Ever since 17 architectural firms wrote a letter of protest to AutoCAD ceo Andrew Anagnost regarding the status of Revit, reaction has been on-going. More architectural firms signed the letter. Our readers wrote lots of letters to the editor. More industry watchers gave their unique points of view on the problem faced by Autodesk, such as these ones:
Letters to the Editor
Your article "Architecture firms to Autodesk: We're no longer happy with Revit" was very interesting, and emphasized some of the pain points we all suffer from being so tightly tied to the Revit platform.
It reminded me of a comment I wrote (a long, long time ago, in 2007) for the article "What Needs to be Fixed in AutoCAD" where I outlined about three dozen things that were just dumb about the program that I used just about every day since 1987.
In a comment to your recent article "Autodesk at 2020," I wrote (after a lengthy diatribe of explaining what's great about Revit) that "I could spend at least another hour talking about what’s wrong with Revit and how to fix it."
- Matt Stachoni, BIM Manager
Tutor Perini / Parsons, JV
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Your review of the status (and future) of Revit was fantastic, and at the same time sad. Autodesk seems to be suffering from shareholder paralysis, but I'm not an expert. It seems like frustration with product roadmaps and customer needs never ends.
I also liked your mention of customers maintaining their own development teams for customization. I loved working in that capacity years ago, but the opportunities in the defense world seemed bleak to me, and the compensation just doesn't compare with mainstream IT work.
Keep up the outstanding work that you do! I haven't worked in the CAD industry in quite a few years, but I still enjoy reading your articles and reviews.
- David Stein
The editor replies: I explain to non-CAD users that Revit is like my previous car: 20 years old, liable to breakdowns, and costly to maintain.
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It is interesting -- in a sort of watching-a-train-wreck way -- to see Autodesk failing to deliver on keeping up its core business. But more curious to me is how this seems to suddenly be happening in a number of industries.
USA automakers are flailing around with electric vehicles, while Tesla seems to have mastered them. A similar thing is true of hybrids: Toyota succeeded where no USA manufacturer even seemed to make an effort. Boeing is facing major internal problems in a similar manner. We have Intel's spectacular failure in not keeping up with TSMC on a technical manufacturing level, and its numerous security issues.
I remember that when Andy Grove was head of Intel, he was almost paranoid about staying ahead of the game technically. His mantra was that you had to be your own competition, always bettering your products before the competition did.
What we are seeing perhaps, is that these large corporations became management-heavy and thought they could coast on near-monopolies forever, forgetting that being heavy on management almost always means being deficient in innovation.
- Steve Schuller
The editor replies: You seem to have it correct. When Jim Collins examined how mighty corporations fell, it mostly was due to hubris: 'Now that we are successful in one area, we can be successful in any area!'
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I’ll be paying my annual AutoCAD maintenance fee (CDN$985) this week, which will be the last time I financially support Autodesk. I’ve had my own copy since 1993, and prior to then, when I ran the CAD department at Wang Australia, since 1985 at which time there was a specific version for the Wang PC. Out of curiosity I asked the dealer what the annual subscription costs -- CDN$2,200!
Apart from blind greed, I don’t understand what the thinking is behind Autodesk’s subscription fee. Surely they must realize that there will be many like me who will happily use their perpetual license and/or switch to BricsCAD or another program.
- Dairobi Paul
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It seems like an association of companies with obvious profit interest is trying to cut expenses. How is this different to what we doing everyday going to the supermarket? Do we have control over the price of potatoes? or trendy avocados?
Let me highlight something from personal experience. I had a boss that wanted to automate everything and make modular construction, because he realized on the benefit he could have from cutting construction costs by pre-fabricating. A classic BIM approach. Now, what he did not realize at the beginning is that he'd have to increase significantly the design inversion in hours and tools enabling the task. When he did it was too late for two reasons: he didn't bring right specialists able to predesign, and he didn't use the right tools. Those tools are expensive. All good tools are expensive, especially if are digital in this increasingly digitalised word. So he admitted that Autodesk flows would have work when bankrupting. He made is choice. I do not get why the obsession with Autodesk here.
