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Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

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Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#81

Post by devwastaken »

superchroma wrote: post #2

I'd rather see firms chuck some money to perhaps Blender or something to get a viable alternative developed than send angry letters to the featureless monolith that is Autodesk. They're the market leader. They don't care. They already have firms by the metaphorical balls with astronomical licensing fees and know people will pay because they set the standards across many industries. In architecture, anyway, the proble…

You can't, Autodesk owns the software patents and massive amounts of IP. You impliment their features, you're sued to non existence. Remove software patents, we will have competition again.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#82

Post by Jenk »

devwastaken wrote: post #81
superchroma wrote: post #2

I'd rather see firms chuck some money to perhaps Blender or something to get a viable alternative developed than send angry letters to the featureless monolith that is Autodesk. They're the market leader. They don't care. They already have firms by the metaphorical balls with astronomical licensing fees and know people will pay because they set the standards across many industries. In architecture, anyway, the proble…

You can't, Autodesk owns the software patents and massive amounts of IP. You impliment their features, you're sued to non existence. Remove software patents, we will have competition again.

Remove software patents and we'll have megacorps absorbing smaller businesses for free through theft of IP instead of acquisitions, and all the antitrust protection (as limited as it may be) instantly evaporates.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#83

Post by marssaxman »

Jenk wrote: post #82
devwastaken wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't, Autodesk owns the software patents and massive amounts of IP. You impliment their features, you're sued to non existence. Remove software patents, we will have competition again.

Remove software patents and we'll have megacorps absorbing smaller businesses for free through theft of IP instead of acquisitions, and all the antitrust protection (as limited as it may be) instantly evaporates.

It is copyright law, not patent law, which prevents the scenario you describe.

Patents are useless to small businesses unless you are in the business of patent-trolling. Try to sue a big corporation and they will just countersue.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#84

Post by AtNightWeCode »

I can’t access the article. However, AD tried to recruit me, and it was just embarrassing. They used to be one of those companies that wanted you to build an alpha of their app and then you might get hired. This was a requirement to get to the first interview. Not like any pro is going to put a week into a maybe-project.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#85

Post by alexashka »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #71
Intermernet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autodesk have jumped the shark with their recent cloud pricing options. New users will be priced out of the software, and will use anything else other than the Autodesk family of products. This may take a generation, but Autodesk have made a conscious decision to be less and less relevant over the next decade or so. Adobe are on the same path, but not quite so aggressively. They may still see the writing on the wall…

Yeah, I don't understand how these firms (especially Adobe) are so completely oblivious to what actually made them successful. One of the main reasons Photoshop and Illustrator became widely used, is that every eleven-year-old with an interest in design or photo editing would torrent these products and learn the workflows inside out. Autodesk seems to have somewhat figured this out, with Fusion360 having a free hobby…

They're not oblivious, at all.

The switch to subscriptions has been a giant success for Adobe.

Their stock went from hovering around 30$ for a decade from 2000 to 2011-2012, to skyrocketing every year since they introduced the subscription model (in 2011-2012), now being at roughly 450$.

Anyone who doesn't think that's a giant success is living in an alternate reality.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#86

Post by sgjohnson »

zarzavat wrote: post #74
seydor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's everything BUT php. The mysql server on the site is too slow and crashed, the HTTP server somehow broke and served source code. PHP is the only thing that works there, and it tells you that mysql connection is not available.

The HTTP server is serving source code because of the braindead system of HTTP routing that PHP encouraged (because it's "easy") whereby scripts are stored in the root path amongst resources, and the file system is used for routing. In other languages the HTTP server doesn't even know where the source code is .

> scripts are stored in the root path amongst resources

that has been a known and documented bad practice for _at least_ 10 years.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#87

Post by YetAnotherNick »

jl6 wrote: post #18

The recent change from unlimited local simulations to pay-per-use cloud simulations was far worse than a mere price hike. It transformed a known, manageable cost into a variable cost that is going to impact users’ workflow as they learn to control it. If I were the architecture industry, I’d be rapidly forming an industry consortium to develop an alternative. Otherwise, this supplier’s monopoly will continue to optim…

Is there any (non software)industry consortium that developed any usable software? I wouldn't bet on that effort, and even if it is done perfectly it will still take at least 5 years to match the complexity and feature completeness of AutoCAD. Instead they should force themselves to boycott AutoDesk and use something like FreeCAD and fund the development. Yes, there would be some loss in productivity, still much more probable that it will work out in long term.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#88

Post by seydor »

zarzavat wrote: post #74
seydor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's everything BUT php. The mysql server on the site is too slow and crashed, the HTTP server somehow broke and served source code. PHP is the only thing that works there, and it tells you that mysql connection is not available.

The HTTP server is serving source code because of the braindead system of HTTP routing that PHP encouraged (because it's "easy") whereby scripts are stored in the root path amongst resources, and the file system is used for routing. In other languages the HTTP server doesn't even know where the source code is .

First, thank you for hating PHP, i'd hate to see it ending up like javascript, especially when ppl misunderstand basic things like this. This 'braindead' system is how the web has been designed from the start. And that issue can easily be mitigated by having using an index.php that simply does require('../app/app.php'). Serving files as text really has nothing to do with PHP since PHP interpreter isnt even invoked at all.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#89

Post by dkarl »

civeng wrote: post #6
superchroma wrote: post #2

I'd rather see firms chuck some money to perhaps Blender or something to get a viable alternative developed than send angry letters to the featureless monolith that is Autodesk. They're the market leader. They don't care. They already have firms by the metaphorical balls with astronomical licensing fees and know people will pay because they set the standards across many industries. In architecture, anyway, the proble…

Try Vectorworks. They had BIM years before Revit was a twinkle in AutoCAD's eye. Perhaps they fell behind for a few years but now but now more than viable and so much more stable code.

When was the quality turning point for Vectorworks? My wife uses it and still experiences regular crashes, though to be fair she avoids upgrading because she doesn't want to learn a new set of bugs to work around.

Re: Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

#90

Post by dkarl »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #16
superchroma wrote: post #2

I'd rather see firms chuck some money to perhaps Blender or something to get a viable alternative developed than send angry letters to the featureless monolith that is Autodesk. They're the market leader. They don't care. They already have firms by the metaphorical balls with astronomical licensing fees and know people will pay because they set the standards across many industries. In architecture, anyway, the proble…

> a lot of firms think Archicad isn't industry ready It's similar in many other industries. Take InDesign, the current market leader in DTP. Say you are working on a book that has multiple indexes: index of places, index of people and so on. Well InDesign doesn't support that! This is not some fancy feature - you will find multiple indexes in many non-trivial books. But for some reason the most popular and supposedly…

When you're the market leader, you get to define what's reasonable. If you're the industry-leading solution and your users struggle to do a simple, common task, then it becomes conventional wisdom that the task is "difficult." If you are the second-place solution and users struggle to do a simple, common task, then your software is not ready for serious work. If you are in second place and have elegant solutions for cases that the industry leader struggles with, then overall that is an advantage, but you'd be surprised how many people write off your innovations as not being really useful precisely because so many people using the industry leader get work done without them.

See: Jira versus every single one of their competitors.

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