Autodesk criticised by architects(extranetevolution.com)
extranetevolution.com
Autodesk criticised by architects
http://extranetevolution.com/2020/07/autodesk-criticism-extends/
386 comments
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 listened.
We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete, for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then... Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked also.
After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features.. they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete detailing sw).
For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.
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 listened.
We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete, for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then... Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked also.
After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features.. they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete detailing sw).
For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.
Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS. When you buy software it's an investment - you invest your time in integrating it into your workflow and your employees learning to use it... your investment is tied to the future of that software.
If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company.
But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.
If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company.
But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.
> Small company rises to produce quality software, it sells, responds to bugs, listens to users, adds features etc.
I would say:
Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots.
Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products.
Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products.
Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.
I would say:
Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots.
Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products.
Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products.
Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.
Sorry I edited away your quote since it was implicit in parent.
Your elaboration sounds more accurate i agree, but I think the end result is the same (a dead product with buried source code and wasted investment from it's users).
Your elaboration sounds more accurate i agree, but I think the end result is the same (a dead product with buried source code and wasted investment from it's users).
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
Blender was originally a closed-source product by Not a Number Technologies (NaN). After NaN went bankrupt, the
creditors agreed to let Blender become released as open source for 100,000 €.
True, but not really relevant. (Unless you're implying that you think Autodesk is likely to go bankrupt and might be open to a similar arrangement?)
The Blender we have today is much improved compared to the last version developed by NaN. Most of its major features today did not exist when it first become open source. It was certainly helpful to have a working core at the start—I'm not saying that the 100k € was a poor investment, by any means—but I would be surprised to find that there is much left of the original code by this point.
The Blender we have today is much improved compared to the last version developed by NaN. Most of its major features today did not exist when it first become open source. It was certainly helpful to have a working core at the start—I'm not saying that the 100k € was a poor investment, by any means—but I would be surprised to find that there is much left of the original code by this point.
Agreed. Of course I don't think this is what GP was implying, at all, but for the record it would devalue a ton of work to say that Blender is where it is because it started as a closed source product.
Blender is where it is because the core organizers over the past decade have had a clear vision, great community management, and have worked their butts off to make the software as good as it is today -- in terms of UX, capabilities, performance, marketing... everything across the board.
When I started using Blender, it was not as powerful or usable as other software in the field. It was impressive, and having a good core did help, but the program today has just advanced so far, I'm not sure it's really comparable.
See also Krita, for another Open Source project I think is headed in the same direction as Blender. None of this stuff happens by chance, developing Open Source software that's popular with a general non-programmer audience is really stinking hard, and the teams that can pull it off deserve all of the praise they get.
Blender is where it is because the core organizers over the past decade have had a clear vision, great community management, and have worked their butts off to make the software as good as it is today -- in terms of UX, capabilities, performance, marketing... everything across the board.
When I started using Blender, it was not as powerful or usable as other software in the field. It was impressive, and having a good core did help, but the program today has just advanced so far, I'm not sure it's really comparable.
See also Krita, for another Open Source project I think is headed in the same direction as Blender. None of this stuff happens by chance, developing Open Source software that's popular with a general non-programmer audience is really stinking hard, and the teams that can pull it off deserve all of the praise they get.
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 free.
It's just too niche and too complicated for there to be enough developers willing to writing it for free.
How much money would be needed to turn SolveSpace into something usable?
Call Siemens and ask what they charge for Parasolid. Hint: you have to ask, so...
Computational Geometry is hard. FOSS CG Kernels are not going to spring from the ether. CGAL exists, but its target audience is CG researchers. OpenCASCADE exists, but it's really a loss-leader for proprietary extensions and consulting contracts.
Computational Geometry is hard. FOSS CG Kernels are not going to spring from the ether. CGAL exists, but its target audience is CG researchers. OpenCASCADE exists, but it's really a loss-leader for proprietary extensions and consulting contracts.
Maybe they can spring from a consortium of interested architects.
At a complete wild guess I would say something like $50m.
(Obviously it depends what you mean by "usable" - I use it now, so in a sense it is already usable. I guess you mean to get to the point that businesses would rely on it.)
(Obviously it depends what you mean by "usable" - I use it now, so in a sense it is already usable. I guess you mean to get to the point that businesses would rely on it.)
My uneducated guess was that engineering tools have a lot more hard requirements than architecture CAD. That's why architects higher engineers to say whether their buildings will fall down!
Blender is programming-adjacent (a lot of Blender users are employed by software businesses to create assets for distribution with software products). In particular, I think that's where a lot of the funding for it comes from.
> Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS.
Look at the city government of Munich. They tried to adopt Linux and FOSS but failed after years of internal issues. Proper support and industry adoption are important properties not easy to emulate for FOSS.
Look at the city government of Munich. They tried to adopt Linux and FOSS but failed after years of internal issues. Proper support and industry adoption are important properties not easy to emulate for FOSS.
They "failed" because the social party mayor didn't get re-elected and a conservative mayor got elected. The new mayor then blamed LiMux for problems that mainly rooted in the ongoing migration of all departments to LiMux and then ordered the migration back to Windows for a price that would have had LiMux running for decades.
By total coincidence, shortly after announcing the move back to Windows, Microsoft announced to relocate their German headquarters from Hamburg to Munich.
By total coincidence, shortly after announcing the move back to Windows, Microsoft announced to relocate their German headquarters from Hamburg to Munich.
I work for a competitor in this space, and we make a living off of poaching AutoDesk customers. We're owned by a pretty deep-pocketed holding company as well, so I don't think we're going to get bought.
IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software background (so right-to-modify does nothing for them).
FOSS is just ... a bad deal for them. They want someone they can call and yell at when they're on a deadline and the software isn't working, and they want tools that get out of their way.
IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software background (so right-to-modify does nothing for them).
FOSS is just ... a bad deal for them. They want someone they can call and yell at when they're on a deadline and the software isn't working, and they want tools that get out of their way.
I get where you are coming from, but when I say FOSS i do not necessarily mean a "FOSS project"...
I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisitions repugnant to the likes of Autodesk (since all that would achieve is funding the software that competes with theirs)... I know that is far from easy to achieve and there is no straight forward business model for that - like I said, i'm probably being too idealistic.
[edit]
I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy (i.e what happened to blender, but as a requirement)... that would prevent takeovers that do not benefit users as a kind of legally binding promise while also sidestepping the issue of being profitable while developing niche FOSS software.
If legally feasible this is a nice promise any currently existing software company can add to their products without changing their business model.
In fact thinking about this, as someone who pretty much never buys software anymore, not because I am unwilling to spend money, but because the experience of having the rug pulled from under me too many times frankly makes closed source unpalatable to me - this would make buying (currently) non-free closed source software a lot more comfortable again.
It also feels like a good strategy to combat anti-competitive monopolies like autodesk from destroying choice in software.
I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisitions repugnant to the likes of Autodesk (since all that would achieve is funding the software that competes with theirs)... I know that is far from easy to achieve and there is no straight forward business model for that - like I said, i'm probably being too idealistic.
[edit]
I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy (i.e what happened to blender, but as a requirement)... that would prevent takeovers that do not benefit users as a kind of legally binding promise while also sidestepping the issue of being profitable while developing niche FOSS software.
If legally feasible this is a nice promise any currently existing software company can add to their products without changing their business model.
In fact thinking about this, as someone who pretty much never buys software anymore, not because I am unwilling to spend money, but because the experience of having the rug pulled from under me too many times frankly makes closed source unpalatable to me - this would make buying (currently) non-free closed source software a lot more comfortable again.
It also feels like a good strategy to combat anti-competitive monopolies like autodesk from destroying choice in software.
"I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy"
The KDE-FreeQt foundation is such a mechanism: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
The KDE-FreeQt foundation is such a mechanism: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow
> I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition
I can't imagine a VC funding a company with a poison-pill clause like this. Such a clause would discourage acquisition, and don't most VCs (if not most founders) hope for acquisition as a very desirable exit strategy?
I can't imagine a VC funding a company with a poison-pill clause like this. Such a clause would discourage acquisition, and don't most VCs (if not most founders) hope for acquisition as a very desirable exit strategy?
> 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
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
Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made.
I know your pain.
Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one.
I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.
I know your pain.
Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one.
I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.
Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made.
At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.
At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.
Yeah, that's why I'm still wary of using Figma.
Great though it is, I'm worried about all my designs going up in smoke if the company gets bought and shut down by Adobe or Google or someone.
Great though it is, I'm worried about all my designs going up in smoke if the company gets bought and shut down by Adobe or Google or someone.
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.
Whilst that's true, there's also a question of degree. Revit, which is the source of complaint here, takes long enough to open your file you might as well go make a sandwich while it does so. The developers only found out that CPUs have multiple cores somewhere around 2017, and still haven't really worked out how to actually use more than one core for anything much. They still appear to be largely unclear what a "GPU" is, so don't bother putting anything fancy in your workstation.
It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.
It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.
Ha. I work on a competitor and our story is similar.
We're a little more aggressive with multi-threading but you have to understand these code-bases are massive legacy things whose value comes from a ton of business logic accreted over 25 years.
I assure you I've heard of multiple CPU cores (before this I did high-performance physics simulations across thousands of cores) but I still don't have the first idea how to get something to execute on a background thread in this codebase.
We're a little more aggressive with multi-threading but you have to understand these code-bases are massive legacy things whose value comes from a ton of business logic accreted over 25 years.
I assure you I've heard of multiple CPU cores (before this I did high-performance physics simulations across thousands of cores) but I still don't have the first idea how to get something to execute on a background thread in this codebase.
Multithread is not as easy as you think for a legacy application this big.
Working on an new project in a similar industrial market to most AD products, we've adopted a massively multi-threaded approach to development. But I'm starting to wonder if the product will come to fruition before I'm pushing trolleys 'round at Tesco.
With Adobe I'm extremely worried about their acquisition of Algorithmic, the makes of Substance Painter and Substance Designer. I use these tools in 3D animation/texturing, they are truly fantastic tools. Before Adobe bought them, they offered a purchase option, now it's just subscriptions of course.
I have such a love/hate relationship with Adobe. Their software is so useful. I want to love it. But they basically infiltrate my entire computer in order to install/run it and I’ve been burned by their shady billing practices so many times I now have a prepaid Visa from CVS that’s exclusively for my Adobe subscription. I fundamentally do not understand how a company can simultaneously be so awesome and so awful.
When I was younger, I used to pirate expensive software that I couldn't afford. It's what got me into 3D graphics and graphic design at a young age. Now I'm older and using some of this software professionally, and usually, I'm more than happy to pay for it. But I'll never buy into Adobe's shady subscription model, or any other company that does this. When I pay for a software license, that version of the software should become mine, the same as when I buy any other product. If a company refuses me that option, I steal the software with zero remorse.
The idea of renting software is ridiculous, especially when I have zero need for support services.
The problem with this: updates. You buy a version. They fix the bugs you report and release a new version. Do you pay full price for it? No, it's just an update. You'll pay a reduced upgrade price, but you want it for free. Your price probably doesn't pay for ongoing upgrades and might not pay for the updates. So no one is paying for updates. Every new version has to be sufficiently improved to get everyone to buy a new copy. Or the company could release a version and coast on it until revenue stops coming in.
Renting software is ridiculous, but at least the incentives are kind of pointed in the right direction.
Renting software is ridiculous, but at least the incentives are kind of pointed in the right direction.
Progressive taxation is rents scaled to means.
Photoshop is extremely stable software. Other than a couple of new features and UI changes, there's not much difference between Photoshop now and ten years ago.
That wasn't the case before Adobe switched to subscriptions. Just look at all the shit they poured into Acrobat to keep selling upgrades.
Easy solution you either get A) all minor updates untill the next major version or B) free minor updates for X years.
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 the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
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 the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
> 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.
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.
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 fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.
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 fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.
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.
I've worked at both kinds of shops. I'd never work at somewhere that follows the above strictly again.
It's been my experience that you get crappy software, produced with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, if your developers don't know your users.
It's been my experience that you get crappy software, produced with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, if your developers don't know your users.
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.
I would push back too, and I think most experienced programmers understand the needs of power users[0] - problem is, they don't push back all that often. I encourage developers to try and voice their opinion about UX more often. Who knows, maybe your PM isn't a pointy-haired boss, but will turn out to be a professional willing to listen to rational arguments? I had a privilege working with such PMs; at one place, I ended up having a lot of say about UX (and provided a counterbalance to our designer) - just because I spoke up about the issues. It turned out that my views were shared by the rest of the dev team, it's just that they never bothered to voice it.
--
[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.
--
[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.
My Experience is software engineers understand how users SHOULD use the software, which rarely matches how users DO use the software
Most of the time I experience a scenario of the engineer or support person saying "Show me what you are doing" only for the user to show some weird and non-logical (to the engineer) way of doing some task, and the engineer or support person replying "Well you should be doing it this other completely different way"
Most of the time I experience a scenario of the engineer or support person saying "Show me what you are doing" only for the user to show some weird and non-logical (to the engineer) way of doing some task, and the engineer or support person replying "Well you should be doing it this other completely different way"
It's only reinforced my capslock is escape habit.
Software engineers do get that, they have been using vim, emacs for decades with few changes.
Product designers on the other hand.
Product designers on the other hand.
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 also buggy, like they were 15 years ago, and are still the best way to corrupt your document.
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.
The problem for microsoft, it's not a simply "fixing the auto formatting", but "changing how auto formatting behave". Nowadays the buggy auto formatting may be expected by some people and changing (fixing) it may distrupt their workflow (xkcd reference).
Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.
Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.
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.
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.
> Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products,
Many people aren't just robotic, they're straight up ritualistic.
I've worked with several people that are absolute wizards at PowerPoint, love to get new features, and quickly integrate them into their workflows.
But those same people have absolutely no mental framework for how Excel works. They'll quite literally use a physical calculator (or their phone's calculator app) in tandem with Excel, treating Excel as a glorified text editor that lets you do cell-by-cell text placement/formatting. They have such a weak grasp of how Excel works that any tiny change whatsoever doesn't just cause extreme frustration, but also extreme anxiety as they scramble to re-establish the thin veneer of usability they previously held.
Having witnessed the above more than once, I've taken to heart the level of naivety that should be presumed when creating UX flows and documentation.
Many people aren't just robotic, they're straight up ritualistic.
I've worked with several people that are absolute wizards at PowerPoint, love to get new features, and quickly integrate them into their workflows.
But those same people have absolutely no mental framework for how Excel works. They'll quite literally use a physical calculator (or their phone's calculator app) in tandem with Excel, treating Excel as a glorified text editor that lets you do cell-by-cell text placement/formatting. They have such a weak grasp of how Excel works that any tiny change whatsoever doesn't just cause extreme frustration, but also extreme anxiety as they scramble to re-establish the thin veneer of usability they previously held.
Having witnessed the above more than once, I've taken to heart the level of naivety that should be presumed when creating UX flows and documentation.
> people that want innovation and people that want stability
Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,
Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,
Could you share more about Esri? That's an unknown example to me.
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.
Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.
"where software goes to die a slowly painful death"
Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.
Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.
The gold standard around these parts is purported to be Tekla Structures. No affiliation, just a structural steel guru who’s happy to work with the fabrication drawings it spits out.
I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires.
I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.
I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires.
I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.
Indeed. Autodesk Advance Steel generated fabrication drawings need a lot of effort to get it right but AS was ahead of Tekla in regard with connection design and modeling/detailing super strange parts/structures.
As for the prices...in 2014, 2 Advance Steel licences were something like 12000 euros and one Tekla license was about 18000 euros.
As for the prices...in 2014, 2 Advance Steel licences were something like 12000 euros and one Tekla license was about 18000 euros.
Yes. Totally agree on TEKLA Structure. Their Concrete detailing also improved substantially in past few years.
Is there anything a non-professional can use for the following four usecases (separate software is ok):
1) Reinforced concrete structure design, with support for non-trivial surfaces (e.g. splines/Bezier curves/surfaces).
2) Non-finely-meshed (in comparison to local volume thickness) truss structures, ideally not just classic steel beams + welded/riveted joints,
3) but also aluminium (considering fatigue from non-stationary loads and optimizing for the lifespan/weight/cost pareto frontier (cost would be just a simplistic metric)).
4) The holy grail, a 3d-printed core (technically a large-pore-size, low-density, open-pore foam) that is then covered by fibers via a robot that passes the spool around the core/preform (filament winding). After hardening the matrix that bonds the fibers together, the 3d-printed core could optionally be removed by melting and/or solvent washing. This kind of structure is potentially extremely stiff due to combining the truss structure with cylindrical beams and a lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer material.
The issue is just the insane non-triviality in designing such a structure, because there are restrictions to holes and fiber angle shifts due to the winding process, where the fiber bundle has to be accurately woven around the mesh in the designed way. This, combined with the directionality of the fibers makes it necessary to consider much more than normal 3d-printable topology optimization[0].
