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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#291

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

namibj wrote: post #248
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there. I’m a metal fabricator by trade and work closely with engineers and steel detailers. You ask for a non-professional solution to four professional grade problems. So I doubt your gong to get a satisfactory answer.

Well, one doesn't need to be professional to the extend where one can argue Tekla Structures to be worth the cost, if the goal is to design structures for hobby/DIY work. Depending on the purpose, structural failure might be sufficiently low-risk to not need more than a cursory glance by an engineer to check whether the concept is sufficiently-sane and the stresses the software calculated are no reason to worry. Peop…

I see and understand your point and agree to some extent.

Not real sure what to do there?

I'd maybe consider doing a course at my local Tafe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_and_further_educatio... ) and do a design course and get friendly with the people who work there and run the workshop part of the campus so they might let you continue to use the facilities are you've finished.

Not sure if you have anything like that around your parts.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#292

Post by d4rti »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #239
ethbro wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.

It's only reinforced my capslock is escape habit.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#293

Post by thejynxed »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #103
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…

To be fair this is not new. Autodesk has had this MO for decades. I remember in 1999, I was interning for a company that was getting into CAD, choice was to get 3D Solidworks that no one had heard of, or get the software that literally everybody used - 2D AutoCAD. That company still uses Solidworks today and has never touched a single Autodesk product. I can guarantee the opposite would not be true if the other decis…

Solidworks is what my university required students to use and it was the better choice then.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#294

Post by twblalock »

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,…

If you made better software and Autodesk acquired it and incorporated it in their product, it would still achieve the goal of making consumers better off.

In fact, it would probably make more consumers better off than if your company had remained independent: Users who were unwilling or unable to abandon Autodesk in order to use your software would be able to use it if it became part of Autodesk's offering.

Plus you'd be rich.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#295

Post by poseva »

mroche wrote: post #260
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. https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/

Seems up-to-date. I was not aware that the list is so long...

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#296

Post by latentpot »

twelvechairs wrote: post #182
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…

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.

Could you share more about Esri? That's an unknown example to me.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#297

Post by rbanffy »

IshKebab wrote: post #283
Ericson2314 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's definitely possible. Look at Blender and GRASS GIS, some of the most successful open source projects among non-programmers of all time. Architecture tool is merely the midpoint between those too domains, right? :D

Architecture tools are way more niche. I think a better place to look is mechanical CAD: how many decent open source mechanical CAD programs are there? Approximately one: SolveSpace. And that is quite basic - even simple stuff like bevels is not supported. Absolutely nobody whose livelihood depended on it would use it. It's just too niche and too complicated for there to be enough developers willing to writing it for…

How much money would be needed to turn SolveSpace into something usable?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#298

Post by jiveturkey »

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"…

> for anyone who can unseat Autodesk

oh, is that all

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#299

Post by TallGuyShort »

brutt wrote: post #278
ethbro wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience (~10 years of doing this sort of work) software engineers typically understand how their users use the software in the abstract, but not in the actual experience. E.g. It is well understood that users rely on a hotkey "a lot." It is not understood that users are so familiar with a hotkey that, if you relocated it on the keyboard, productivity would decrease 40% for 3 months. That distinction is fairl…

UX design is done by designers and product managers. Developer just implemented ability to assign hot key X to function Y. How this ability used was not his/her concern.

Personally, I'd push back on such a change unless there was a very good reason. I feel like this violates the same kind of principle as "we do not break user space EVER". My point above is that a programmer should understand better than most how important muscle memory and shortcuts are to productivity.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#300

Post by grawprog »

snoopen wrote: post #259
syshum wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MS Office, or at least Word and PowerPoint have lacked innovation to the user experience on a fundamental level. Years ago they overhauled the UI because people weren't using many of the features on offer. What they failed to do is make those features easy to use. Prime example is numbered lists in Word which is still unnecessarily complicated to use. This isn't a compatibility issue, purely UX. Numbered lists are al…

It's not just lists, just about all word's auto formatting is buggy and unintuitive. Page numbers, tables, headings, tables of contents, paragraph layout on pages with pictures, just putting pictures in a document can be a pain in and of itself. Pretty much anything you do in word above some simple formatting starts to get buggy and unpredictable and the more of these things you have in a document, the more painful editing that document becomes.
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