What Happened?

[Chadwick]

I was searching through our firm's catalog of Arch Record mags for some building types and I noticed something odd. In the late 90's - around 97, 98 - it appears that Graphisoft unleashed a marketing blitz within the magazine's pages. It appeared that there were more adds for ArchiCAD than any other product. Or at least it appeared that way. It got me to thinking about what happened? It appears at one time Graphisoft was resembling the marketing giant that Autodesk is loathed as today.

I bring this up because I encourage competition since it will always benefit the consumer. I don't want to see ArchiCAD die because that essentially means that Revit will die as well (or at least any push to develop Revit at a rapid pace).

Did a competitor to Archicad arrive too late on the BIM / VB scene to encourage them to keep their R&D at full blast? It's odd in that its perceived now that Autodesk is the marketing giant and their ads are pasted everywhere in arch record these days but it was only 10 years ago or less that Archicad was the product all over those ads.

See the attached image of a scan of an advertisement I found. This was the first page of a 14 page advertisement for Archicad.

[Dwight]

How closely does the timing of those ads match Graphisoft's IPO? Not to be cynical.......

At any rate, it wasn't too long before AutoDesk was buying full color full back cover ads in CADalyst magazine with two soccer [football] players kicking a cabbage - each costing what Graphisoft's year of inside ads were worth.

[Chadwick]

Dwight -

This particular ad was 14 pages of full color, glossiness. I have never seen an ad span 14 pages before. I think it's interesting that at one time Graphisoft did have an aggressive marketing campaign in the states...

[Dwight]

Excuse me.

14 pages, eh?
No wonder they thought better of it.

[Anonymous]

Apparently GS used to listen back then too.