A concrete-ish example would be a multi-monitor + keyboard/mouse support structure to enable a low-fatigue position where the user leans back about 30~60 degrees to allow the neck to be supported and the user's practical FOV (w.r.t. feasibly eye/head movement) is covered by screen area and the arms can rest on supports. The constraint that makes a traditional steel truss undesirable would be to have it mobile (thus lightweight), yet stiff enough to handle ~5 m/s² without impairing usability. A practical case would be to overlay travel with getting work done, by mounting this in the back of a van (including straps/seatbelts as required) and being driven.
A different practical example could be amateur airplane design, e.g. devising an autonomous solar glider, where some stiffness is required to not break the solar cells laminated into the wing surface (thinned wafers are lighter and can conform to the wing's curvature, but will then dislike the wing flexing along the span), but weight is extremely important. Mounting the heavy things (motors, some backup batteries, potential payload) and handling control surface actuation forces won't easily work with a simple fiber-reinforced hollow wing, as a lack of dedicated mounting points (with their own fibers distributing the forces into the outer structural surface) would require a far heavier construction.
It's also difficult to consider aerodynamic forces when computing pre-distortion of the unloaded structure, so that design loads make it take on the desired shape, if there are also ad-hoc mounting brackets glued to the inside surface (which would be necessary if they're not designed into the primary structure).
Sorry for the slightly-OT examples.
[0]: Project video "on using the free version of Fusion360 for shelf brackets printed in PLA on a Prusa i3 MK3": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc - Thomas Sanladerer: Making STRONG shelves with Topology Optimization
1) Reinforced concrete structure design, with support for non-trivial surfaces (e.g. splines/Bezier curves/surfaces).
2) Non-finely-meshed (in comparison to local volume thickness) truss structures, ideally not just classic steel beams + welded/riveted joints,
3) but also aluminium (considering fatigue from non-stationary loads and optimizing for the lifespan/weight/cost pareto frontier (cost would be just a simplistic metric)).
4) The holy grail, a 3d-printed core (technically a large-pore-size, low-density, open-pore foam) that is then covered by fibers via a robot that passes the spool around the core/preform (filament winding). After hardening the matrix that bonds the fibers together, the 3d-printed core could optionally be removed by melting and/or solvent washing. This kind of structure is potentially extremely stiff due to combining the truss structure with cylindrical beams and a lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer material.
The issue is just the insane non-triviality in designing such a structure, because there are restrictions to holes and fiber angle shifts due to the winding process, where the fiber bundle has to be accurately woven around the mesh in the designed way. This, combined with the directionality of the fibers makes it necessary to consider much more than normal 3d-printable topology optimization[0].
A concrete-ish example would be a multi-monitor + keyboard/mouse support structure to enable a low-fatigue position where the user leans back about 30~60 degrees to allow the neck to be supported and the user's practical FOV (w.r.t. feasibly eye/head movement) is covered by screen area and the arms can rest on supports. The constraint that makes a traditional steel truss undesirable would be to have it mobile (thus lightweight), yet stiff enough to handle ~5 m/s² without impairing usability. A practical case would be to overlay travel with getting work done, by mounting this in the back of a van (including straps/seatbelts as required) and being driven.
A different practical example could be amateur airplane design, e.g. devising an autonomous solar glider, where some stiffness is required to not break the solar cells laminated into the wing surface (thinned wafers are lighter and can conform to the wing's curvature, but will then dislike the wing flexing along the span), but weight is extremely important. Mounting the heavy things (motors, some backup batteries, potential payload) and handling control surface actuation forces won't easily work with a simple fiber-reinforced hollow wing, as a lack of dedicated mounting points (with their own fibers distributing the forces into the outer structural surface) would require a far heavier construction.
It's also difficult to consider aerodynamic forces when computing pre-distortion of the unloaded structure, so that design loads make it take on the desired shape, if there are also ad-hoc mounting brackets glued to the inside surface (which would be necessary if they're not designed into the primary structure).
Sorry for the slightly-OT examples.
[0]: Project video "on using the free version of Fusion360 for shelf brackets printed in PLA on a Prusa i3 MK3": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc - Thomas Sanladerer: Making STRONG shelves with Topology Optimization
Sounds like you might want to use something like finite element software, which is essentially what other programs do. FEniCS is an example of an open source library that could maybe help. People usually use something like ls-dyna or Abaqus
Yes, of course. But I'm specifically interested in the design side, because the analysis side is already handled by open and/or free software, due to it being so close to what a small university research group might just publish or adapt for unconventional FEM analysis.
Design software is much less easy to find, though.
Design software is much less easy to find, though.
Ah, sorry. Have you tried rhino 3d? There are some nice additions to it like grasshopper
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.
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.
People today build these structures without software-assisted structural analysis. Or anything, really, beyond rough numbers.
I hope there'd be something that be good enough to not fly blind when working on hobby projects that would benefit massively from clever structural design. Finding someone qualified to look over the finished design is often reasonable, but paying them to do clerical work (e.g. re-drawing your blueprint in their CAD, just to get the computer to calculate stresses), would be too expensive.
I just see that these tools all have license fees where any non-full-time usage is directly prohibitive.
Even if a good tool has e.g. 500$ + 20% royalties (of the sale price), that'd be far better than what I see out there from my searching.
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.
People today build these structures without software-assisted structural analysis. Or anything, really, beyond rough numbers.
I hope there'd be something that be good enough to not fly blind when working on hobby projects that would benefit massively from clever structural design. Finding someone qualified to look over the finished design is often reasonable, but paying them to do clerical work (e.g. re-drawing your blueprint in their CAD, just to get the computer to calculate stresses), would be too expensive.
I just see that these tools all have license fees where any non-full-time usage is directly prohibitive.
Even if a good tool has e.g. 500$ + 20% royalties (of the sale price), that'd be far better than what I see out there from my searching.
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.
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.
> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death.
https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/
https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/
Seems up-to-date. I was not aware that the list is so long...
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 decision was made.
We knew in 1999 that Autodesk was never going to innovate, or allow us to.
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 decision was made.
We knew in 1999 that Autodesk was never going to innovate, or allow us to.
Solidworks is what my university required students to use and it was the better choice then.
Crazy enough, in my country in Africa, we aren't trained to use Revit or AutoCad but Archicad primarly.
RIP to SoftImage. And we're all worried about the future of Inventor. The only reason I use that at all was because of the generous student license...other companies don't seem to do that, which feels like a giant mistake.
You may want to check the offerings from Altair. They have a lot to offer and even support many 3rd party tools. They do make a lot of acquisitions but that's to increase their capability, not to destroy competition.
When you are a software company and you buy another software company or you buy a product from another software company, you do not intend to maintain their software. You are purchasing the users, and adding them to your own userbase. That's the only reason to buy a competitor.
Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."
Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."
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.
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.
> 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, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers, the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.
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, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers, the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.
> I will make up some numbers: 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.
The situation is way more severe than this makes it sound:
* The benefit you get from $10b is not actually 200 times as much as the benefit of $50m. (Economists would talk of a "utility function" - that's what you should actually be taking the expectation of - and what I'm saying is that it's nonlinear.) How much it's worth very much depends on your personality, but for most people (maybe all?) it's worth well under twice as much, maybe barely 10% more? Either way, you never have to work again, and maybe your kids never have to work again, and you can enjoy your lifetime retirement in a great deal of luxury, so the difference in experience is minimal. It's probably not a big deal if you have to be careful not to charter private jets too often. So even if the chance of getting $10b is 1 in 10, or even 3 in 4, you still might find the $50m option wins.
* The $50m is right now whereas the $10b dollar requires effort. Not just 9-to-5 effort either, but possibly a CEO-of-a-startup 90-hours-a-week effort. Again, the benefit of $10b is not actually that much compared to $50m, so you might consider that marginal benefit less than than the extra work. If that's so, you would take the money now even if the big win were 100% guaranteed!
The situation is way more severe than this makes it sound:
* The benefit you get from $10b is not actually 200 times as much as the benefit of $50m. (Economists would talk of a "utility function" - that's what you should actually be taking the expectation of - and what I'm saying is that it's nonlinear.) How much it's worth very much depends on your personality, but for most people (maybe all?) it's worth well under twice as much, maybe barely 10% more? Either way, you never have to work again, and maybe your kids never have to work again, and you can enjoy your lifetime retirement in a great deal of luxury, so the difference in experience is minimal. It's probably not a big deal if you have to be careful not to charter private jets too often. So even if the chance of getting $10b is 1 in 10, or even 3 in 4, you still might find the $50m option wins.
* The $50m is right now whereas the $10b dollar requires effort. Not just 9-to-5 effort either, but possibly a CEO-of-a-startup 90-hours-a-week effort. Again, the benefit of $10b is not actually that much compared to $50m, so you might consider that marginal benefit less than than the extra work. If that's so, you would take the money now even if the big win were 100% guaranteed!
The most egregious aspect is that these companies arguably shouldn't even have the ability to make such large purchases. They don't pay their taxes (using loopholes to appear completely unprofitable while an entity that is all-but-legally indistinct amasses a massive warchest is tantamount to tax avoidance, period) and they shortchange users on the value of their data (delivering software worth a fraction of the value of the data collected during its use). What results is an enormous economic distortion that has numerous negative effects, of which the issue described above is just one.
I know, and if I were in the same boat, I would probably do the same thing.
The thing is a piece of software that could replace and update Revit is not going to be built by a lone developer. I know people have built some pretty amazing stuff, but for something to operate with that amount of polish and reliability it's going to take a pretty big team and some experienced people to lead them which means some hefty VC investment. While you or I might be easily bought off a group of VC firms are not going to let it go so cheaply.
The thing is a piece of software that could replace and update Revit is not going to be built by a lone developer. I know people have built some pretty amazing stuff, but for something to operate with that amount of polish and reliability it's going to take a pretty big team and some experienced people to lead them which means some hefty VC investment. While you or I might be easily bought off a group of VC firms are not going to let it go so cheaply.
>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 [...] The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: [...]
The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])
Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".
In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]
If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...
The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])
Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".
In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]
If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...
It is always the same thing "If I were X" people only imagine that X wouldn't bring them anything, so having $50M is better than having nothing.
Well as you said, no, is it better to have a company valued $50M growing 30% per year, or having $50M in your bank account ? Most entrepreneur will prefer the latter
Well as you said, no, is it better to have a company valued $50M growing 30% per year, or having $50M in your bank account ? Most entrepreneur will prefer the latter
> Yahoo made offers to buy Google
I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...
I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...
>I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them
The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under no pressure to sell.
The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under no pressure to sell.
You're right:
"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5 billion."
"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5 billion."
> 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 they'll finish a marathon, you'd probably say it's not very likely. But if I tell you they just passed mile 26, you might revise your estimate.
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 they'll finish a marathon, you'd probably say it's not very likely. But if I tell you they just passed mile 26, you might revise your estimate.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think the choice for founders is between $50 million and a small shot at $10 billion - it's between $50 million and a near-guarantee of getting crushed.
In your example, before giving you an offer, the big software company will conduct an internal analysis to figure out how much money they'd have to spend to develop the bare-minimum featureset to prevent their customers from fleeing to your competing product, then they'll back that number off a little bit, and try to buy you out. This number will probably be significantly higher than the amount it costed you to build the thing, because for them to replicate your features, they have the added overhead, bureaucracy, and inefficiencies that come with being a megacorp.
If you accept the offer, it saves them money and time.
If you decline the offer, they'll just greenlight their internal projects and steamroll you.
In your example, before giving you an offer, the big software company will conduct an internal analysis to figure out how much money they'd have to spend to develop the bare-minimum featureset to prevent their customers from fleeing to your competing product, then they'll back that number off a little bit, and try to buy you out. This number will probably be significantly higher than the amount it costed you to build the thing, because for them to replicate your features, they have the added overhead, bureaucracy, and inefficiencies that come with being a megacorp.
If you accept the offer, it saves them money and time.
If you decline the offer, they'll just greenlight their internal projects and steamroll you.
Version management for more structured data is hard. In a previous job we did extensive work on it in the GIS domain, and even having everything backed by a long transaction version controlled data store, resolving conflicts was not always easy. We did a lot of work on ways to automatically resolve conflicts, and it was only worthwhile for large customers who could set up good rules for their workflows (e.g. if you moved a pole in as part of a resurveying workflow then that position should take preference even if other changes happened to the pole).
We can handle this sort of thing in software because we can try compiling something, see it has errors, and fix the obvious syntax problems that have been introduced by a merge or rebase. We have tools that make it easy view and copy data from a previous version, and all of this makes things easier. For more structured data those low level conflicts need to be handled much better so that the user can concentrate on the higher level aspects. If they need to restore sub structures deleted in a merge then they need to be able to see those, so our version control starts to bleed right through the tool chain.
We can handle this sort of thing in software because we can try compiling something, see it has errors, and fix the obvious syntax problems that have been introduced by a merge or rebase. We have tools that make it easy view and copy data from a previous version, and all of this makes things easier. For more structured data those low level conflicts need to be handled much better so that the user can concentrate on the higher level aspects. If they need to restore sub structures deleted in a merge then they need to be able to see those, so our version control starts to bleed right through the tool chain.
I can't speak for Revit but people are looking to switch to Blender from 3dsMax.
The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility.
But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.
The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility.
But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.
People are always talking about switching to Blender (me included) - but they don't. Because as sad as it is, once you start to actually work with it in serious projects, you noticed all the things that hobbyists who hail Blender as the second coming never care about.
I wanted to give Blender another got at replacing Cinema 4D for us (since their new licensing). I got used to the UI, though it's not nearlly as intuitive as C4D, but when I started working with larger scenes, it came out that Undo steps in large scenes could take 20 seconds easily. I mean...wtf? That is probably one of the most essential functions you can have in an editor.
Apparently they are working on fixing that. Eventually.
Which license change? Last year? Blender technical and financial situation has changed very much since then.
Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.
Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.
Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.
Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.
Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.
Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.
The Cinema 4D licensing changed to subscription which caused many people to look for alternatives.
I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.
I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.
I was mainly replying to the "only used by hobbyists which don't know what they are talking about" argument.
If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.
If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.
Undo has certainly sped up in the latest version and the 2.9 build due for release at the end of this month but there's still a lot of room for improvement. I'm hopeful that the increasing number of large corporate backers are willing to pay for development and improvement of existing features (€30,000 gets you half a developer) which will focus the team on improving the quality of the basics rather just adding more shiny.
I switched after 20 years of 3DSMax. Blender is definitely becoming more acceptable in professional settings.
C4D is beautiful software - Blender is making strides, maybe 3 years it would take, but Blender is in feature acquisition mode, not improving the codebase/current functionality.
C4D is really good and Maxon has been decent in making updates for it imo. They are listening to their users and updating stuff, even if more slowly than people would like.
They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.
I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.
They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.
I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.
I don't really have anything against it per se. It just had that Autodesk / Adobe feel to it that immediately provokes a kicking and screaming reaction in many :)
Out of interest : did you try 2.7x or 2.8x , the latter is a major step up.
That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.
That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.
2.8x
Yes, C4D is fast and more importantly, extremely stable. It's crazy how often I got Maya or even Houdini to crash, compared to Cinema (which basically only crashed due to Octane...)
Yes, C4D is fast and more importantly, extremely stable. It's crazy how often I got Maya or even Houdini to crash, compared to Cinema (which basically only crashed due to Octane...)
Agreed. Blender as of when I last used it (1.5 years ago) is not usable on serious projects.
It’s rarely the tool itself that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the entire workflow is built around that tool. Any potential rival must not only match what the incumbent provides, but exceed it so obviously that reworking decades old pipelines is worth it.
You're perfectly describing the reasons for hanging onto legacy <anything>. Manufacturing and distribution supply chains in and out of China being a pertinent large-scale example.
The pearl is the story, not the speck of grit.
The pearl is the story, not the speck of grit.
Was looking into creating some tooling for the construction industry perhaps 15 years ago as drawings were send over emails with all the version nightmares that creates. Some Danish government agency had a ‘Digital Construction’ project going on so I initially thought I was too late. After a couple of years all they had amounted to was creating a ton of convoluted documents defining common CAD drawing layers. I’ve since moved on but I would not be surprised if drawings are still send by email between architects/engineers/contractors. Perhaps that agency has created a 50 page spec for tracking versions in the file name ;-)
There are a fair few doc management for construction companies around now. So i'd be surprised if any large project wasn't using a managed or self hosted one today. and several of them have fancy tools that can pull in 3d models and the like. (oracle bought one that i worked at)
I've hired an architect at a "big" construction firm (they regularly manage multistory hospital construction) to design some "medium" buildings and remodels. When I visited his office to talk through some change orders (I'm thinking this was about three years ago?), it was all Windows shared folders and carefully constructed file names.
:O
I wonder if they moved to different solutions when they started bringing in subbies?
for a counter example. I'm currently getting a small house built and the near by land developers are mostly using the SAAS solution I worked at to manage the construction\design of each subdivision.
I wonder if they moved to different solutions when they started bringing in subbies?
for a counter example. I'm currently getting a small house built and the near by land developers are mostly using the SAAS solution I worked at to manage the construction\design of each subdivision.
I've hired numerous subcontractors who don't use email. These guys require printed plans. Hell, the local fire inspectors require printed plans, even though they prefer not to fill out paper inspection reports.
