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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#201

Post by chrstphrknwtn »

mihaaly wrote: post #172
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.

Sounds like accountants run the company.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#202

Post by somewhereoutth »

303bookworm wrote: post #13
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 of those exist, a friend of mine has a startup that's essentially "Git for building plans" ( https://shapedo.com/ )

If the intention is well realized then this can be a great product.

Horrendous name though (for English first language speakers anyway), 'do' is the fallback - most primitive - verb for any kind of action implying a lack of precision or importance: "I'm doing the dishes" vs "I'm polishing the cutlery". There is also an unfortunate embedded word in there too.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#203

Post by chrstphrknwtn »

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"…

I tend to think it's the other way around in some respects... software development is almost entirely writing text files to describe a huge variety of things (processes, networks, UIs, etc). In a lot of ways it's good, but text files are not obviously the best way to make software.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#205

Post by rjsw »

johnwalkr wrote: post #187
rjsw wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical CAD doesn't have to use binary files.

That's true, although most native formats of mechanical CAD programs are binary so I think a standard tool would need to support it. I've actually been searching online for solutions for a while as well as thinking about trying to solve this problem. Ideally, you'd want to be able to see text such as: - Feature3, hole: diameter 3.0mm + Feature3, hole: diameter 3.1mm - Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 400mm + F…

We don't need yet another CAD interchange format.

I have been working on STEP (ISO 10303) for 35 years. Every few years someone comes along to a meeting and declares that we need to start again and adopt their new model, they waste everyone's time for a bit then go away again.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#206

Post by gtsteve »

ur-whale wrote: post #63

There's so many bad things to say about AutoDesk beyond the unhelpful/broken "move to the cloud" ... But if I had to pick one, it's AutoDesk's systematic attempt to build a closed ecosystem à la FaceBook / Apple. They do it, among other things, via tight control of the data file format, and an ever-changing unpublished specification for those. There was a time when there was decent exporters in AutoDesk products, so…

The one thing I found interesting was that there's no attempt to control distribution of extensions by signing or having an app store style review process... but surely that's not far away.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#207

Post by chansiky »

syshum wrote: post #186
twelvechairs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through t…

> people that want innovation and people that want stability

Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#208

Post by rurban »

dTal wrote: post #126
thdrdt wrote: 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.

"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.

The best parametric 3D CAD kernel now has SolveSpace, and it's open source. Much better than ACIS and OpenCASCADE. It's very young though.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#209

Post by prox »

sprafa wrote: post #148
prox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After Effects also has a competitor with Cavalry now. Beta is out now. Adobe is the Autodesk or 2D world. I’ve heard they don’t even have Dev teams in the US anymore, for the most part they have teams in India. Profit maximisation at its worst, since now they no longer deliver meaningful updates to their software. I haven’t had a significant update for Premiere/After Effects that made any sense in at least half a dec…

Don’t know why you are downvoted, unless it’s not true.

Cavalry looks very interesting!

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#210

Post by ethbro »

syshum wrote: post #186
twelvechairs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through t…

> Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,

Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much!

Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.

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