After taking a couple of days to process this event, here are my thoughts.
First, I was steaming a bit after the second day for a couple of reasons: The first being that it took two nights of sleep away from me, since my time zone here in Hawaii mandated that I watch it from 2am-5am both nights)… I know, cry me a river 😂 Not that that in and of itself would make me upset as I’ve dealt with it for years, but rather felt like it wasted my time staying up for they Q&A when they did not stick to what they said they would do.
They were very adamant that they would answer all the questions that were presented ahead of time and had a name/location associated with it. What happened at the end of the second Q&A session was in total contradiction to that.
I get it, you want to put your best foot forward and look good… but looking good for GRAPHISOFT lately is essentially putting lipstick on a pig. Many questions sent in the night before were not approved or asked. When they said they would be saved for the following night, I felt that they would indeed address them, so I prepared for another sleepless night.
However, there were questions floating at the top of this list with several likes and in some cases, had viewer replies to them supporting their wish to have those topics addressed, yet GS intentionally ignored them.
But what occurred while the Q&A session was wrapping up was a farce. Questions (multiple) were popping up that were anonymous and only had submission times of a minute previous. These were obviously “shill” questions. I don’t know how much more obvious it could be. One of the questions:
‘When is a good time to bring in a structural engineer to a project.”
If that’s not an obvious setup question to appear to support their commitment to “engineering” tools, I don’t know what is. They then throw it to one of the architects from the presentation earlier to discuss (sorry, I forget his name, from South Africa). Of course a quick answer was “as soon as possible,” then it quickly goes into a testimony of his personal wishes to develop structural tools for him as well as engineers to use. Again, an obvious push into the engineering market; albeit at the expense of all their architectural users subsidizing these costs.
THAT is a perfect example of why we are frustrated. We’ve been vocal as we can be here in the forum that they supposedly check. There hasn’t been a stronger topic of late. And as for them checking in and participating in the forum, Holger basically did a post and run series of posts just before the event to save face for the company to fit their narrative of monitoring the forums. It’ll be interesting to see if he comments here again before the next Building Together event.
I’d like to use Adobe as a case of a software developer who does it right. They monitor not only their own forums, but social media channels for user feedback, and in some cases invites users to headquarters to have a discussion with key people. They also come out with feature upgrades multiple times a year. They have all of their software available in beta format for download and feedback. Plus, if you subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service, you get it ALL… no hidden upsells and fees for extra services. Seriously GRAPHISOFT, asking nearly $1000/year from perpetual license owners, only to have to pay more for “upgrade benefits” to BIMx (requires BIMcloud SaaS) to work.
Graphisoft needs to make their software the best architectural software and go after new users… there are plenty… instead of giving up on the architectural market by milking your existing user base (essentially holding us hostage with threats of enormous upgrade prices if we ever leave SSA) and jumping ship to sell to engineering offices. Fine if you want to do that… but make it a separate software and use our yearly SSA fees for developing Architectural features and fix the tools.
Still looking?