People who haven't used change control have a hard time imagining what they're missing.
People who haven't used change control have a hard time imagining what they're missing.
Wow it's a substantially different experience with most that i've been across here.
Almost every subbie I've met even those building residential properties have a few mobile apps for doc management and so many ipads for plan review\access\defecting
The last plumber I worked with had the quote in my email with updated pricing and online billing before they got back to their ute.
Almost every subbie I've met even those building residential properties have a few mobile apps for doc management and so many ipads for plan review\access\defecting
The last plumber I worked with had the quote in my email with updated pricing and online billing before they got back to their ute.
It seems to me that breaking into this industry, that is, defeating network effects that work to Autodesk's favor, would actually be harder than building the superior product itself.
Anyone on the inside, am I wrong? Would your company readily switch to a superior product, retrain its employees for it, deal with business partners who haven't heard of that new product, etc.?
Anyone on the inside, am I wrong? Would your company readily switch to a superior product, retrain its employees for it, deal with business partners who haven't heard of that new product, etc.?
The network effects are strong and it is a big hurdle.
The problem is the software isn't just used by one team at one company. Architects hire subconsultants- MEP engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, Landscape designers, Lighting designers, many others. They all need to share files so whatever you make has to be compatible with whatever everyone else is using (which is probably Revit).
There are some competitors like ArchiCAD, which some architects love and swear by, but it is a pain in the ass for their subconsultants to work with them, because the ArchiCAD file has to be converted to a Revit file and this doesn't usually work quite right and of course Autodesk has no incentive to make this easier.
The problem is the software isn't just used by one team at one company. Architects hire subconsultants- MEP engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, Landscape designers, Lighting designers, many others. They all need to share files so whatever you make has to be compatible with whatever everyone else is using (which is probably Revit).
There are some competitors like ArchiCAD, which some architects love and swear by, but it is a pain in the ass for their subconsultants to work with them, because the ArchiCAD file has to be converted to a Revit file and this doesn't usually work quite right and of course Autodesk has no incentive to make this easier.
No wonder all the smaller AEC software firms out there are pushing OpenBIM very hard. If you think you need to convert an Archicad .pln into a Revit .rvt you're doing it wrong and essentially playing into the hands of Autodesk.
We really need to stop with all that siloing going on. OpenBIM with IFC and BCF are the only way of going forward.
Revit is a mediocre product in all categories, but that's the thing: People are using Revit since it somehow can do all the stuff a bit. Architects love Archicad because it's a software tailored to their needs and far superior to Revit in that domain, but if you're a consultant doing e.g. MEP work you will be probably not so happy. You still won't be while using Revit, but since "everybody" is using it at least you won't have to deal with OpenBIM and correct file workflows.
Source: I'm an architect myself.
We really need to stop with all that siloing going on. OpenBIM with IFC and BCF are the only way of going forward.
Revit is a mediocre product in all categories, but that's the thing: People are using Revit since it somehow can do all the stuff a bit. Architects love Archicad because it's a software tailored to their needs and far superior to Revit in that domain, but if you're a consultant doing e.g. MEP work you will be probably not so happy. You still won't be while using Revit, but since "everybody" is using it at least you won't have to deal with OpenBIM and correct file workflows.
Source: I'm an architect myself.
Yeah, IFC is the format I had experience with trying to coordinate between ArchiCAD and Revit. There's probably a better way to do it than the way we did it at least at first, because initially Revit imports the IFC with everything as a generic "object" family instead of windows, doors, ceilings, etc. which make it impossible to configure views to show the correct things. There are probably settings in ArchiCAD that fix this when exporting, but it takes experienced people on both sides.
In the context of design projects that don't always have the most realistic schedule, it's just one additional hurdle to deal with that isn't there if everyone is using Revit.
In the context of design projects that don't always have the most realistic schedule, it's just one additional hurdle to deal with that isn't there if everyone is using Revit.
It's a Revit problem. Autodesk is known for hating on OpenBIM, since it threateans their hegemony. I've never heard of anyone saying everything went smooth when dealing with Revit + IFC. It's still not certified for IFC 4 and 2x3 support is lacking at best.
True however, you need people who know what they are doing :)
Btw I'm glad we have options in the market. Same as with browsers, OS, etc. Mono cultures are hurting everyone.
True however, you need people who know what they are doing :)
Btw I'm glad we have options in the market. Same as with browsers, OS, etc. Mono cultures are hurting everyone.
I think not, because making the product is much harder than that. Lots of difficult 3D work, reverse engineer very complex file formats, specialized domain knowledge for some features. There are work for a whole team easily, it's really not a two people startup.
Selling the product to some smaller companies is probably easier. I have some family working in industrial drawing, I think it's doable if you sell hard enough, as long as the software is as good and can import and export seamlessly.
I think it's quite doable overall but it's a 10 year endeavor. Need to start with $10M and a couple developers and play the long game before you can replace autocad at Boeing/Airbus.
Selling the product to some smaller companies is probably easier. I have some family working in industrial drawing, I think it's doable if you sell hard enough, as long as the software is as good and can import and export seamlessly.
I think it's quite doable overall but it's a 10 year endeavor. Need to start with $10M and a couple developers and play the long game before you can replace autocad at Boeing/Airbus.
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.
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 decade. If you go into reddit/r/editors you’ll see it’s full of people working their way out of Premiere, which is garbage software.
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 decade. If you go into reddit/r/editors you’ll see it’s full of people working their way out of Premiere, which is garbage software.
Makes me actually feel a little sick with how bad After Effects is these days, used to be such a godlike application 10 years ago.
Cavalry is interesting and does a lot of things a modern professional app should do but it really isn't anywhere close to an After Effects competitor.
AE isn't just for animating some vectors, AE is non-destructive Photoshop with a timeline it's possibilities are absolutely vast.
Cavalry is interesting and does a lot of things a modern professional app should do but it really isn't anywhere close to an After Effects competitor.
AE isn't just for animating some vectors, AE is non-destructive Photoshop with a timeline it's possibilities are absolutely vast.
Don’t know why you are downvoted, unless it’s not true.
Cavalry looks very interesting!
Cavalry looks very interesting!
Look in the Affinity support forum and you’ll find myself and about three thousand of my closest friends crying out for Affinity Designer DXF export.
Inkscape has it and it’s free.
I’m stuck not using Affinity Designer because I can’t export to DXF.
I paid for Affinity Designer, just assuming it’s would have DXF export because why wouldn’t it.
So sad ),;
Inkscape has it and it’s free.
I’m stuck not using Affinity Designer because I can’t export to DXF.
I paid for Affinity Designer, just assuming it’s would have DXF export because why wouldn’t it.
So sad ),;
No way - you would have to teach all your employees - new software, and existing know-how templates will be all gone. Plus compatibility issues with your sub contractors would be nightmare.
Productivity lost by adopting new tools would render firm non-competitive in this thin margin business, will likely make your P/L red.
Productivity lost by adopting new tools would render firm non-competitive in this thin margin business, will likely make your P/L red.
What if the software has an almost identical UI?
It doesn't matter if you can't simply import Revit projects into it and work as usual. That is how Excel got its foothold into the spreadsheet market dominated by Lotus 123 at the time, you need to support the current de facto file standard for that industry/task.
Revit / AutoCAD import / export is sine qua non - everyone in this space is going to offer it before going to market.
There's also the plugin ecosystem to consider - ranging from small things you might have self-written or exchanged with other users over the years for your workflows or to add missing functionality [1], to complete commercial add-on packages adding big chunks of domain-specific functionality.
[1] Some of which frankly should just be built-in, but either way it wouldn't make creating a replacement any easier.
[1] Some of which frankly should just be built-in, but either way it wouldn't make creating a replacement any easier.
Trust me - you never want to work on a job where the new owner wants Issue For Construction in Bently Microstation and you have 10, 000 Autocad files from 30% initial engineering. It's not fun.
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I'm about as deep in the user space as you can get, and it would take YEARS for a new company to have a proven record before my company would even consider adopting it. years. And not only would it take years, it would need to prove that it is better than AutoDesk, not as good, better. Most likely, orders of magnitude better. We are so far deeply entrenched into AutoDesk ecosystem that any change would probably be on the scale of decades.
I work for a company that makes a living off of poaching Architectural AutoCAD customers.
Granted, it has also existed for a quarter century so it has its own network effects going.
Granted, it has also existed for a quarter century so it has its own network effects going.
> I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries.
It happens in all industries. For example InDesign currently has a dominant position as a DTP tool. However, after so many years it still doesn't support many basic functions such as multiple indexes (Index of People, Index of Places, etc.). Adobe simply doesn't care because there is no competition (Affinity Publisher is not there yet, and Scribus has its own quirks, although got much better recently; paradoxically Quark finally got competitive, but they don't support multiple indexes either...).
It happens in all industries. For example InDesign currently has a dominant position as a DTP tool. However, after so many years it still doesn't support many basic functions such as multiple indexes (Index of People, Index of Places, etc.). Adobe simply doesn't care because there is no competition (Affinity Publisher is not there yet, and Scribus has its own quirks, although got much better recently; paradoxically Quark finally got competitive, but they don't support multiple indexes either...).
As an emerging EE, I fully agree. I honestly believe it could be done with solid quality. Early today I saw this very old video of Elon at SpaceX with their design software [1]. It's amazing to me that this video was six years ago. Revit is the prized gem. Whomever creates it, focus on Revit and focus on the pain-points.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
Musk is espousing a UX fallacy by saying that a more "natural" interface is superior. Natural interfaces have a shallower learning curve for beginners, but CAD designers are all going to be expertly trained in their software. This is why pros always know the hot keys even when the mouse is simpler. Hot keys are faster. Learning how to pan, tilt and zoom with a mouse and keyboard is an 1 hour lesson that they will apply for 20 years and never worry about again.
I think that many commentators here on HN will be very unused to the market that Autodesk serves - mostly trained engineers who have been doing this stuff for decades, not so easy to "disrupt."
As someone who was working in the physical engineering world when that video came out ... I am not convinced that design software specifically actually empowers engineers to be any faster at designing new and novel engineering (over pen and paper -- with isometric style drawings, etc.). Both software and paper design require a huge amount of training upfront and a huge amount of effort per project.
Anything that is standardized (engineering-wise -- and many things are) does not actually need a designer working with design software. It needs a generation algorithm (a script) with input parameters.
The biggest problem of why this area does not get more attention? We just don't build shit anymore. So, there is less money and opportunity than ever in it. Like really. We don't build shit. We need to fix corruption in politics long before we fix the lack of a proper marketplace to create incentive for maximizing the engineering potential of our society.
Anything that is standardized (engineering-wise -- and many things are) does not actually need a designer working with design software. It needs a generation algorithm (a script) with input parameters.
The biggest problem of why this area does not get more attention? We just don't build shit anymore. So, there is less money and opportunity than ever in it. Like really. We don't build shit. We need to fix corruption in politics long before we fix the lack of a proper marketplace to create incentive for maximizing the engineering potential of our society.
> I am not convinced that design software specifically actually empowers engineers to be any faster at designing new and novel engineering
I don't adhere to a luddite attitude. It's my opinion Autodesk's tools are deeply lacking and this is based on my experience and knowledge on software.
When I first starting learning AutoCAD, I was very annoyed at the slow snail pace to designing things (as to pen/paper). I used to be a web designer/developer for a handful of years, those tools are much more refined and allow a person to do more with less time.
Revit is a step in the right direction for the building industry but it has many drawbacks too. I strongly believe this is due to lack of competition and innovation on Autodesk's part. Adobe should be seen as the model. They've developed many tools that empower it's users and they continue to push the envelop forward.
Autodesk will be unseated, if they don't continue to push their tools forward like Adobe has with many of it's products. The software isn't terribly hard, just needs a lot of investment upfront for a MVP competitor that chips away the market, then reinvest back into improving the tools with AI/DL/ML. I.e. One agency may use specifically a specific contractor, the AI recognizes revisions and highlights them to the architect. Or using specific materials. Etc. Etc.
Construction industry is stuck in the 1940s, IMHO. Hopefully a competitor arises to bring it into the 21st century.
I don't adhere to a luddite attitude. It's my opinion Autodesk's tools are deeply lacking and this is based on my experience and knowledge on software.
When I first starting learning AutoCAD, I was very annoyed at the slow snail pace to designing things (as to pen/paper). I used to be a web designer/developer for a handful of years, those tools are much more refined and allow a person to do more with less time.
Revit is a step in the right direction for the building industry but it has many drawbacks too. I strongly believe this is due to lack of competition and innovation on Autodesk's part. Adobe should be seen as the model. They've developed many tools that empower it's users and they continue to push the envelop forward.
Autodesk will be unseated, if they don't continue to push their tools forward like Adobe has with many of it's products. The software isn't terribly hard, just needs a lot of investment upfront for a MVP competitor that chips away the market, then reinvest back into improving the tools with AI/DL/ML. I.e. One agency may use specifically a specific contractor, the AI recognizes revisions and highlights them to the architect. Or using specific materials. Etc. Etc.
Construction industry is stuck in the 1940s, IMHO. Hopefully a competitor arises to bring it into the 21st century.
and next year, chinese companies have that cheap Autodesk-compatible-software out there (like the online-office featured recently on HN) and everyone jumps there, because it's sooo cheeeeap. It seems like communist-painted authoritarism finally wins.
I saw that Leap Motion [0] video almost 10 years ago and have wanted to have one ever since. Sadly, it seems they didn't sell enough to sustain theirselves and have mostly concluded their incredible journey [1]. I had a few friends that worked in 3D modelling them and they really wanted to try it out for sculpting.
I guess actually swinging your hands around in air like Tom Cruise in Minority Report was too tiring for most people. I wish Apple had bought them and integrated them into the macbooks instead of the touchbar.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Motion
[1]: https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap-motion-controller/
I guess actually swinging your hands around in air like Tom Cruise in Minority Report was too tiring for most people. I wish Apple had bought them and integrated them into the macbooks instead of the touchbar.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Motion
[1]: https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap-motion-controller/
I remember being really annoyed at the reaction to that video. Here's 2 headlines from the first page of hits: "Elon Musk Waves His Hand and Designs Rocket Parts Out of Thin Air" and "Elon Musk to build rocket ship parts with hand movements through the air, and 3D printing".
His tweet before that video was "We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator. Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium". That's really disingenuous. First of all, it looks like a typical demo made by an intern and some toys. Second, mechanical engineers don't need or want that type of interface. Actually manipulating and rotating CAD is such a small part of the process the time sink (aside from all the design and documentation aside from CAD) is adding dimensions and relations to geometry and relations. This video is the equivalent of a software developer's manager showing off a visual programming language and declaring text-based languages and keyboards are obsolete.
His tweet before that video was "We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator. Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium". That's really disingenuous. First of all, it looks like a typical demo made by an intern and some toys. Second, mechanical engineers don't need or want that type of interface. Actually manipulating and rotating CAD is such a small part of the process the time sink (aside from all the design and documentation aside from CAD) is adding dimensions and relations to geometry and relations. This video is the equivalent of a software developer's manager showing off a visual programming language and declaring text-based languages and keyboards are obsolete.
Leap Motion was recently acquired by a company that builds ultrasonic haptic devices. The standalone USB Leap Motion sensor is still available for like $80. I've done some work with it (and the haptic device) and it's extremely underwhelming. It's equivalent to voice dictation versus typing. It feels miraculous at first but there's a lot of edge cases (like hands going vertical or occlusion) and there's simply no good UX patterns for gestures. Keyboard and mouse is faster and more accurate in 99% of scenarios.
Google actually one-upped Leap Motion with Project Soli that's in the new Pixel phones It can track minute finger gestures in a much smaller form factor using radar. It similarly doesn't have any killer app that actually makes it useful for much of anything.
Google actually one-upped Leap Motion with Project Soli that's in the new Pixel phones It can track minute finger gestures in a much smaller form factor using radar. It similarly doesn't have any killer app that actually makes it useful for much of anything.
The Leap Motion is still on sale. https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap-motion-controller/
I had one when they first came out and while the tracking accuracy was quite good, it wasn't good enough for doing any precision work. Every so often the tracking would skip and glitch.
I had one when they first came out and while the tracking accuracy was quite good, it wasn't good enough for doing any precision work. Every so often the tracking would skip and glitch.
>try it out for sculpting.
I bet the Index has potential for that with the finger control
I bet the Index has potential for that with the finger control
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.
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.
>how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries.
Every time I think of how great the tools for building software (IDEs, etc.) are, that’s what I think next. What could help is having more devs with knowledge and interests in other domains, and not only focused on software itself, for example by interleaving software and non-software courses in students curriculums.
Every time I think of how great the tools for building software (IDEs, etc.) are, that’s what I think next. What could help is having more devs with knowledge and interests in other domains, and not only focused on software itself, for example by interleaving software and non-software courses in students curriculums.
> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry.
Same is true for many other industries. I've been hoping for a Quickbooks contender for years, but Intuit has proven to be very adept at shutting down the competition by virtue of the fact that relatively few CPAs will work with any other software.
