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.?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.?