Autodesk and Bentley to Advance AEC Software Interoperabilit

[TomWaltz]

I'll be curious to see if Graphisoft can take advantage of this deal between Autodesk and Bentley as well.

[Laura Yanoviak]

Here's LK's take on it: here.

[Anonymous]

TomWaltz wrote:
I'll be curious to see if Graphisoft can take advantage of this deal between Autodesk and Bentley as well.

You think Autodesk and Bentley are planning to let others play in their sandbox? That would be nice but I think it might take Sherman (the anti-trust act - not the tank) to intervene and make them play nice. Not bloody likely as far as I can see. Maybe there's some leverage to be applied in Europe.

As has been pointed out elsewhere this looks like a move to bury IFC just as it looks like it's getting mature enough to go out on it's own.

[TomWaltz]

To be good for GS, it would be one of two ways, either Autodesk and Bentley making their formats available to other vendors, like Nemetschek/Graphisoft, or opening up their formats so they are non-proprietary.

The bis issue I'm thinking of is that government projects require formats that are non-proprietary. DWG and PDF are acceptable because it's writable by most CAD programs. IFC is acceptable now for the same reason, even though it's quality is pretty low.

If RVT or DGN became open formats like PDF is, then Autodesk and Bentley could drop IFC support.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I'm jumping into this thread and confess that I don't really know how seriously anyone takes this press release as a piece of news.

Disclaimer: I am an ArchiCAD Reseller.

I've scoured the web via Google for reaction to the Autdesk / Bentley announcement and discovered two things:

One

There is next to no reaction in the AEC blogosphere to this story; what's on offer seems to be coming from the "geospatial" - read Civil/GIS - community. GIS has a long way to go before it can hope to speak with BIM platforms designed to document buildings. ESRI and others seem to be struggling with what they should do, or have determined that its not relevant at this point in time.

AEC CAD has all but ceased to be an interesting topic for anyone to write about. Ralph Grabowski now writes almost exclusively about mechanical 3D CAD, Evan Yares has almost abandoned the tecnics of CAD in favour of the far more interesting topic of process and methodology (he's still a pretty good read, but very different from where he was at a year ago). Lachmi Khemalni's coverage of the story brought more comment than most including an entry posted by someone from Nemetschek. He upbraided her for being not in-depth enough in her coverage. Her response was to 'out' him. All very polite. So far no one has accused her of being a shill for Revit, but maybe there are those who see her that way.

Two

Most bloggers and stringers for the major CAD news services are simply cutting and pasting the press release into their articles. Is that helpful? It ain't journalism.

But this isn't news either. Fake Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) rightly and masterfully skewered the media for this and did it insightfully and humourously. He really did a great job of putting both the industry and the press who pretend o cover it in their place. In his mind all of the Emperors are without clothes.

So

We are doing a disservice to ourselves and our AEC disciplines by not raising the bar a little bit higher than it is when it comes to offering reasoned opinions. Reading articles critically and responding is a skill which I fear we've lost. As a consequence, the pundits who once covered BIM in its infancy have simply walked away.

This is a news story in my opnion that is worthy of considerable coverage, but I'm waiting for someone to tackle it as one story in the bigger paradigm shift that is BIM.

[Anonymous]

Aaron wrote:
This is a news story in my opnion that is worthy of considerable coverage, but I'm waiting for someone to tackle it as one story in the bigger paradigm shift that is BIM.

This would require someone to actually research the details as well as look at the big picture. With the mainstream press simply reprinting government and corporate press releases as "news" (alongside the ever so important doings of Paris, Nicole and Britney) real journalism seems in short supply these days.