Same is true for many other industries. I've been hoping for a Quickbooks contender for years, but Intuit has proven to be very adept at shutting down the competition by virtue of the fact that relatively few CPAs will work with any other software.
I feel like this is one of those places where open source probably doesn't work. Maybe it would require a change in culture.
I don't know CAD but in 3D software for movies/games most studios use expensive software (Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini, etc). The market for that software is relatively small and the effort to create and maintain it larger than many many other projects. So, the price is high. But, if they didn't make it hard to copy most companies would arguably not pay because they see it as a large expense. Especially for smaller companies if it was easy to copy and they could they would (and often do).
My point is getting that same money out of them instead for an open source solution (because the open source solution will require just as much income to maintain) is unlikely.
Blender is eeking by so maybe the tide is turning.
I don't know CAD but in 3D software for movies/games most studios use expensive software (Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini, etc). The market for that software is relatively small and the effort to create and maintain it larger than many many other projects. So, the price is high. But, if they didn't make it hard to copy most companies would arguably not pay because they see it as a large expense. Especially for smaller companies if it was easy to copy and they could they would (and often do).
My point is getting that same money out of them instead for an open source solution (because the open source solution will require just as much income to maintain) is unlikely.
Blender is eeking by so maybe the tide is turning.
As far as modelling goes you can now model in almost anything you want (Blender/Maya/whatever).
Maya is the default for animation pipelines, since it has the more robust animation tools.
Houdini is for FX and sims, and Houdini is STUNNING in its development speed at the moment. Each of their software updates has 100+ features a year, and these are complex overhauls or entire new toolkits. I don’t know anyone in 3D who isn’t salivating at what’s going on with SideFX and Houdini.
Maya is the default for animation pipelines, since it has the more robust animation tools.
Houdini is for FX and sims, and Houdini is STUNNING in its development speed at the moment. Each of their software updates has 100+ features a year, and these are complex overhauls or entire new toolkits. I don’t know anyone in 3D who isn’t salivating at what’s going on with SideFX and Houdini.
Houdini has also cracked the market open to indie pricing. Autodesk has finally offered $250/year subscriptions for Max and Maya after sustained pressure from SideFX’s offering.
Some users implement version control using the NTFS/Windows file history feature on shared drives where the projects are saved.
This has saved my hide a few times, on the occasion I remember to think of it.
Such an underrated / understated feature.
Such an underrated / understated feature.
Spend $20 million paying Blender and FreeCAD/CalculiX developers to build an open-source system.
Add another $10 million and take advantage of overseas rates and create a marketplace for support, bug fixes, plugins, etc.
Add another $10 million and take advantage of overseas rates and create a marketplace for support, bug fixes, plugins, etc.
You then (maybe) have a product...but no ecosystem. You can't just convince an entire industry to switch tomorrow and you've just sunk $30m+ into a "maybe".
And that’s £30m that benefits your competitors just as much as it benefits you. Hard to justify the ROI on that.
It can be done though, maybe a foundation approach where high tier members get increased input into the product roadmap.
It can be done though, maybe a foundation approach where high tier members get increased input into the product roadmap.
> Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X"
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software provide such features.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software provide such features.
For what it’s worth, first hand experience here, Autodesk’s PLM is IMO quite awful.
I do not want to question that, I was rather questioning the statement that "you'd be hailed as a revolutionary genius." if you introduce version control or package management.
PLM software exists since a long time but I agree that it might not serve user needs optimally. But this is more a market failure than a technical problem.
PLM software exists since a long time but I agree that it might not serve user needs optimally. But this is more a market failure than a technical problem.
I only know of one system (grabcad) that just offers simple version control for CAD.
Most are the equivalent of JIRA, i.e. lots of features and bloat that sell well to managers. They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.
Something simpler and more standardized is needed in the physical engineering space to become part of standard practice, like git has for software.
Most are the equivalent of JIRA, i.e. lots of features and bloat that sell well to managers. They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.
Something simpler and more standardized is needed in the physical engineering space to become part of standard practice, like git has for software.
>They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.
This is true for most business software and very true for something like a PLM, and double super extra true for Autodesk PLM where it’s so unintuitive, clunky, “ Enterprisey” that no one wants to learn or use it without being required to.
Now, consider it like a really bad JIRA but at $75-150 per month. I’m probably overselling it still.
This is true for most business software and very true for something like a PLM, and double super extra true for Autodesk PLM where it’s so unintuitive, clunky, “ Enterprisey” that no one wants to learn or use it without being required to.
Now, consider it like a really bad JIRA but at $75-150 per month. I’m probably overselling it still.
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.
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The same holds for EDA (electronics design automation).
EDA is at least simple text formats that work well with git, etc. I've seen lots of good version control of EDA using standard tools. I don't think I've ever seen good version control of mechanical CAD. The files are large, binary, not really diff'able, and almost every file is touched in every session.
And the proprietary "Product Data/Lifecycle Management" tools are expensive, bloated and hard to use.
And the proprietary "Product Data/Lifecycle Management" tools are expensive, bloated and hard to use.
If we're talking about IC EDA - then the OpenAccess library format (anything but, more like InteroperableAccess at best) is binary.
The industry standard version control here is Perforce. Perforce being Perforce, there even are 3rd party solution to de-duplicate users' workspaces in order to save gigabytes of disk space.
The industry standard version control here is Perforce. Perforce being Perforce, there even are 3rd party solution to de-duplicate users' workspaces in order to save gigabytes of disk space.
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:
- control read/write access to files to prevent unintentional file changes due to rotated views, etc. The user would have to manually select which files are checked out/active. This might require a plugin to the CAD programs, so I may rethink this.
- Upon commit, the user adds comments, then all changed files are exported to the new interchange format
- text based diff is generated
- CAD with color highlights is generated
This is a pretty intensive operation, but it doesn't need to be instant. I think I would allow branches and make a workflow to automatically show conflicts based on diffs and CAD, then the user would manually resolve conflicts, declare a branch merged and select the files to go into main branch. After typing that, I am wondering if centralized control of read/write and one branch is the only way.
In the short term, I think an MVP could be scripted: - Before commit, user selects which files are to be kept and other files are rolled back to previous version and writes the commit message
- Updated files are exported to STL (there are many tools available to compare STL files visually)
- A tool generates combined/subtracted STL files for each updated file
- git commit
- git notes to cross-reference the combined/subtracted STL to the commit message
- Nice to have: built-in STL viewer
Github is supposed to have STL Diffs but it took me forever to find an example on github because everyone commits files as _v1, _v2 (highlighting my complaint that version control is not part of standard practice). Only to find out they removed this feature.
Grabcad has been great for me but I need to find an on-premises solution.
- Feature3, hole: diameter 3.0mm
+ Feature3, hole: diameter 3.1mm
- Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 400mm
+ Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 425mm
- control read/write access to files to prevent unintentional file changes due to rotated views, etc. The user would have to manually select which files are checked out/active. This might require a plugin to the CAD programs, so I may rethink this.
- Upon commit, the user adds comments, then all changed files are exported to the new interchange format
- text based diff is generated
- CAD with color highlights is generated
This is a pretty intensive operation, but it doesn't need to be instant. I think I would allow branches and make a workflow to automatically show conflicts based on diffs and CAD, then the user would manually resolve conflicts, declare a branch merged and select the files to go into main branch. After typing that, I am wondering if centralized control of read/write and one branch is the only way.
In the short term, I think an MVP could be scripted: - Before commit, user selects which files are to be kept and other files are rolled back to previous version and writes the commit message
- Updated files are exported to STL (there are many tools available to compare STL files visually)
- A tool generates combined/subtracted STL files for each updated file
- git commit
- git notes to cross-reference the combined/subtracted STL to the commit message
- Nice to have: built-in STL viewer
Github is supposed to have STL Diffs but it took me forever to find an example on github because everyone commits files as _v1, _v2 (highlighting my complaint that version control is not part of standard practice). Only to find out they removed this feature.
Grabcad has been great for me but I need to find an on-premises solution.
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.
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.
That's interesting. Did some light reading just now and I see that STEP is already considering feature-based descriptions. I have lots more reading to do, I am pretty ignorant about STEP!
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PlanGrid, my former employer and YC graduate, does in fact offer a version control for construction drawings. They offer the ability to export from Revit into PlanGrid.
PlanGrid was bought in 2018/2019 by Autodesk for 875 million, though, so good luck escaping the Autodesk family :D
PlanGrid was bought in 2018/2019 by Autodesk for 875 million, though, so good luck escaping the Autodesk family :D
So sideproject should be find the leading software in a dozen industries and map out what is / not working (maybe do sales safari style discovery?)
Most of these already exist in their cloud offerings
The multi-billion dollar opportunity is acquisition by Autodesk. There's no multi-billion dollar opportunity in Revit add-ons.
> for anyone who can unseat Autodesk
oh, is that all
oh, is that all
This is exactly right—we now live in a world in which most jobs are knowledge work, and we should look to those who are the most productive (and lazy) knowledge workers: software developers.
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 price of the software.
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 price of the software.
> 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 business model.
If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...
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 business model.
If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...
> If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...
You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD UI.
You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD UI.
> You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD UI.
Software develoment is of course quite difficult. Good software development is that much harder. Sure, you could pay a company to try to improve the FreeCAD UI - you could pay a company a lot of money to botch the effort, deliver a mediocre outcome, take a zillion years to finish, go far over budget it while still getting a mediocre outcome, and so on. If it's anything other than a good outcome, most likely you just stole resources from the rest of your business and now you're worse off. The odds are against you.
It's one of the many reasons people stick with their 75% or 85% good enough present solution. They're busy running their own business. Trying to manage a software development endeavor on the side is a huge tax (that much more so if you're not in the software business).
Software develoment is of course quite difficult. Good software development is that much harder. Sure, you could pay a company to try to improve the FreeCAD UI - you could pay a company a lot of money to botch the effort, deliver a mediocre outcome, take a zillion years to finish, go far over budget it while still getting a mediocre outcome, and so on. If it's anything other than a good outcome, most likely you just stole resources from the rest of your business and now you're worse off. The odds are against you.
It's one of the many reasons people stick with their 75% or 85% good enough present solution. They're busy running their own business. Trying to manage a software development endeavor on the side is a huge tax (that much more so if you're not in the software business).
> It's one of the many reasons people stick with their 75% or 85% good enough present solution.
100% this. That's one thing many people don't realise until they run a business - there are so many things which MUST be done, all the time, just to keep the lights on. When you do get a rare gap in those, you're better off developing and improving your core product than indulging yourself by spending resources on some unrelated nice-to-have.
100% this. That's one thing many people don't realise until they run a business - there are so many things which MUST be done, all the time, just to keep the lights on. When you do get a rare gap in those, you're better off developing and improving your core product than indulging yourself by spending resources on some unrelated nice-to-have.
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.
I'm edging closer to getting the source code and digging in in my spare time, though.
To be fair, FreeCAD has been improving quite rapidly over the last few years. To the extent that I'm able to use it for the few small things I need to do.
The problem with FreeCAD, and open source CAD in general, is we have two choices: OpenCASCADE and CGAL.
FreeCAD is based on OpenCASCADE. I've used both libraries and OpenCASCADE really left a bad taste in my mouth. It's not a project I'd want to contribute to due to the technology.
FreeCAD is based on OpenCASCADE. I've used both libraries and OpenCASCADE really left a bad taste in my mouth. It's not a project I'd want to contribute to due to the technology.
I share your frustration with OpenCASCADE. OCC has become marginally modernised with v7, abandoning that weird macro-template system and gaining support for real C++ smart pointers, etc. But it's still an early 90s framework with all the warts.
Still it's like that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government apart from all the other ones we've tried. I don't have all that much experience with ACIS, but I happened to look at the API once a few years back. OCC looks like heaven compared to that.
I keep toying with the idea of writing a CAD library every few months or so. Sometimes I even write a bit of code. But OCC is always "good enough" for the task at hand, so I just bite the bullet, start typing BRepBuilderAPI_Make* and get on with life.
Still it's like that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government apart from all the other ones we've tried. I don't have all that much experience with ACIS, but I happened to look at the API once a few years back. OCC looks like heaven compared to that.
I keep toying with the idea of writing a CAD library every few months or so. Sometimes I even write a bit of code. But OCC is always "good enough" for the task at hand, so I just bite the bullet, start typing BRepBuilderAPI_Make* and get on with life.
They want to establish a steady income for a stable and feature complete tool. They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy, or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway, as reasons why subscriptions cost the price they charge.
> They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway
That's what $$$ upgrades are for. No need for a subscription if I'm happy without the new features and happy using it on an old OS. I'm happy to pay for new features I might actually use. I'm happy to pay for upgrades for a new OS. As an example though, I used to get by upgrading Adobe Photoshop at most about once every 4 years at a cost of about $200 or $50 a year. Now they extract out of me $480 ($120 a year) for features I don't actually use. In fact I'm pretty sure I use zero features past CS2 (2003) and like I said was fine paying them $200 every 4 years for the OS upgrades but now I just feel taken advantage off.
Unfortunately yes, I've tried the alternatives and PS is still the best by many measures so I'm stuck paying for nothing but permission to use the software.
That's what $$$ upgrades are for. No need for a subscription if I'm happy without the new features and happy using it on an old OS. I'm happy to pay for new features I might actually use. I'm happy to pay for upgrades for a new OS. As an example though, I used to get by upgrading Adobe Photoshop at most about once every 4 years at a cost of about $200 or $50 a year. Now they extract out of me $480 ($120 a year) for features I don't actually use. In fact I'm pretty sure I use zero features past CS2 (2003) and like I said was fine paying them $200 every 4 years for the OS upgrades but now I just feel taken advantage off.
Unfortunately yes, I've tried the alternatives and PS is still the best by many measures so I'm stuck paying for nothing but permission to use the software.
$$$ versions have few cons:
1. It is a decision point so requires reselling at every new version.
2. Old Versions must now be maintained for n years.
3. Features and sometimes bugfixes) are now kept on hold to bundle to make a big bang version release.
4. Multiple devices now add additional decision point, should you buy and iPad pro version of the app and a mobile one. Value of these would vary for users.
With a subscription model: companies can reduce the maintenance window, have a 3 months release cycle, support multiple devices and have only one decision point for the user am I making enough to justify $ / month.
1. It is a decision point so requires reselling at every new version.
2. Old Versions must now be maintained for n years.
3. Features and sometimes bugfixes) are now kept on hold to bundle to make a big bang version release.
4. Multiple devices now add additional decision point, should you buy and iPad pro version of the app and a mobile one. Value of these would vary for users.
With a subscription model: companies can reduce the maintenance window, have a 3 months release cycle, support multiple devices and have only one decision point for the user am I making enough to justify $ / month.
> That's what $$$ upgrades are for. No need for a subscription if I'm happy without the new features and happy using it on an old OS.
Obviously that would be a better deal for you, that's why it's not an option.
Obviously that would be a better deal for you, that's why it's not an option.
Indeed. One of our main competitors when I started 6 years ago is no longer one, mainly because they kept doing the traditional "buy the new version" routine, while my boss had transitioned to subscription-based contracts.
They spent a large amount of effort rewriting their main product, but struggled to sell it afterwards. Why would you buy the new version with inevitably more bugs for lots of $$$, when the old version works just fine? Hit them really hard.
I think it benefits our customers though, as we don't have as much pressure to focus on flash and bling and can spend time doing things right and fixing old cruft, making our product more solid. Finance departments also seem to love the lower, fixed recurring cost rather than a huge bill every other year or so.
Another thing that's been good is that our price has a fixed component and a component that scales with use. Since our customers can charge their customers for the work done with our program, that means our price can be competitive both for companies with low activity and high activity.
They spent a large amount of effort rewriting their main product, but struggled to sell it afterwards. Why would you buy the new version with inevitably more bugs for lots of $$$, when the old version works just fine? Hit them really hard.
I think it benefits our customers though, as we don't have as much pressure to focus on flash and bling and can spend time doing things right and fixing old cruft, making our product more solid. Finance departments also seem to love the lower, fixed recurring cost rather than a huge bill every other year or so.
Another thing that's been good is that our price has a fixed component and a component that scales with use. Since our customers can charge their customers for the work done with our program, that means our price can be competitive both for companies with low activity and high activity.
The problem, from shareholders point of view, is that upgrades don't allow for continuous growth and with time, as the potential user base is already covered, it makes very hard to keep that revenue coming in.
So unless you want to see your beloved products die at version X, or them ramping down the teams for maintenance mode, subscriptions are the only way to get them going.
So unless you want to see your beloved products die at version X, or them ramping down the teams for maintenance mode, subscriptions are the only way to get them going.
Why not keep using CS2 (or up to CS5), if you are not using newer features?
Not the op but whenever I have similar gripes it's because the old version is no longer maintained and eventually breaks after an OS upgrade.
Because I can't open files from clients who use a newer version than I do - with the 2020 illy update particularly schisming matters.
Because it doesnt work on current os (on mac atleast). Also adobe started to expect that you always have most current software so opening any file without current verion so working with others is no no.
You’ve tried Affinity Photo?
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.
