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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#221

Post by mhb »

fsloth wrote: post #185
gorgoiler wrote: post #26

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…

Large AEC clients actually prefer subscriptions. It's OPEX vs CAPEX. Purchasing a license comes with a huge CAPEX cost, while paying a monthly fee is OPEX so looks much less scary in the budget.

Large clients could probably figure out how to convert CAPEX to OPEX. If needed, using an intermediary leasing company.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#222

Post by sitkack »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
donquichotte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except that they are not. Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran. Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains. In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in colla…

At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from proprietary to OSS with a different makefile.

OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#223

Post by Dork1234 »

I do not feel bad about these Architects, they knew exactly what Autodesk was going to do with Revit when they acquired the company. Autodesk did the same thing with AutoCAD. Reduce innovation, and increased subscription cost. These architecture firms need to diversify the their software toolset, have more in house developers, push for more open standards, and fund open source tools. Instead they take the easy route and standardize on a close tool, until the point where Autodesk has a monopoly.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#224

Post by DonHopkins »

esperent wrote: post #113
pfranz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wrote a batch animation exporter shell script that had to restart max in a loop, repeatedly running a maxscript function blowChunks() to export chunks of 50 animations at a time, then restarting max to export the next chunk, because if it tried to export too many animations from the same process, max would eventually go senile and crash.

(Search for "chunks":)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscrip...

Automating The Sims Character Animation Pipeline with MaxScript:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character...

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#225

Post by mattkevan »

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…

> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death.

There's a really nice lightweight vector design app for Mac and iOS called Graphic [0]. It was one of the first fully-featured design tools for iOS, and still the best to use.

It was bought by Autodesk back in 2015, who promptly did nothing with it at all. Pretty much all development ground to a halt. From being updated every few months, the Mac app has only been updated three times in the last five years.

It's since been spun-out to a different company, but development still isn't really happening – the iOS app hasn't seen an update since 2018.

The lack of attention this app has been shown is sad, as it's a good piece of software and I use it all the time. It had the potential to be the vector equivalent of software like Pixelmator or Acorn – lightweight but powerful alternatives to Adobe products created by independent, highly-passionate developers.

Instead, newer apps like Affinity Designer and Vectornator have taken any traction it might have had - and it's probably going to stop working with an upcoming release of macOS if they don't do anything.

[0] https://www.graphic.com

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#226

Post by fsloth »

Dork1234 wrote: post #223

I do not feel bad about these Architects, they knew exactly what Autodesk was going to do with Revit when they acquired the company. Autodesk did the same thing with AutoCAD. Reduce innovation, and increased subscription cost. These architecture firms need to diversify the their software toolset, have more in house developers, push for more open standards, and fund open source tools. Instead they take the easy route…

Even though a logistics company uses trucks it does not mean they could build and operate a fleet of trucks.

You presume architecture firms would have any sort of capability to operate in software development. You might as well say they should create their own ink and papers. Software engineering companies are savvy in software.

Other companies aren't, and it is not expected that they would have any competence beyond their core offering.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#227

Post by Frost1x »

irjustin wrote: post #192
jxf wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That sort of logic is true if you're starting from scratch. But if you've already grown to a $50M company, your chances of being a $1B company are much better. Put another way, if I pick a random person and ask you what the probability is that the…

It's easy to say. Hard to do. $50m realized, now... cash in your pocket vs. maybe $1B.... but you don't know - there's a very real chance the company will die before that. 50m now vs 1b later is way too simplistic of a view.

Let's not forget that should you decline an offer, the other party has options like shifting to hypercompetitive approaching anti-competitive tactics: undercutting you to bleed you dry, burying you in frivolous lawsuits, propoganda campaigns against your product, and so forth.

The list goes on and many different tactics are perfectly legal or can be ambiguous requiring proof of motive (nearly impossible). You're engaging in war with someone who has far more resources than you. Sure, you couod win and shift or supplant their market share but more likely you'll be crushed.

Choosing between that option and $50m retiring happily, I'll choose the second option every time. I like the idea of competing but let's be realistic, this is not your restaurant competing with the other guy down the street where it might really come down to your actual competitive advantage in what you're providing a customer. Many times it comes down to business strategy and resources to execute those strategies.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#228

Post by taneq »

david_draco wrote: post #119
taneq wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is true, but in a strange sort of tragedy of the commons, it's much cheaper for me personally to just fork out for Fusion and put up with their cloud shenanigans than it is to pay for improvements to FreeCAD.

I'm edging closer to getting the source code and digging in in my spare time, though.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#229

Post by NikolaNovak »

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…

This nails it.

There's a class of software I want rapid improvements to.

And frankly there's a class of software I want to just work and not move the needle needlessly. Even with Adobe, I have NO idea why I have to have 27 processes constantly running to check for updates; why it actually performs updates that grind my system all the time; I can't honestly say that I have personally advanced and started using anything new or different in Photoshop in many many years, let alone MS Word. :-/

(understanding this is a different use case to original-original-poster; most of the software I DO want to advance - our database engine or process scheduler or OS monitoring software can always get better as far as I'm concerned, etc.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#230

Post by pjmlp »

sitkack wrote: post #222
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they are not. Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran. Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains. In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in colla…

At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from proprietary to OSS with a different makefile. OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.

What file formats? Text?

That is meaningless if they don't support the same language features, which is why other than Google's inhouse Android Linux fork, the Linux kernel is hardly compilable with anything else other than GCC C dialect.

GNU/GCC might have enabled and unleashed a movement, but thanks to the mass adoption of non-copyleft licenses, its time has come to pass, and in a couple of generations we will be back to shareware and public domain software packages.

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