I’d expect it to contain Autodesks dwg dlls.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#175

Post by mcnaKa »

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…

But what value does it bring, especially for architects (the topic of this discussion)?

Buildings are getting worse and worse, perhaps people should be creative again, throw their computers away and literally go back to the drawing board instead of pushing buttons.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#176

Post by imgabe »

Hokusai wrote: post #133
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,…

I know, and if I were in the same boat, I would probably do the same thing.

The thing is a piece of software that could replace and update Revit is not going to be built by a lone developer. I know people have built some pretty amazing stuff, but for something to operate with that amount of polish and reliability it's going to take a pretty big team and some experienced people to lead them which means some hefty VC investment. While you or I might be easily bought off a group of VC firms are not going to let it go so cheaply.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#177

Post by imgabe »

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.?

The network effects are strong and it is a big hurdle.

The problem is the software isn't just used by one team at one company. Architects hire subconsultants- MEP engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, Landscape designers, Lighting designers, many others. They all need to share files so whatever you make has to be compatible with whatever everyone else is using (which is probably Revit).

There are some competitors like ArchiCAD, which some architects love and swear by, but it is a pain in the ass for their subconsultants to work with them, because the ArchiCAD file has to be converted to a Revit file and this doesn't usually work quite right and of course Autodesk has no incentive to make this easier.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#178

Post by KaiserPro »

I used to work for The foundry (now foundry.com) Who i believe are the last people to "beat" autodesk at their own game(well discreet).

Autodesk sold Flint/Flame/Inferno, which are high end compositor systems (Think photoshop but for movies) They were expensive bis of kit.

Foundry's nuke is a program that runs on normal workstations and doesn't require any special hardware to run (it also means that it can't run in real time like the Flames could)

What was the secret to Nuke's success? It was cheaper than flame, it was equally as capable, and apple killed Shake. We worked closely with the artists to put in features that wanted. Offered discounts for volume (standard) offered brilliant support[1], and was generally far more responsive than autodesk (who basically only shipped a patch if you were ILM)

Foundry is the incumbent now, and is being eaten by fusion (ironically, considering we pretty much drove them out of buisness)

[1] including fixing a script that made a "magic wand" for a sexy version of harry potter.

It might have changed, but when I was there the support was top notch.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#179

Post by jffhn »

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"…

>how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries.

Every time I think of how great the tools for building software (IDEs, etc.) are, that’s what I think next. What could help is having more devs with knowledge and interests in other domains, and not only focused on software itself, for example by interleaving software and non-software courses in students curriculums.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#180

Post by geokon »

rjmunro wrote: post #161
slim wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It may or may not be illegal, but including the ads is unlikely to make any difference. It's generally not thought to be illegal, see for example: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...

hmm, indexing and linking seem intrinsically different from hosting a direct copy of a website.

You request a webpage, the server gives it to you. It seems reasonable that you can then look at it, inspect it, quote it etc. (like a newspaper or a book at the bookstore). But re-hosting the content whole-sale seems quite different?

Or maybe I'm not seeing some subtly as to why they're equivalent

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