I always love comments like these,
Having been through this cycle a few times at different companies, the bean counters always love OPEX until you move everything to OPEX causing that annual budget to explode then all of a sudden they want to "Reduce costs", so people start shifting things to CAPEX until that budget explodes then they want to "Reduce annual capital spend" so people start shifting thing back to opex.....
And so the cycle goes, over and over again
bean counters and MBA's live in this mythical land where $100,000 over 5 years or $20,000 a year is some how different
Having been through this cycle a few times at different companies, the bean counters always love OPEX until you move everything to OPEX causing that annual budget to explode then all of a sudden they want to "Reduce costs", so people start shifting things to CAPEX until that budget explodes then they want to "Reduce annual capital spend" so people start shifting thing back to opex.....
And so the cycle goes, over and over again
bean counters and MBA's live in this mythical land where $100,000 over 5 years or $20,000 a year is some how different
> bean counters and MBA's live in this mythical land where $100,000 over 5 years or $20,000 a year is some how different
There are differences and they are far from mythical!
A big one: Liquidity. If you spend $100,000 today, you all of a sudden have a $100,000 less in your bank account. That may limit what you and your team can do this year - because budgets are finite. If you have the option to pay $20,000 each year over 5 years your liquidity goes down by that amount each year. Much easier to plan and usually less risky.
Another one: Flexiblity. If you don't need the product or service after year 3 any more, stop it. You paid $60,000 instead of $100,000. Less. Money. Spent. (And yes, it also goes into the other direction (pay more than $100,000 if you use it longer) but that's a trade off many businesses are willing to make. 5 years is a long time, things change.)
Last but not least: Opportunity costs. Paying $100,000 at once is expensive because it means you can't invest the money into something else that generates interest. If you pay $20,000 each year it means, that you still have $80,000 in the first year, $60,000 in the second and so on. Use this remaining money to invest it into something that creates interest for you (bank account, stocks, index fund, ...). That's another win! (And also the reason why big companies pay their bills as late as possible - it adds up for them!)
There are differences and they are far from mythical!
A big one: Liquidity. If you spend $100,000 today, you all of a sudden have a $100,000 less in your bank account. That may limit what you and your team can do this year - because budgets are finite. If you have the option to pay $20,000 each year over 5 years your liquidity goes down by that amount each year. Much easier to plan and usually less risky.
Another one: Flexiblity. If you don't need the product or service after year 3 any more, stop it. You paid $60,000 instead of $100,000. Less. Money. Spent. (And yes, it also goes into the other direction (pay more than $100,000 if you use it longer) but that's a trade off many businesses are willing to make. 5 years is a long time, things change.)
Last but not least: Opportunity costs. Paying $100,000 at once is expensive because it means you can't invest the money into something else that generates interest. If you pay $20,000 each year it means, that you still have $80,000 in the first year, $60,000 in the second and so on. Use this remaining money to invest it into something that creates interest for you (bank account, stocks, index fund, ...). That's another win! (And also the reason why big companies pay their bills as late as possible - it adds up for them!)
lol, I figured it would be faster before a MBA responded about opportunity costs....
>>>Liquidity.
That really depends on how you budget, but for many things I have been involved in these are well known costs that can not simply be postponed really, while it may have some impact on Liquidity, if budgeted for property it would not no matter if it was lump sum or spread out. The effect on a 5 year picture is the same
>>Flexiblity
This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
Office 365 you pay that bill or your services shut down. That is why company like AutoDesk has removed the ability to buy perpetual Licensing under a CapEx model and have moved to Subscription OpEx model, before if you wanted to Stay on the Previous version of Autocad sure you might take a security risk but the software still worked. Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
So no this new OpEx model is in no way more flexible, it more akin to ransomware, pay us or we lock you out
>>>Opportunity costs.
i will agree with opportunity costs. Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
>>>Liquidity.
That really depends on how you budget, but for many things I have been involved in these are well known costs that can not simply be postponed really, while it may have some impact on Liquidity, if budgeted for property it would not no matter if it was lump sum or spread out. The effect on a 5 year picture is the same
>>Flexiblity
This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
Office 365 you pay that bill or your services shut down. That is why company like AutoDesk has removed the ability to buy perpetual Licensing under a CapEx model and have moved to Subscription OpEx model, before if you wanted to Stay on the Previous version of Autocad sure you might take a security risk but the software still worked. Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
So no this new OpEx model is in no way more flexible, it more akin to ransomware, pay us or we lock you out
>>>Opportunity costs.
i will agree with opportunity costs. Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
Given that Opex costs are lower than full license, I claim it still feels less risky. As an AEC firm, when you have a project going on, you can pay the Opex, and when not, you don't need to pay - and probably go bankrupt anyway since you need to have ongoing projects.
I think opex saas model might actually be beneficial for AEC industry. Generall you would have paid the yearly license anyway - some products have so called "maintenance" licenses where you basically pay for the company to fix bugs in older versions. And get a release every year or so - patiently waiting for your bugfux.
If licensing moves to Saas, then I would expect customer expectations for better service to rise, bringing in more rapid innovation and quality.
At this point all the CAD houses have been sitting on decades old legacy products and basically charged rent for minimal added value. I would imagine with more frequent releases and more flexible licensing models customer value would increase.
For example if you pay for product x some opex in project and find it dissatisfactory then you can try in next project product y if it works better without paying the expensive yearly license.
Should be good for competition as well (Autodesk is not the only AEC software house, even though they seem the dominant gorilla).
I think opex saas model might actually be beneficial for AEC industry. Generall you would have paid the yearly license anyway - some products have so called "maintenance" licenses where you basically pay for the company to fix bugs in older versions. And get a release every year or so - patiently waiting for your bugfux.
If licensing moves to Saas, then I would expect customer expectations for better service to rise, bringing in more rapid innovation and quality.
At this point all the CAD houses have been sitting on decades old legacy products and basically charged rent for minimal added value. I would imagine with more frequent releases and more flexible licensing models customer value would increase.
For example if you pay for product x some opex in project and find it dissatisfactory then you can try in next project product y if it works better without paying the expensive yearly license.
Should be good for competition as well (Autodesk is not the only AEC software house, even though they seem the dominant gorilla).
> That really depends on how you budget
It depends on how big your budget is. If it's tight, the problem of purchasing expensive licenses at once may be a blocker - bad for the buyer AND the seller!
> This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
I don't see how this proves that SaaS is not flexible? You also forgot to account for the necessary expenses to run all this On-Prem stuff. You need an expensive team that you pay on a monthly basis --> OPEX
> Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
I agree with you that this sucks.
> Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
You can look at it this way but that still doesn't make it (not even "highly logical") the same. Sorry.
It depends on how big your budget is. If it's tight, the problem of purchasing expensive licenses at once may be a blocker - bad for the buyer AND the seller!
> This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
I don't see how this proves that SaaS is not flexible? You also forgot to account for the necessary expenses to run all this On-Prem stuff. You need an expensive team that you pay on a monthly basis --> OPEX
> Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
I agree with you that this sucks.
> Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
You can look at it this way but that still doesn't make it (not even "highly logical") the same. Sorry.
[deleted]
Large clients could probably figure out how to convert CAPEX to OPEX. If needed, using an intermediary leasing company.
That’s a valid request. However, continued support or bug fixes in that case might require a much higher upfront price than the one you might be used to.
While it’s easy to blame the developers of a product for real or perceived flaws, even if operated entirely offline software products interact with their environment.
Hence, a bug you’re having might be due to an operating system update, another third-party application, or even a specific hardware configuration.
I’d want the software company in question to be motivated to investigate and - if possible - fix the issue nonetheless, even if the underlying cause of the issue isn’t their fault.
While it’s easy to blame the developers of a product for real or perceived flaws, even if operated entirely offline software products interact with their environment.
Hence, a bug you’re having might be due to an operating system update, another third-party application, or even a specific hardware configuration.
I’d want the software company in question to be motivated to investigate and - if possible - fix the issue nonetheless, even if the underlying cause of the issue isn’t their fault.
I'm not against subscription pricing in principle, but in practice newly introduced subscription pricing pretty much always ends up being significantly more expensive than original pricing, and that's just greed.
Also there is often no longer an option to stop paying and just continue using your version, even if you've been paying for the subscription for years. Or they only let you use an old version so you'll need to actually downgrade if you stop paying. This innovation in user hostility I first encountered with Jetbrains.
Also there is often no longer an option to stop paying and just continue using your version, even if you've been paying for the subscription for years. Or they only let you use an old version so you'll need to actually downgrade if you stop paying. This innovation in user hostility I first encountered with Jetbrains.
Funny you mention JetBrains, they have the best subscription model of any software company I have used.
You pay a yearly fee to get the latest stuff within that year and you can use the current or any previous version forever if you stop paying.
There was a bit of mob forming with JetBrains first announced the subscription model and the current one developed by working with their customers.
This subscription model, combined with the largely open source codebase for their products means I'll probably be paying JetBrains for the rest of my life.
You pay a yearly fee to get the latest stuff within that year and you can use the current or any previous version forever if you stop paying.
There was a bit of mob forming with JetBrains first announced the subscription model and the current one developed by working with their customers.
This subscription model, combined with the largely open source codebase for their products means I'll probably be paying JetBrains for the rest of my life.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
If you don't renew your annual subscription, the latest version you have installed stops working and you have to downgrade to a one year old version. Just another way they lock you in to continue paying. Who in their right mind would willingly downgrade the software they're using.
If you don't renew your annual subscription, the latest version you have installed stops working and you have to downgrade to a one year old version. Just another way they lock you in to continue paying. Who in their right mind would willingly downgrade the software they're using.
You have chosen the tool which is not actually owned by you and does not have good substitution from another vendor. No wonder you have exposed yourself to rent-seeking and other things you don't want.
It's not a situation that can be solved by individual, I know. But a profession as a collective should group around open tools.
It's not a situation that can be solved by individual, I know. But a profession as a collective should group around open tools.
These 50 architectural firms should pool their money and create an Open Source Design Lab that can do for architecture and building construction what https://www.khronos.org/ has done for 3d.
I had the idea to create a company that helps organizations create these niche open source governance structures. While I love the result (more open source), I have no business or non-profit skills, and it sounds like a hard boring job. I do recommend someone explore this space, who knows it might not be that difficult.
I had the idea to create a company that helps organizations create these niche open source governance structures. While I love the result (more open source), I have no business or non-profit skills, and it sounds like a hard boring job. I do recommend someone explore this space, who knows it might not be that difficult.
Do you want it enough to not only pay as an upfront price what your lifetime value would have been as a subscription customer, but also cover the difference from other people being unwilling to?
A lot of people will subscribe for $50/month for something they'll be using for the next 5 years but won't pay anywhere near $3000 for it.
Particularly for work, where smaller monthly purchases are a lot less hassle to make than big once off purchases. It can be the difference between chucking it on the work credit card and having to go through the purchasing people.
A lot of people will subscribe for $50/month for something they'll be using for the next 5 years but won't pay anywhere near $3000 for it.
Particularly for work, where smaller monthly purchases are a lot less hassle to make than big once off purchases. It can be the difference between chucking it on the work credit card and having to go through the purchasing people.
It's all about bilking customers. It's the natural endgame for capitalism. Same idea with planned obsolesence. It's why big ticket items like washing machines and fridges last a fraction of the length as their counterparts from 60 years ago.
Interesting that the criticism is levelled at Autodesk 'the company' rather than that it admits what people don't want to say: Autocad is pretty good, and it will take a large and well funded entity to take it on. Using anti-trust tools may be the right tool here but the industry as a whole was quick to adapt to Autocad long before it became a dominant player.
Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it. It was essentially game over by the mid 1990's and since then they have only further consolidated their position. BIM hookups and the very large amount of software that somehow interacts with Autocad or has been written in AutoLisp are the kind of lock-in that newly minted start-ups can only dream of.
Improving on Autocad is going to be very hard, it will take a long time and even then you will probably lose the game. Acquisition is probably your best bet, unseating a dominant player that doesn't make any major mistakes is super hard.
I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than forcing the opening up of all file formats and interoperability information. And lots of that is already open.
Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it. It was essentially game over by the mid 1990's and since then they have only further consolidated their position. BIM hookups and the very large amount of software that somehow interacts with Autocad or has been written in AutoLisp are the kind of lock-in that newly minted start-ups can only dream of.
Improving on Autocad is going to be very hard, it will take a long time and even then you will probably lose the game. Acquisition is probably your best bet, unseating a dominant player that doesn't make any major mistakes is super hard.
I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than forcing the opening up of all file formats and interoperability information. And lots of that is already open.
I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features and improvements.
The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.
The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.
CAD software is hard. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement.
And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn.
As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.
And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn.
As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.
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.
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.
Blender and Fusion on the geometry editing level are completely different beasts. Blender uses and edits meshes. Fusion360 and other CAD software primarily work on boundary representations which effectively represents a volume as a set of equations for surfaces and topological graph data. It allows for some neat operations but also makes it extremely difficult to handle correctly and a lot of the work in handling these operations is covering edge cases.
"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.
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.
Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.
I am just a rudimentary 3D artist. I’ve used Cheetah3D, which is basically a “toy” app, for some branding work; but that’s about the extent of my exposure. I have never used Blender, or AutoDesk.
I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.
I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.
I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.
[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...
I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.
I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.
I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.
[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...
I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me.
Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.
Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.
Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use. It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.
Yes, exactly. I use 3ds Max occasionally and there's no other piece of software I've ever used that crashes so often. Every time I perform an action that I haven't tried before, I fully expect the program to crash and then I'll have to spend a few hours searching for workarounds. Working with large models or scenes takes so long to reload that every crash represents around 10 minutes of lost time, and I've easily had twenty - thirty crashes on a bad day.
You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics.
I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?
I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?
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 pro GPU). The crashiness often comes from other things. Maya likes to corrupt its preferences. Complaints against Maya mirror the complaints I see for 3ds Max and their CAD software.
Maya is one of the most horrible pieces software I've used. It's also simultaneously one of the best because it's so feature rich.
That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs.
Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.
That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs.
Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.
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...
(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...
From the letter that I saw (link's not working for me now) the criticism was specifically about Revit their BIM platform.
Yes, which of course re-inforces their position. Note that it was acquired and then tied hand-and-feet to the whole suite. Essentially, if you want 100% interop you're going to have to buy in to the whole eco-system. This is the crux of the anti-trust angle but I don't see what remedy they will want to make things better. Complaining is easy. Short of breaking up Autodesk it will remain the way it is and that is something that the EU will not be able to effect anyway since Autodesk is an American company.
Most people in the industry see it as the equivalent of the Microsoft tax: it's a license to do business.
Most people in the industry see it as the equivalent of the Microsoft tax: it's a license to do business.
You're funny.
Nobody cares about AutoCAD any longer. For whatever task you have at hand there are better alternatives. Only people stuck in a time loop use it.
That being said: The AEC has a deeply troubling problem – It's full of people living in yesterday. There is no innovation. Technical advances are ignored.
In the aviation business CAD was started as early as the 60s, with the auto business following soon. Architects still drafted buildings with a pencil in 2D until the early 2000s. There is just so much resistance burdening everything.
Nobody cares about AutoCAD any longer. For whatever task you have at hand there are better alternatives. Only people stuck in a time loop use it.
That being said: The AEC has a deeply troubling problem – It's full of people living in yesterday. There is no innovation. Technical advances are ignored.
In the aviation business CAD was started as early as the 60s, with the auto business following soon. Architects still drafted buildings with a pencil in 2D until the early 2000s. There is just so much resistance burdening everything.
>Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it
What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.
What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.
Man-years, not calendar years.
I think they're saying if you put together the hours spent by all developers who have ever worked on Autocad, it would add up to hundreds of years of work.
Oh I'm sure it's a hell of a lot more than 100 years of work! Especially if you count all the third party developers.
Here's John Walker's history of Autodesk:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience
The Autodesk File chronicles the history of Autodesk, Inc. and its principal product, AutoCAD, through contemporary documents edited and annotated by Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker. The book traces the company from the first glimmer of an idea in the minds of the founders, through start-up, initial public stock offering, and growth from a loose confederation of moonlighting individuals to a leader in the industry of computer aided design. The book is available in several different editions, suited for on- or off-line reading with various tools. Click on the titles of the section describing the edition you prefer to view it or download to your computer.
Here's John Walker's history of Autodesk:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience
The Autodesk File chronicles the history of Autodesk, Inc. and its principal product, AutoCAD, through contemporary documents edited and annotated by Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker. The book traces the company from the first glimmer of an idea in the minds of the founders, through start-up, initial public stock offering, and growth from a loose confederation of moonlighting individuals to a leader in the industry of computer aided design. The book is available in several different editions, suited for on- or off-line reading with various tools. Click on the titles of the section describing the edition you prefer to view it or download to your computer.
But what value does it bring, especially for architects (the topic of this discussion)?
Buildings are getting worse and worse, perhaps people should be creative again, throw their computers away and literally go back to the drawing board instead of pushing buttons.
Buildings are getting worse and worse, perhaps people should be creative again, throw their computers away and literally go back to the drawing board instead of pushing buttons.
