Skaman40 wrote:
My hunch is that an objective review by experience BIM managers would put ArchiCAD on top.
If Revit did not get the push it got from the Autodesk marketing juggernaut in the USA & Canada, and both programs were marketed equally, I wonder if sales and use would be much different than it is now. I think it would.
When I was a CAD manager at HOK (2000-2005), their CEO wanted to go with ArchiCAD. We knew about Revit and nothing about ArchiCAD at the time, so the general consensus was that we should go with Revit, without any kind of an objective review between the two.
As it turned out, I went to a firm in which an objective review was made, and they went with ArchiCAD. They were gobbled up by HDR who is a Revit firm, after I left. Doh!
I believe the firm that chooses to actively use more than one BIM program is the smarter firm.
Even beyond BIM managers, I believe that if an "objective" assessment (as objective as it possibly could be) had to be made by the people who would actually use the program day-in and day-out - whether you refer to them as the designers, CAD-Monkeys, BIM-Monkeys or what have you - that ArchiCAD would also come out on top,
I recently had an experience at the firm where I work (which is primarily Revit based) when one of the new designers, lady from Brazil who had never used BIM software (Revit or ArchiCAD) before and had been learning Revit in the process of getting going in the firm, passed by my desk where I was modeling a project on my laptop in ArchiCAD in the 3D window.
Now her background was primarily and strictly 2D Flatland CAD or more specifically AutoCAD and she said that BIM in general had hardly had any proliferation where she came from in Brazil, so for her Revit seemed to be the best thing since sliced bread, espeially with everything from automatic generation and updating of sections, elevations and all plans from a single model.
That is, until she saw ArchiCAD in action in the 3D window and asked me who to do that in REvit. I told her that you can't, since Revit's ability to work in 3D is severly hampered by everything from the inability to work or model in perspective view, to the buggy and slow 3D engine which begins to choke up as the model gets heavier and just the general limited functionality of modeling actions in the 3D window with Revit's text-based and dialog-box based interface.
Her comment then was that watching me work in ArchiCAD was like watching someone work in Sketchup - or as close to it as you could get with a BIM program. In other words, while she was mainly "documenting" in Revit, I was actually designing in ArchiCAD, as per her past experience where she was accustomed to doing most of the design-work in a 3D visual environment like Sketchup, and then the documentation in a numerical precision software like AutoCAD.
Hers was the opinion of someone who'd mostly never had any BIM experience at all except for what she had picked up at the office in learning REvit prior to seeing ArchiCAD in action and it was as objective as you could possibly get, but at least informed by a conventional architectural background, education and training. And for her there simply was no contest as to which software she would choose to work in if she had to make the choice herself.
She downloaded an ArchiCAD demo shortly after that.
I guess my point is a large part of the reason why Revit has proliferated an dominated the North American market so much is that in a lot of firms, the decision as to what software or platform to use is typically made by people who will either hardly ever use the software in questions and are primarily interested in saving money (i.e. the owners, principals or senior partners and associates who hardly ever do any digital design grunt work) or by people who while they might use it more frequently than the owners, are likely to be more interested in managing design teams, CAD standards and library databses - in other words, BIM and CAD managers or rather the former CAD (AutoCAD) Managers of the firm),
The people who actually do the design and documentation and modeling and who are the ones that will use the software day in and day out, hardly ever have a say in the matter or the chooice as to which software the firm uses.
Multiply this by a factor of a couple of thousand times exercabated by Autodesk's relentless marketing people (who are hardly design gurus themselves and more marketing and PR people) and strategy, and you have almost total market dominance after a few short years.