Second point. What happened to my ex-boss is happening at an industry level. Everything is digitalizing and there is a huge investment from software companies supporting that change. But don't get confused here, software companies are addressing industry needs -- not the opposite way)
So, when this ECIF is proposing that paper are actually not understanding the same that my ex-boss missed, that the inversion is balancing towards design stages and pre-construction stages. That's the whole point of BIM, and some construction firms are missing the point because they have significantly less benefits rather than more expenses that, of course, are justified by the investment made by not only Autodesk but others too. I'm a fan of Bentley for example.
So what are we talking about here? You do not want the avocado? Take the donut. Let's see for how long you'll benefit from it.
- Fernando Gonzalez (via WorldCAD Access)
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You wrote, "Architectural firms in England and Australia, some of whom work globally, had standardized on Revit, partly due to government mandating it for its own projects." This is not true. They did not mandate Revit; they mandated BIM. They are very different things. Revit does not equal BIM. Revit is software. BIM is a process.
- BIMFluff (via WorldCAD Access)
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I have been saying this for two decades, as you know: the only way to get Autodesk to listen is to become an Autodesk shareholder; to Autodesk's upper management, paying users are just cows to be milked.
Any customer who buys more than ten seats of an Autodesk software product should also get in the habit of buying stock in that company. If each of the signatories to that open letter had 10,000 shares of Autodesk in their corporate stock portfolio, they could join forces to threaten to vote out upper management with much more authority and effectiveness.
The bonus is that when customers own stock in the products that they themselves use, they are getting a discount on the products in the form of stock dividends and increased share value.
Change can even be pushed by regular users, if they work together. Buying a few shares each month, 100,000 aggravated users would control a major chunk of the company after just two or three years. Then they could demand real improvements.
Thanks as always for your diligent reporting.
- Peter Lawton, LEED AP
AEI | Affiliated Engineers, Inc.
The editor replies: Autodesk has 221 million outstanding shares. I believe that when someone has 7% of the shares (at a cost currently of $3.7 billion), he can have one seat on their board of directors.
Mr Lawton responds: Yes, I understand that share prices are now 10x what they were when I was talking about this in the early 2000s, but it is also true that in those days, crowdsourcing was much less developed.
Today the effort would require sophisticated crowdsourcing infrastructure, and the involvement of many people: 100,000 to 250,000 frustrated Autodesk customers would need to pool resources to purchase many shares each month, for at least a couple of years, before a strong position would be realized.
Then, if we can get some of the large A/E/C firms to buy up blocks of stock, for their corporate portfolios, things speed up. Their investing philosophy would have to be different than with other investments. For example, one improvement that corporate users might like would be reducing the release cycle to every 4 years, so Autodesk profits would fall, (along with the stock value), but the A/E/C company's profits might rise, because IT changes and software training would be reduced.
Also, if Autodesk gets wind of such an effort seriously undertaken, they might be more inclined to listen up.
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Excellent read! It’s what I’ve been saying about Autodesk since-- well, forever. If you want to know what Autodesk's been up to for the past decade, just follow the money. But that’ll take some digging, and probably creative accounting as well!
- Chris Cadman
The editor replies: The effort to displace Autodesk is a rare event that's occurred only twice before, that I know of. There was a (failed) effort in the 1990s to replace DXF (then the de facto exchange format among desktop CAD), and then the successful Project Phoenix, which resulted in IntelliCAD and the explosion in alternatives to AutoCAD.
Mr Cadman responds: I can only hope for this rare event to trigger an explosion in Autodesk's customer base, away from them to alternative BIM software.
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I could have told them this ten years ago. Revit came from the stable of PTC's Pro/ENGINEER, perhaps the least flexible parametric modeler at the time. Users familiar with Autodesk products over time know they have never had a 'vision'. Revit's founders played the market well tho.
- Keith Jackson (via WorldCAD Access)
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