Okay, well that can be your startup's idea, meanwhile Autodesk will keep chugging along with CAD.
I certainly hope all the people who signed that letter are safe and sound. Autodesk can come down pretty hard on their critics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-conference-...
>Blender Conference: Ton talks about Autodesk, ceiling crashes
>While Ton was talking about Autodesk during the Blender Conference, part of the ceiling of the Balie came crashing down, hitting him on the head. So remember folks: Autodesk is watching! ;-)
>Here's a picture of Ton after the event:
https://media.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/T...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-conference-...
>Blender Conference: Ton talks about Autodesk, ceiling crashes
>While Ton was talking about Autodesk during the Blender Conference, part of the ceiling of the Balie came crashing down, hitting him on the head. So remember folks: Autodesk is watching! ;-)
>Here's a picture of Ton after the event:
https://media.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/T...
You could swap Adobe in for Autodesk and almost the entire letter holds true. High cost, few improvements, few alternatives. There's a little more competition these days with Adobe at least.
I agree, Adobe lost me to their competition. Affinity Designer, Publisher and Photo replaced the Adobe Suite for me and while I miss some functionality, I don't miss the monthly payments. Maybe if I was a fulltime designer I would not have a problem with Adobe.
I dont know full time designer who doesnt have problem with adobe. They take monthly fee and updates to software are so minor especially on classic tools like indesign and photoshop. They dont tackle the important hard problems like performance and stability instead they add some new gimmicky features 5% of users ever use and make new software that again anyone rarely uses (except XD i guess). Adobe classic software has been on life support before the subscriptions even started. Nobody was upgrading CS3 even ran much faster than CS5 and had most of the features. Its probably the reason why they made the subscriptions.
I actually wouldn’t mind the subscription model if they priced you for daily use. $0.99/day to use Adobe suite would be perfect.
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 you could move the data out to other (better) tools.
That era is long gone, they have been removing exporter modules to all but their own formats.
Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare.
One thing that I find really frustrating about this is the bitrot that ensues. Better not hope to load work you did 10-15 years ago to get something useful out of it. That use case is not part of the AutoDesk plan.
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 you could move the data out to other (better) tools.
That era is long gone, they have been removing exporter modules to all but their own formats.
Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare.
One thing that I find really frustrating about this is the bitrot that ensues. Better not hope to load work you did 10-15 years ago to get something useful out of it. That use case is not part of the AutoDesk plan.
"Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare."
At least you can do it on a non-Autodesk affiliated software stack that more-or-less works https://www.opendesign.com/
At least you can do it on a non-Autodesk affiliated software stack that more-or-less works https://www.opendesign.com/
Nowadays you don't have to pay ODA anymore when can use GPL-3 LibreDWG. In the end opensource CAD will win, but it's still a long march.
If the options are to hook up to GPL-3 or pay ODA quite few software products probably go the ODA way still. ODA has quite a large development org to support their stack. I presume if maximum feature parity with DXF was a requirement then ODA would still win.
Open source is really great for innovation. I don't see much innovation or excitement in reverse engineering a stone-age proprietary black-box format.
It would be much better if those efforts were spent in an open source data interchange format.
Open source is really great for innovation. I don't see much innovation or excitement in reverse engineering a stone-age proprietary black-box format.
It would be much better if those efforts were spent in an open source data interchange format.
DXF is a too stupid and irregular format, JSON is much more regular and easier to read and write.
There are several open source alternative formats, but I never warmed up to them. They look very overarchitectured, like XML. But maybe I'll have to do some IFC converters later.
With all the constraints, dynamic blocks, mesh and solid formats it's very diverse, and Acad's new constraints system is extremely baroque and undocumented. A big C++ mess. Dynblocks and meshes also.
ACIS is extremely nice though. I recently reverse engineered their new ShapeManager format, which is just binary ACIS (SAB) plus history (ACSH).
There are several open source alternative formats, but I never warmed up to them. They look very overarchitectured, like XML. But maybe I'll have to do some IFC converters later.
With all the constraints, dynamic blocks, mesh and solid formats it's very diverse, and Acad's new constraints system is extremely baroque and undocumented. A big C++ mess. Dynblocks and meshes also.
ACIS is extremely nice though. I recently reverse engineered their new ShapeManager format, which is just binary ACIS (SAB) plus history (ACSH).
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.
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.
Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Rhino is genuinely fun to use. Best UX of by far of any program I've ever had the pleasure of using.
Blender is frustrating as heck to use in comparison.
Blender is frustrating as heck to use in comparison.
Blender has had actually a revamp of the UX exactly because of this sentiment... Might be worth trying again..?
Blender is great, but setting UX considerations aside, I don't think their NURBS engine is on par with that of Rhino (features like trimmed NURBS, NURBS fillets, etc ...)
Rhino is primarily command line based, it is a perfect mix of CLI and GUI.
Also it is 4-up by default and designed around that paradigm. I don't understand how people stand using modeling programs that only have 1 viewport, but they are common enough that I presume everyone gets by.
Also it is 4-up by default and designed around that paradigm. I don't understand how people stand using modeling programs that only have 1 viewport, but they are common enough that I presume everyone gets by.
And Sofitmage, which they promptly shut down after they acquired them. Basically, they bought all of the standard tools out there (yes, even max) and became a dominant player. There's an old interview floating around with one of the autodesk founders - he explains their strategy (was?) is to straight-up buy into both market share and competition.
Is rhino actually used for serious CAD work? From what I‘ve read/heard I thought it was mostly something used in student projects or design explorations because of grasshopper‘s visual programming functionality
To add to what the other user has said, it is used at a number of firms, but primarily in early stages of design. It's actually very solid for actual drafting (Rhino originated out of an AutoCAD plugin), and does freeform surface modeling very well. It's the middle piece, bringing the design into a set of drawings, that is the sticking point, and something that Revit automates very well. It's not that Rhino can't do it, it's that it's a very manual process that requires a lot more steps and structured process than most firms are willing to invest. Also, the kind of work you'd use Rhino for doesn't flow well to other downstream CAD or BIM software that architects typically use. Yes, you can easily export linework, but at that point, you might as well keep it in Rhino.
Somewhat unrelated, but Rhino's SDK is really solid and gives a ton of access to the software. It's amazing some of the things that can be done with it, and Rhino as a whole, but at the same time it's producing construction documents that's where the rubber meets the road as far as Architecture is concerned.
Source: Former architecture student and Rhino plugin developer
Somewhat unrelated, but Rhino's SDK is really solid and gives a ton of access to the software. It's amazing some of the things that can be done with it, and Rhino as a whole, but at the same time it's producing construction documents that's where the rubber meets the road as far as Architecture is concerned.
Source: Former architecture student and Rhino plugin developer
Yes it is. I've seen it used professionally at more than one company.
Depends on the firm, but it's definitely used. Specifically Rhino/Grasshopper get used a lot for concept, schematic design, and then Revit gets used for design development and onward, especially at companies that work a lot with complex geometry (Zaha, SHoP).
That makes sense, I have no clue about how architects actually work but I imagine Revit et al. have a ton of features that you would probably miss in Rhino when it gets to working out the nitty-gritty details of floorplans, generating section drawings, or working with BIM features?
https://www.visualarq.com/ adds BIM tools to Rhino (and the total price of perpetual licenses for Rhino+VisualARQ is still significantly less than a year's Revit subscription)
Sounds perfect, but I've yet to hear of any company using this plug-in!
Personally I also have hope for the interesting hybrids that are continually coming out that are trying to create a seamless pipeline between Revit and Rhino: Google's Flux (which failed), Speckle, RhinoInside.
I also hacked up my own crude solution, which was to continually run a flask server in the background, and then pass json strings between Rhino, Revit, and Jupyter. I do a lot of analysis work (building energy and environmental simulation/optimization), so wanted a solution that gave me access to the scientific python ecosystem.
Personally I also have hope for the interesting hybrids that are continually coming out that are trying to create a seamless pipeline between Revit and Rhino: Google's Flux (which failed), Speckle, RhinoInside.
I also hacked up my own crude solution, which was to continually run a flask server in the background, and then pass json strings between Rhino, Revit, and Jupyter. I do a lot of analysis work (building energy and environmental simulation/optimization), so wanted a solution that gave me access to the scientific python ecosystem.
Yeah exactly. You can easily generate any orthographic views, cut sections, use templates for common building elements and more in Revit.
On the other hand, everyone loves the flexibility, and UX of Rhino/Grasshopper.And (for now?) Rhino has the market cornered on structural, energy, and environmental simulation and optimization plug-ins, just because data-management is so much easier in Grasshopper then Revit's equivalent visual scripting language (Dynamo).
On the other hand, everyone loves the flexibility, and UX of Rhino/Grasshopper.And (for now?) Rhino has the market cornered on structural, energy, and environmental simulation and optimization plug-ins, just because data-management is so much easier in Grasshopper then Revit's equivalent visual scripting language (Dynamo).
Depends on the industry.
For automotive and even ship design a lot of studios are using it (even not openly, but in a "secret" manner).
In AEC many students nowadays use it during university. Some offices use it as well, and if only for Grasshopper. GH is a really great piece of software and you can e.g. even use it with Archicad nowadays.
For automotive and even ship design a lot of studios are using it (even not openly, but in a "secret" manner).
In AEC many students nowadays use it during university. Some offices use it as well, and if only for Grasshopper. GH is a really great piece of software and you can e.g. even use it with Archicad nowadays.
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Fun fact: Everybody who says "We are not using Rhino" lies.
All the big studios might be using Autodesk products in the front, but I know of some who have a senior engineer who has a secret PC in some attic with Rhino installed. If you need more complex tasks to be done the engineer goes to "smoke a cig". ;)
All the big studios might be using Autodesk products in the front, but I know of some who have a senior engineer who has a secret PC in some attic with Rhino installed. If you need more complex tasks to be done the engineer goes to "smoke a cig". ;)
At least in the 3DS Max/Maya space Blender is seeming to make more and more headway these days.
cough t-splines cough
Would be great, if architects invested in free & open source software:
https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre
https://blenderbim.org/
https://community.osarch.org/
https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre
https://blenderbim.org/
https://community.osarch.org/
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.
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 for a successful open source effort.
Yes, there is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, but every time I try to use them, I give up in the end and whip up something in Fusion360.
Yes, there is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, but every time I try to use them, I give up in the end and whip up something in Fusion360.
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 collaboration with IBM tend to make use of xlc.
No JIT compiler, or GC implementations, for the pure open source managed runtimes tend to be on the same ball park of the work going on Java, .NET and JavaScript, all sponsored by deep pockets corporations.
No CUDA based open source clone beats NVidia and PGI compilers targeting NVidia hardware.
What most open source compilers have is good enough performance so that a large part of the dev population, that isn't willing to pay for tooling, doesn't care anyway.
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 collaboration with IBM tend to make use of xlc.
No JIT compiler, or GC implementations, for the pure open source managed runtimes tend to be on the same ball park of the work going on Java, .NET and JavaScript, all sponsored by deep pockets corporations.
No CUDA based open source clone beats NVidia and PGI compilers targeting NVidia hardware.
What most open source compilers have is good enough performance so that a large part of the dev population, that isn't willing to pay for tooling, doesn't care anyway.
Except that, for CUDA, they do. https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas exhibited significantly higher performance than Nvidia's own SGEMM kernel, and https://github.com/mangpo/swizzle-inventor beats all named competitors in the non-texture-memory-input-using implemention. Namely, NVIDIA Performance Primitives, ArrayFire, and Iandola et al ( https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2013.6738436 ).
As for GC implementations: did you consider ZGC in that statement? It's GPL 2.
As for GC implementations: did you consider ZGC in that statement? It's GPL 2.
Yes I did "all sponsored by deep pockets corporations."
Take their money out of the equation and the quality would be as the "state of the art GC" that CPython and MRI Ruby enjoy.
Take their money out of the equation and the quality would be as the "state of the art GC" that CPython and MRI Ruby enjoy.
I see. Your sentence structure is a bit confusing and was successful in causing me to parse it as if you were referring to Java, .Net, and JavaScript with pure open source managed runtimes.
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.
OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.
> At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from proprietary to OSS with a different makefile.
Assuming you don't rely on compiler-specific features.
Assuming you don't rely on compiler-specific features.
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.
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.
I guess people who can do the math would like to get paid properly for their efforts.
I think a big part of why this happens is that a lot of the fundamental math of CAD doesn't have good answers - everything is heuristics and approximations to within a tolerance.
You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels. You won't even know what the common edge-cases are until you start getting user reports of things failing, so you'll need to be doing this development with a large community of users.
There is no closed-form formula to tell how long a NURBS curve is. Offsets of NURBS curves are not NURBS curves. Likewise, intersecting NURBS surfaces produces intersection curves that are not possible to represent as NURBS curves.
So something as simple as a fillet is impossible to exactly produce in like 3 ways. Booleans then add the joy of topology to the mix. It's all heuristics and approximations and dirty hacks.
You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels. You won't even know what the common edge-cases are until you start getting user reports of things failing, so you'll need to be doing this development with a large community of users.
There is no closed-form formula to tell how long a NURBS curve is. Offsets of NURBS curves are not NURBS curves. Likewise, intersecting NURBS surfaces produces intersection curves that are not possible to represent as NURBS curves.
So something as simple as a fillet is impossible to exactly produce in like 3 ways. Booleans then add the joy of topology to the mix. It's all heuristics and approximations and dirty hacks.
While this is true of programs like Rhino, it's not as true for fusion360. There are no NURBS in fusion360.
I would guess that the fusion360 kernel is very focussed on deterministic solutions, specially being constraint based, where the errors in heuristics would multiply across the history. Interestingly, in situations where the math has more guesswork, as I think lofts and such are, fusion can be really quite bad.
Rhino is amazingly good (and it's many many years old).
Fusion360 is just a baby but it's pretty good for what it does. Once you use constraints based CAD it's hard to go back.
While Fusion 360 does have many non-NURBS procedural surfaces, they definitely also have NURBS. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to import an IGES or step file.
Using a solids kernel with procedural surfaces can help many cases, as you keep the modeling tree around and can recompute portions at higher tolerance as needed. However that's just another cumbersome workaround to the fundamental problem that the math doesn't have clean solutions.
Using a solids kernel with procedural surfaces can help many cases, as you keep the modeling tree around and can recompute portions at higher tolerance as needed. However that's just another cumbersome workaround to the fundamental problem that the math doesn't have clean solutions.
I guess there is a silly amount of work to make a usefull CAD program. FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge. No assembly either or sheet bending tool.
I tried to use FreeCAD but gave up. It is too limited even for simple designs. I would rather use paper and ruler since you can't easely change stuff anyway.
I tried to use FreeCAD but gave up. It is too limited even for simple designs. I would rather use paper and ruler since you can't easely change stuff anyway.
>FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge.
Unfortunately since I have only used FreeCAD and no other CAD tool I may not know what you are talking about but it is possible to create a spreadsheet inside FreeCAD and give each cell an alias which makes the spreadsheet basically act like a hashmap/dictionary. Every input field in Freecad can be filled based upon a formula. You can just <SpreadsheetName>.<variableName> as the formula and then changing the value of the spreadsheet cell will change the part.
>No assembly either or sheet bending tool.
There are addons for that and I agree that having a dedicated addon for everything is bad because now you need to know whether an addon exists for your usecase and how to find it. Someone who fires up FreeCAD for the first time is going to get disappointed.
Honestly, my biggest problem with FreeCAD is that it crashes and freezes on basic operations like chamfers and fillets. When an operation takes 20 seconds the entire application just stops responding. If the fillet cannot be created there is basically a 25% chance that it will crash. If your fillet radius is too large it will simply show nothing so now you have to play around via binary search to find the maximum value for the fillet.
The other problem is that curved surfaces are hard to do in FreeCAD in general. Of course there is an addon for that which makes it easier but I already have a backlog of addons to try out...
Unfortunately since I have only used FreeCAD and no other CAD tool I may not know what you are talking about but it is possible to create a spreadsheet inside FreeCAD and give each cell an alias which makes the spreadsheet basically act like a hashmap/dictionary. Every input field in Freecad can be filled based upon a formula. You can just <SpreadsheetName>.<variableName> as the formula and then changing the value of the spreadsheet cell will change the part.
>No assembly either or sheet bending tool.
There are addons for that and I agree that having a dedicated addon for everything is bad because now you need to know whether an addon exists for your usecase and how to find it. Someone who fires up FreeCAD for the first time is going to get disappointed.
Honestly, my biggest problem with FreeCAD is that it crashes and freezes on basic operations like chamfers and fillets. When an operation takes 20 seconds the entire application just stops responding. If the fillet cannot be created there is basically a 25% chance that it will crash. If your fillet radius is too large it will simply show nothing so now you have to play around via binary search to find the maximum value for the fillet.
The other problem is that curved surfaces are hard to do in FreeCAD in general. Of course there is an addon for that which makes it easier but I already have a backlog of addons to try out...
Ye I agree. I tried the assembly addon but I could not get the flow and it did not feel native to the app. If I remember correctly the wiki named three alternative addons.
