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Autodesk criticised by architects

extranetevolution.com

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#2

Post by aut0away »

It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them.

Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#3

Post by bfuclusion »

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#4

Post by CaliforniaKarl »

Here's the Google cache of the page, as I think the site is dealing with the traffic spike right now: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2OQV-Q6...

I tried grabbing the site using archive.is, but the site is using something called Imunify360, which threw up a Captcha, which was promptly archived instead of the site.

Although the Internet Archive has a cache entry (https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetev...), it's returning a 503 (I don't know if the 503 is what it got from the site, or if it's the Internet Archive returning the 503).

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#5

Post by imgabe »

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" to almost anything outside software and you'd be hailed as a revolutionary genius.

For Revit specifically, version control for construction drawings or a package manager for Revit families would both be huge.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#7

Post by tsimionescu »

bfuclusion wrote: post #3

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

If you think it will take less time and money for a firm of architects to build an equivalent to the most powerful architecture CAD system in the world, even for their specific use case, and that they wouldn't run afoul of Autodesk patents when doing so, then you have probably not played around with CAD software to much.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#8

Post by fsloth »

bfuclusion wrote: post #3

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

It's quite hard to develop software by just throwing money at it. And even harder when the domain is a bit niche and a bit esoteric so your hiring will be even harder. The optimal person would be a game dev with a penchant for math and a MSc in an engineering field. And you would like to have a team of these, please.

Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse experience to start with you'll have to spend a few years just building the initial team unless you find a really good headhunter.

In CAD you have to combine at least two non-trivial[0] discipline, computer graphics and and computational geometry. And they are completely unlike 'normal' software fields where you can just plug in various third party components and call it a day. You have to write your stuff to a great extent. And you have to design it - there are not that many public examples of how to put such a thing together.

It's not magic, it's not intrinsically very deep, but it's complex in the sense that the systems that have to interact are far and wide. It needs a lot of work.

And there are lots of things that are not in books, you just have to understand how they go together and which ways to do things are better than others.

[0] Non-trivial as in "I'll just figure it out" vs. "I'll have to pour through a few decades of academia and industry research and technical publications plus scour obscure websites" to get a clue on what the state of the art is and where it could go on from here

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#9

Post by muska3 »

The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.
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