Honestly my biggest problem with FreeCAD might be that I have already learned Solid Edge and Solid Works in school and at work.
Learning to use CAD software is a nightmare and I rather not do it again.
Since I only do wood work out of work it is just simpler to draw by hand than trying to learn FreeCAD properly to maybe learn that it can't do what I want anyway.
The "auto dimension tool" (I do not know the real name) is a magic ruler that let you change dimensions and inter object relations by just clicking stuff. It introduces constrains too. I understand why it would be a nightmare to program.
Honestly my biggest problem with FreeCAD might be that I have already learned Solid Edge and Solid Works in school and at work.
Learning to use CAD software is a nightmare and I rather not do it again.
Since I only do wood work out of work it is just simpler to draw by hand than trying to learn FreeCAD properly to maybe learn that it can't do what I want anyway.
The "auto dimension tool" (I do not know the real name) is a magic ruler that let you change dimensions and inter object relations by just clicking stuff. It introduces constrains too. I understand why it would be a nightmare to program.
The problem with open source is that developers mostly want to scratch their own itch. Understanding someone else's problem requires communication, which is something most developers prefer to avoid, so it seems.
CAD is both math heavy and UI heavy. Getting a good UI right is very hard for an open source project.
Fusion 360 isn’t a Solidworks competitor, not even close that would be Autodesk Inventor.
Yes Fusion 360 is very easy to use but it is because it’s basically sketchup with basic CAM, simulation and parametric modeling baked in.
Yes Fusion 360 is very easy to use but it is because it’s basically sketchup with basic CAM, simulation and parametric modeling baked in.
The moat autodesk has is surreal. In AEC atleast, students learn with Autodesk softwares in university and colleges.
The softwares (autocad, revit, maya, etc., many others) itself is complex, require domain know-how to build competing product. I don't see how anyone can compete with them anymore.
They have the industry by the balls, and they know it. Competing against Autodesk is like competing against Google in search.
The softwares (autocad, revit, maya, etc., many others) itself is complex, require domain know-how to build competing product. I don't see how anyone can compete with them anymore.
They have the industry by the balls, and they know it. Competing against Autodesk is like competing against Google in search.
Something mildly related which I found interesting from a recent talk by Ryan Singer is that Christopher Alexander of "Pattern Language" fame create some unusual architectural design software called GateKeeper that guides sketching based on prompts from a pattern language:
Gatekeeper demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o
Ryan Singer's talk "Christopher Alexander: A Primer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsTZXT0FlM
Gatekeeper demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o
Ryan Singer's talk "Christopher Alexander: A Primer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsTZXT0FlM
Most buildings today can still be effective designed and constructed from pen+paper drafting technology that adhere pre computer-revolution standards. They're not F35s. My understanding from architects/professors 20 years ago is the education pipelines has dramatically shifted away from practical training (i.e just solid drafting skills) while remaining some of the longer professional/masters programs. Most graduate simply aren't very technical in the first place and nature of work allows you to get away with it. Trades + associated industries involved in actual building aren't much better. Many in the industry, most are not what you consider "developer" types eager to adopt new technical features and workflows. There's just too much conservative regulations and stubborn old hands at the top of the industry.
Compared to other design fields where technical tools are everything for actually making the thing, there's a lot more excitement and experimentation in software progression in those industries, many of which are _tiny_ compared to the behemoth that is global building/construction industry. That said, Arch software aren't bad, they're serviceable but extremely unexciting. Adobes SaaS is pretty shit but they occasionally introduce "thank god" features that makes tasks 10 years ago 10X easier, can't really say the same for Revit and associated arch software with exception of ArchViz software since that just cannibalizes from rendering industry.
Compared to other design fields where technical tools are everything for actually making the thing, there's a lot more excitement and experimentation in software progression in those industries, many of which are _tiny_ compared to the behemoth that is global building/construction industry. That said, Arch software aren't bad, they're serviceable but extremely unexciting. Adobes SaaS is pretty shit but they occasionally introduce "thank god" features that makes tasks 10 years ago 10X easier, can't really say the same for Revit and associated arch software with exception of ArchViz software since that just cannibalizes from rendering industry.
Depends on the firm. Zaha Hadid software requirements would make your head spin. You are clearly not producing any of her (and her teams) buildings with only Pen and Paper.
Starchitects who can get parametric designs built for $$$ are outliers, and considering how these buildings have failed to perform in real life, computation is a enabling a lot of bad designs. I know ppl that that interned at Hadid 15 years ago, they mostly just used Rhino / Maya and dodgy exports to cad for construction drawings. The real software dependency is all the structural analysis behind the scene to optimize design for costs, the former can be negated via expensive overengineering, so the latter is ultimately what makes these designs buildable in market economies.
I used to work for The foundry (now foundry.com) Who i believe are the last people to "beat" autodesk at their own game(well discreet).
Autodesk sold Flint/Flame/Inferno, which are high end compositor systems (Think photoshop but for movies) They were expensive bis of kit.
Foundry's nuke is a program that runs on normal workstations and doesn't require any special hardware to run (it also means that it can't run in real time like the Flames could)
What was the secret to Nuke's success? It was cheaper than flame, it was equally as capable, and apple killed Shake. We worked closely with the artists to put in features that wanted. Offered discounts for volume (standard) offered brilliant support[1], and was generally far more responsive than autodesk (who basically only shipped a patch if you were ILM)
Foundry is the incumbent now, and is being eaten by fusion (ironically, considering we pretty much drove them out of buisness)
[1] including fixing a script that made a "magic wand" for a sexy version of harry potter.
It might have changed, but when I was there the support was top notch.
Autodesk sold Flint/Flame/Inferno, which are high end compositor systems (Think photoshop but for movies) They were expensive bis of kit.
Foundry's nuke is a program that runs on normal workstations and doesn't require any special hardware to run (it also means that it can't run in real time like the Flames could)
What was the secret to Nuke's success? It was cheaper than flame, it was equally as capable, and apple killed Shake. We worked closely with the artists to put in features that wanted. Offered discounts for volume (standard) offered brilliant support[1], and was generally far more responsive than autodesk (who basically only shipped a patch if you were ILM)
Foundry is the incumbent now, and is being eaten by fusion (ironically, considering we pretty much drove them out of buisness)
[1] including fixing a script that made a "magic wand" for a sexy version of harry potter.
It might have changed, but when I was there the support was top notch.
Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software, but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and expensive, a key step is settling on a standard format for data exchange. When and during the time Google owned SketchUp, they made Collada/.dae export part of the community product, and eg Blender has really great support for Collada import (worked out of the box for a non-trivial project of mine - thx Blender and SketchUp/Google!). Of course, meanwhile SketchUp has been discontinued as a free desktop product (being offered only as online hobby software for 3D printing models, like Tinkercad, instead), and Autodesk has introduced FBX as oh-so-much better alternative. I'm just saying that if you want competition and innovation, as a customer you must demand open standards and use workflows based on open file formats to get anywhere.
There are many standards. Unfortunately the most used ones are called DXF (Autocad file) and RVT (Revit file).
There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes
Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.
There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes
Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.
There is a standard format for data exchange [1], what became BIM didn't have to be different to it but at least they kept the geometry definitions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303
If people didn’t use Autodesk’s software I wouldn’t have to pay a surreal amount of money to use their binary API so my cad program can write DWG.
But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep changing it slightly every year, so a third party implementation would always be slightly behind.
This type of moat is exactly the type of moat every business dreams of and tries to create, and the only reason it’s bad when Autodesk does it is because they are so big it actually hurts competition on a large scale.
I can’t see a good “open” replacement for DWGs (DXF, IFC, ...) on the horizon, sadly.
But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep changing it slightly every year, so a third party implementation would always be slightly behind.
This type of moat is exactly the type of moat every business dreams of and tries to create, and the only reason it’s bad when Autodesk does it is because they are so big it actually hurts competition on a large scale.
I can’t see a good “open” replacement for DWGs (DXF, IFC, ...) on the horizon, sadly.
LibreDWG comes to rescue, and for better formats JSON is widely used.
There are multiple open reverse-engineer efforts, but Autodesk changes the format every single year, and customers expect to be able to read drawings immediately in the latest format. This is deliberate by Autodesk I think.
LibreDWG is also GPL I believe with no option for commercial?
LibreDWG is also GPL I believe with no option for commercial?
Autodesk changes the format only every 3 years, and since r2007 the changes were minimal. Haven't looked into the r2021 changes yet.
Afaik only LibreDWG matches Acad and ODA/Theiga, the rest does only DXF, no DWG write and a minimal numbers of objects.
LibreDWG only offers GPL, but many CAD packages thrive with the GPL: Qcad, FreeCad, SolveSpace, Blender.
Afaik only LibreDWG matches Acad and ODA/Theiga, the rest does only DXF, no DWG write and a minimal numbers of objects.
LibreDWG only offers GPL, but many CAD packages thrive with the GPL: Qcad, FreeCad, SolveSpace, Blender.
They release their own library (ObjectARX/RealDWG) yearly in sync with the AutoCad releases, and at least call the format “DWg 2018“,2019,2020 and so on. The library (I think) refuses to open a 2019 file with version 2018. Even if the problem just occurred every 3 years that too would be unacceptable of course.
We are developing a proprietary bespoke program, it’s not possible to use GPL style licenses, nor will the niche filfilled by it ever be filled by an OSS program.
We are developing a proprietary bespoke program, it’s not possible to use GPL style licenses, nor will the niche filfilled by it ever be filled by an OSS program.
> JSON is widely used.
Not sure I understand how JSON fits into the discussion tbh. Our users don’t decide which format they receive drawings in. They need to handle all the major formats. Our users can’t ask their customer “can you send me a dxf/step/ifc/... instead of the dwg you sent me?”, sadly it’s just not possible.
Not sure I understand how JSON fits into the discussion tbh. Our users don’t decide which format they receive drawings in. They need to handle all the major formats. Our users can’t ask their customer “can you send me a dxf/step/ifc/... instead of the dwg you sent me?”, sadly it’s just not possible.
What CAD program is this?
I’ve switched some users at my work away from Autocad for 2D stuff to DraftSight and have had no problems opening dwg.
An annual DraftSight license is $180 or something similarly trifling.
I’ve switched some users at my work away from Autocad for 2D stuff to DraftSight and have had no problems opening dwg.
An annual DraftSight license is $180 or something similarly trifling.
A “narrow” cad+fem package for building components. It’s not a general cad program even though it can be used as such.
If DraftSight opens the latest dwgs correctly I’d expect it to contain Autodesks dwg dlls.
If DraftSight opens the latest dwgs correctly I’d expect it to contain Autodesks dwg dlls.
Ah right, thanks for clearing that up.
You see this pattern for all professional tools, which have a very narrow expert audience. After a period of open competition, that for most fields ended in the 80s and 90s, a closed source competitor emerges which becomes the industry standard. Massive moats, file formats, plugin investment, teaching of the tools in schools etc. prevent real competition, and the company becomes a fantastic cash cow. In the last decade most transitioned to the software as a service model, to better extract the rent they think they are "due" from the professional community.
This is the type of setting where open source simply cannot subsist: the professional users are usually not programmers, the number of people using the features is limited (but for them, they are essential) and the expertise to develop them is very specialized. Furthermore, clients rarely need customized development done. Therefore, no developer community can form around an open-source competitor, comprised of either enthusiasts or professional providers of open source solutions. Photoshop vs. Gimp is a good example of all these pathologies.
I think the solution to such problems would be marrying the open source philosophy with the commercial solution that allows developers to charge for licensing. We give up the „free to use” liberty for a limited time, allowing the "open" source developer to charge for the software like a commercial software vendor. Source is provided, and all contributors can operate on similar terms, charging for their patch for a limited time.
After 3-5 years, the license reverts to a GPL compatible, that allows anyone the full four liberties, or, at their discretion, fork a commercial-open-source competitor for another 5 years period.
This way, a flagship commercial product could be developed by a company that attracts the most users and has the best features, and that company has a number of years to recoup it's investment by making it's userbase pay for those features in licensing fees. Once it's exclusivity period ends, in order to maintain it's commercial dominance the company must innovate and improve the product, otherwise people would use an older version for free, or a competitor can emerge that can disrupt its rent seeking by forking the old version as a new „commercial open source” project with it's own 5 year exclusivity period.
This is the type of setting where open source simply cannot subsist: the professional users are usually not programmers, the number of people using the features is limited (but for them, they are essential) and the expertise to develop them is very specialized. Furthermore, clients rarely need customized development done. Therefore, no developer community can form around an open-source competitor, comprised of either enthusiasts or professional providers of open source solutions. Photoshop vs. Gimp is a good example of all these pathologies.
I think the solution to such problems would be marrying the open source philosophy with the commercial solution that allows developers to charge for licensing. We give up the „free to use” liberty for a limited time, allowing the "open" source developer to charge for the software like a commercial software vendor. Source is provided, and all contributors can operate on similar terms, charging for their patch for a limited time.
After 3-5 years, the license reverts to a GPL compatible, that allows anyone the full four liberties, or, at their discretion, fork a commercial-open-source competitor for another 5 years period.
This way, a flagship commercial product could be developed by a company that attracts the most users and has the best features, and that company has a number of years to recoup it's investment by making it's userbase pay for those features in licensing fees. Once it's exclusivity period ends, in order to maintain it's commercial dominance the company must innovate and improve the product, otherwise people would use an older version for free, or a competitor can emerge that can disrupt its rent seeking by forking the old version as a new „commercial open source” project with it's own 5 year exclusivity period.
You mean something a bit like - what's the word? - a patent?
That won't solve the problem, because this is not a software problem. It's an economic problem.
To maximise profit you need to dominate a market by 1) locking out competitors 2) forcing customers to give you money 3) spending as little as possible on continued development.
This happens because that's how capitalism works. It's an inevitable consequence. Effectively it becomes a form of rent-seeking, where corporations charge their "tenants" money for access to a resource. And as long as the product sort of works some of the time corporations can claim customers are getting something of value.
But really these corporations are like bad landlords, charging users a huge monthly rent and never fixing the leaky roof.
The answer would be more along the lines of a user's association - effectively a "union" for users which was prepared to fight aggressive and expensive class actions to challenge ridiculous licensing terms and make corporations accountable for consequential damage and lost time caused by bugs.
This may sound extreme, but when there's no competition - because competing products have been bought and shut down or left to rot - it's a de facto antitrust situation. Governments are unlikely to enforce this, so class actions to challenge unreasonable contract terms and assert that in fact there are obligations towards users may be the only way to fix this.
That won't solve the problem, because this is not a software problem. It's an economic problem.
To maximise profit you need to dominate a market by 1) locking out competitors 2) forcing customers to give you money 3) spending as little as possible on continued development.
This happens because that's how capitalism works. It's an inevitable consequence. Effectively it becomes a form of rent-seeking, where corporations charge their "tenants" money for access to a resource. And as long as the product sort of works some of the time corporations can claim customers are getting something of value.
But really these corporations are like bad landlords, charging users a huge monthly rent and never fixing the leaky roof.
The answer would be more along the lines of a user's association - effectively a "union" for users which was prepared to fight aggressive and expensive class actions to challenge ridiculous licensing terms and make corporations accountable for consequential damage and lost time caused by bugs.
This may sound extreme, but when there's no competition - because competing products have been bought and shut down or left to rot - it's a de facto antitrust situation. Governments are unlikely to enforce this, so class actions to challenge unreasonable contract terms and assert that in fact there are obligations towards users may be the only way to fix this.
Lock-in is not inherent to capitalism, see for example how open platforms like Linux competed successfully with closed platforms like Windows, with all their resources.
So there is something particular with, say, operating systems, webservers or browsers that allow open source alternatives to thrive, while the same is not for tools aimed at professions outside the software/programmer/IT realm.
Governmental solutions are unlikely to help.
What I mean by my proposal above is not to reinvent patents, but to make copyright work for the benefit of society. A limited form of copyright, adapted to the digital age, with a much shorter duration and source code available.
So there is something particular with, say, operating systems, webservers or browsers that allow open source alternatives to thrive, while the same is not for tools aimed at professions outside the software/programmer/IT realm.
Governmental solutions are unlikely to help.
What I mean by my proposal above is not to reinvent patents, but to make copyright work for the benefit of society. A limited form of copyright, adapted to the digital age, with a much shorter duration and source code available.
Excuse me. This is not intrinsically how capitalism works. Capitalism can exist in free and non-free markets. Capitalism in a free market is efficient if property rights which exist and are enforced, there are low barriers to entry, and there are low transaction costs. You have just described capitalism with barriers to entry. At this point you have left free-market capitalism, and entered a world with no particular term of art describing it. I would say it is best called by an epithet like "crony capitalism."
The operation of free markets is Intro to Econ material. You should pursue a remedial course that you may understand this before proposing remedies, because while some of your proposed remedies hit near the mark, I think this is by accident.
The most effective remedy is competition, achieved once you can dismantle the barriers to entry. You mention antitrust in passing, which is the key policy-based approach, and regulatory provisions against trusts are mentioned in passing in the article — but mostly you focus on a "union" of customers, and I have grave doubts to its efficacy in practice. There is a massive coordination problem here, thousands of firms and their legal departments who must agree to risk substantial consequences individually in order (denying themselves key software) to achieve the collective goal.
The operation of free markets is Intro to Econ material. You should pursue a remedial course that you may understand this before proposing remedies, because while some of your proposed remedies hit near the mark, I think this is by accident.
The most effective remedy is competition, achieved once you can dismantle the barriers to entry. You mention antitrust in passing, which is the key policy-based approach, and regulatory provisions against trusts are mentioned in passing in the article — but mostly you focus on a "union" of customers, and I have grave doubts to its efficacy in practice. There is a massive coordination problem here, thousands of firms and their legal departments who must agree to risk substantial consequences individually in order (denying themselves key software) to achieve the collective goal.
Before prescribing remedial education, perhaps you could consider the root word of "capitalism" a bit more carefully? "Capital" has its own interests, but those don't include free markets, which latter I hope we can agree is more important for the innovation upon which humanity relies. Properly understood, all "capitalism" is eventually revealed as what you're calling "crony capitalism". Temporarily the owners of capital and their sockpuppets might have to pretend to value free markets. Unless the local political or ethical system is quite incorruptible, capitalists' true colors are eventually seen. After all, they have the money, by definition. Many people will do unethical things (e.g. write tax codes under which corporations pay no taxes) in exchange for money.
What you describe isn't a "capital" thing. What you describe is a "power" thing. It describes princes and bureaucracies at least as well as it does capital, and there are plenty of investments into capital in the world which do not take place at these massive scales (indeed, probably the majority).
This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government interventions to "fix" this concentration of power, delivering it into the hands of even-more-powerful politicians.
This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government interventions to "fix" this concentration of power, delivering it into the hands of even-more-powerful politicians.
OK, sure, royalty is also bad. We're not talking about that, and we're not talking about e.g. a small shop owner plowing some profits back into improvements to her shop or whatever you mean by "investments into capital". We're talking about the owners of vast wealth, and what they have done from the moment they or their ancestors acquired that vast wealth. They treat customers (and employees) as property and their custom (and labor) as rents to which capitalists are due by birthright, which is not humane.
Now I realize, it's a bit silly to invoke such high-minded concepts in defense of the commercial interests of a group who themselves enjoy a lucrative state-supplied professional monopoly. Architects who don't like the terms under which software is available should hire some programmers. Programmers don't have a monopoly from the state, so as Autodesk knows they are relatively cheaper to hire than architects. If the architects try to lobby their way to a better commercial circumstance, which the effort described in TFA seems to indicate they will, they're likely to find themselves out-bribed by their monopolist vendor. I'm just opposed to attempted re-definitions of the word "capitalism". It is what we have seen it always to be, nothing more and nothing less.
Now I realize, it's a bit silly to invoke such high-minded concepts in defense of the commercial interests of a group who themselves enjoy a lucrative state-supplied professional monopoly. Architects who don't like the terms under which software is available should hire some programmers. Programmers don't have a monopoly from the state, so as Autodesk knows they are relatively cheaper to hire than architects. If the architects try to lobby their way to a better commercial circumstance, which the effort described in TFA seems to indicate they will, they're likely to find themselves out-bribed by their monopolist vendor. I'm just opposed to attempted re-definitions of the word "capitalism". It is what we have seen it always to be, nothing more and nothing less.
Check out http://www.osarch.org/ which is a quite vibrant community of open source architecture software and users.
Architects can use Blender. It has better BIM support than all the commercial offerings, better rendering, is free, stable, cross-platform, etc. Not brilliant on drawing output, but that is under active development and is already OK. You can also export to FreeCAD and then do drawings from there.
Architects can use Blender. It has better BIM support than all the commercial offerings, better rendering, is free, stable, cross-platform, etc. Not brilliant on drawing output, but that is under active development and is already OK. You can also export to FreeCAD and then do drawings from there.
An interesting counterpoint comes from Autodesk Life Sciences which outlines the need for Bio/Nano software development: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-018-2009-5
Abstract: "There is a digital revolution taking place and biotechnology companies are slow to adapt. Many pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and industrial bio-production companies believe that software must be developed and maintained in-house and that data are more secure on internal servers than on the cloud. In fact, most companies in this space continue to employ large IT and software teams and acquire computational infrastructure in the form of in-house servers. This is due to a fear of the cloud not sufficiently protecting in-house resources and the belief that their software is valuable IP. Over the next decade, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, with agile software teams, will quickly become a compelling competitive advantage. Biotechnology companies that do not adopt the new regime may lose on key business metrics such as return on invested capital, revenue, profitability, and eventually market share."
Abstract: "There is a digital revolution taking place and biotechnology companies are slow to adapt. Many pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and industrial bio-production companies believe that software must be developed and maintained in-house and that data are more secure on internal servers than on the cloud. In fact, most companies in this space continue to employ large IT and software teams and acquire computational infrastructure in the form of in-house servers. This is due to a fear of the cloud not sufficiently protecting in-house resources and the belief that their software is valuable IP. Over the next decade, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, with agile software teams, will quickly become a compelling competitive advantage. Biotechnology companies that do not adopt the new regime may lose on key business metrics such as return on invested capital, revenue, profitability, and eventually market share."
I'm surprised nobody in the Eurozone has raised similar issues about Adobe.
Currently in the Eurozone you need to submit autodesk formats to get your building permissions and certifications approved.
Architecture is a protected profession in the EU and you’ll be surprised just how many architects from construction firms do nothing more than to trace plans they got from interior design and other architecture firms in a PDF format in autocad.
There are a few gems on the autodesk forums where people asking for line trace capability then getting replies that basically saying well if it did that well be out of a job.
Architecture is a protected profession in the EU and you’ll be surprised just how many architects from construction firms do nothing more than to trace plans they got from interior design and other architecture firms in a PDF format in autocad.
There are a few gems on the autodesk forums where people asking for line trace capability then getting replies that basically saying well if it did that well be out of a job.
Having recently interacted with Architects that are strictly stuck on using Autocad (that's all they know, from University and through their whole career), I can testify to the accuracy of that statement.
Also, trying to communicate with them with anything outside of a PDF is damn near impossible. The very idea of them sending a 3D file to their customers scares them shitless.
Also, trying to communicate with them with anything outside of a PDF is damn near impossible. The very idea of them sending a 3D file to their customers scares them shitless.
I put in my contracts with architects that I want the source files to any drawings they make. Not a single one has ever refused to work with me for that reason. Surveyors, too.
Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US.
And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives.
The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form a threat to European citizens is because for some reasons we have zero local alternatives.
And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives.
The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form a threat to European citizens is because for some reasons we have zero local alternatives.
Europe does build its own software. And anything even remotely successful then gets acquired by some US entity.
This has been a common theme. Dassault owns CATIA and Solidworks tough, and they've been used a lot in Europe.
Dassault does both Catia and Solidworks, and as far as I know, they're French.
The need for friction-free interoperability combined with the technical challenges of competing vendors implementing fully interoperable software means most domain-specific software markets are an economic natural monopoly where only one product can dominate.
There is no obvious good economic or technological solution to this, short of heavily regulating software vendors so they are responsive to customer needs or stripping vendors of their copyrights and open sourcing everything. Neither choice is politically possible.
There is no obvious good economic or technological solution to this, short of heavily regulating software vendors so they are responsive to customer needs or stripping vendors of their copyrights and open sourcing everything. Neither choice is politically possible.
Well, we do, and we are pretty successful.
Archicad is Hungarian, Allplan is German, Tekla originates from Finnland.
(Also please note: the offices which signed the open letter to Autodesk are mostly UK-based, so strictly speaking are not members of the EU ;))
Archicad is Hungarian, Allplan is German, Tekla originates from Finnland.
(Also please note: the offices which signed the open letter to Autodesk are mostly UK-based, so strictly speaking are not members of the EU ;))
CERN sponsors Kicad for EDA.
There is this one:
https://www.allplan.com/us_en/
Not an architect myself, but heard good things.
https://www.allplan.com/us_en/
Not an architect myself, but heard good things.
Here is the actual Open Letter to Autodesk: https://letters-to-autodesk.com/
I never saw website, where homepage is pdf.
I never saw website, where homepage is pdf.
It's not a website. It's a webdoc? I think this is amazing. Who says the root of a domain has to return an index.html?
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.
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.
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.
Larger architectural firms like Zaha Hadid and Foster and Partners have developers in-house who work on internal tools for designers. Though I don’t know how many firms there are like this. Though I think architects in general have been lazy when it comes to tooling. The CGI industry has been far more involved in tools and open standards.
Was reyling on Autodesk a bad idea? Sure it was!
Do you have any idea of the AEC industry? Does not seem so.
Funny enough, those big offices signing the open letter are so big they actually have in-house devs. But this is only feasible for the top 0.1% of offices.
Architecture is badly paid and most offices are in the size range of 15–30 people working there. Also CAD programs belong to the most complex software imaginable with really big code bases grown over many years. It's not like you "just write a new one and make it FOSS". You HAVE to rely on others. Also most architects (and even engineers for that matter) are scared by code. They want someone to call and yell at, not looking for workarounds or making a bugfix.
Do you have any idea of the AEC industry? Does not seem so.
Funny enough, those big offices signing the open letter are so big they actually have in-house devs. But this is only feasible for the top 0.1% of offices.
Architecture is badly paid and most offices are in the size range of 15–30 people working there. Also CAD programs belong to the most complex software imaginable with really big code bases grown over many years. It's not like you "just write a new one and make it FOSS". You HAVE to rely on others. Also most architects (and even engineers for that matter) are scared by code. They want someone to call and yell at, not looking for workarounds or making a bugfix.
Anything Autodesk is a lic to print money. Same goes for Bentley systems.
sob's will bend you over a barrel without hesitation.
sob's will bend you over a barrel without hesitation.
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
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
Autodesk has gone "software as a service". For a long time they sold boxed software. But that market is over. So they went to "software as a service". That can get very expensive for users. That's apparently the real customer complaint.
I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked up Maya.
Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid, which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.
Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.
Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade animation business.
A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it was ahead of its time 20 years ago.
On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much. This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and "just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing consistent.
(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the company for decades.)
I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked up Maya.
Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid, which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.
Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.
Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade animation business.
A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it was ahead of its time 20 years ago.
On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much. This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and "just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing consistent.
(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the company for decades.)
Lots of AEC users actually would prefer subscription model. The hand-wavy economic main reason is subscriptions go from opex and purchases would go from capex and companies generally prefer opex to capex.
The business model of large AEC companies is a bit different than that of hollywood VFX subcontractors. The projects for one are already expensive and the data itself is a critical part of the deliverables (instead of just a rendering of the data).
The business model of large AEC companies is a bit different than that of hollywood VFX subcontractors. The projects for one are already expensive and the data itself is a critical part of the deliverables (instead of just a rendering of the data).
As a FreeCAD user I don't understand why FreeCAD absolutely despises chamfers and fillets. The dedicated chamfer and fillet tools are just bad. I can do the fillet by hand without any problems. Just create a sketch and revolve the cut or sweep the cut along the chamfered edge. Works perfectly fine but it takes much longer than it should.
PartDesign chamfer/fillet are so much better in git master now. No longer limited to 45 degrees, and they can be duplicated with linear/polar patterns!
You do realize the whole history of Revit started with a small team at an Architecture Firm. You have to start somewhere, I think bringing software back into architecture firms could be a good thing, even if it is just Grasshopper. All buildings are starting to look the same, and I blame the fact the tools (Revit) lead you in the direction of making those styles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMW_Architects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMW_Architects
How are GMW Architects linked to Charles River software, the original authors of Revit referred to in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Revit ?
Architect's margins are typically in 5-10%. Avg salary for architect is ~75-80k. They don't have the budget to even pay for small pilot or mvp, even if all 20+ firms pool their money together.
The domain knowledge + software engineer skills + computer graphics skills needed are extremely rare.
The domain knowledge + software engineer skills + computer graphics skills needed are extremely rare.
You are right on point, it even says in the letter:
"It is in this context that a number of practices, who represent a revenue stream for Autodesk of over $22m over the last 5 years"
A $22m over 5 years is not a large deal for the large CAD companies such as Dassault, PTC, Siemens, Nemetschek.
Revit as a software package started as Reflex and then acquired by PTC, PTC decided they couldn't make enough money off it, and basically let former employees leave and start Charles River Software with the Reflex code base. The amount of work required to create Revit, It would not be good return on investment for any company other than Autodesk to sell it. The only reason it makes sense for Autodesk is it keeps the AutoCAD DWG monopoly going.
"It is in this context that a number of practices, who represent a revenue stream for Autodesk of over $22m over the last 5 years"
A $22m over 5 years is not a large deal for the large CAD companies such as Dassault, PTC, Siemens, Nemetschek.
Revit as a software package started as Reflex and then acquired by PTC, PTC decided they couldn't make enough money off it, and basically let former employees leave and start Charles River Software with the Reflex code base. The amount of work required to create Revit, It would not be good return on investment for any company other than Autodesk to sell it. The only reason it makes sense for Autodesk is it keeps the AutoCAD DWG monopoly going.
Exactly, this is the main reason you don't see a lot of successful start-ups tackling problems for architects. Most end up pivoting to real-estate development.
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.
Let me clarify. I absolutely, completely, think doing this would be painful and take years. But if it's line of business critical and someone has you by the throat, then you have to make the long term investments to survive. Even better, when you're done nobody can take it away from you. I just think by the time you get to the EU lobbying, regulator rulings, Autodesk dragging their feet, the appeals process, the fines that Autodesk will just build into the cost of the next version, etc, in the end it would be shorter and easier to write the software. Bonus if you make it open source so nobody has to go through this garbage again.
> shorter and easier to write the software
There is nothing short or easy about writing Revit/BIM software and it couldn't be done with the 5 million dollars that these firms had been spending on ADSK products.
There is nothing short or easy about writing Revit/BIM software and it couldn't be done with the 5 million dollars that these firms had been spending on ADSK products.
Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal?
I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is
I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24034596.
thanks! didn't mean to derail things. It grew bigger than I expected. Thought I'd get a short quick link
Not everybody likes to hear it, but archive.is is an illegal operation. In some countries, posting archive.is links may even be illegal as well (it might be interpreted by a court as "Aiding and Abetting Criminal Copyright Infringement")
how i archive.is illegal but Way Back machine not? Seems odd that you isolate a single archive service as illegal instead of saying "Internet Archiving is an illegal operation"
Archive.is bypasses paywalls and does not honor takedown requests. Copyright infringement is what it's designed for.
As you said, bona fide archiving happens on archive.org
As you said, bona fide archiving happens on archive.org
I disagree that the purpose of archive.is is "Copyright infringement", I have argued the archive.org should not honor take down requests and should challenge them in court, as it ceased to be a true archive if at anytime anyone can just remove things they do not like from the archive. DMCA abuse on archive.org is a real problem for controversial issues today
is it still illegal if it's the exact same page including ads (revenues go to the source) ?
It may or may not be illegal, but including the ads is unlikely to make any difference.
It's generally not thought to be illegal, see for example: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
It's generally not thought to be illegal, see for example: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Search-Engines-Indexing-a...
hmm, indexing and linking seem intrinsically different from hosting a direct copy of a website.
You request a webpage, the server gives it to you. It seems reasonable that you can then look at it, inspect it, quote it etc. (like a newspaper or a book at the bookstore). But re-hosting the content whole-sale seems quite different?
Or maybe I'm not seeing some subtly as to why they're equivalent
You request a webpage, the server gives it to you. It seems reasonable that you can then look at it, inspect it, quote it etc. (like a newspaper or a book at the bookstore). But re-hosting the content whole-sale seems quite different?
Or maybe I'm not seeing some subtly as to why they're equivalent
$22 million over 5 years = $4.4 million /year
$4.4 million/year / 25 companies = $176,000 / year / company
So, these companies are complaining about spending $176k/year on the most critical software they use to run their business? I'd wager they spend more on company parties than they do on Revit. I'd also wager what they're REALLY pissed about is being forced to move to SaaS and the crackdown by Autodesk on pirating their software. Autodesk is arguably the most pirated business software of all time. They estimate something like 70%+ of their installs are pirated.
If Revit is really as terrible as they say it is, Autodesk should write an open letter agreeing with them and quadrupling the price to improve it. These firms make hundreds of millions of dollars every year and they're complaining about < $200k for business critical software. It's absurd.
$4.4 million/year / 25 companies = $176,000 / year / company
So, these companies are complaining about spending $176k/year on the most critical software they use to run their business? I'd wager they spend more on company parties than they do on Revit. I'd also wager what they're REALLY pissed about is being forced to move to SaaS and the crackdown by Autodesk on pirating their software. Autodesk is arguably the most pirated business software of all time. They estimate something like 70%+ of their installs are pirated.
If Revit is really as terrible as they say it is, Autodesk should write an open letter agreeing with them and quadrupling the price to improve it. These firms make hundreds of millions of dollars every year and they're complaining about < $200k for business critical software. It's absurd.
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).