Graphisoft public roadmap - Follow-up conversation

[Gordana Radonic]

Dear Community, 

We're excited to have published our roadmap!

We'd love to hear your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to use this thread for discussion.

Graphisoft Insights announcement: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Graphisoft-Insights/Graphisoft-public-roadmap/ba-p/375281

Public roadmap on the Graphisoft website.

Thank you.

[torben_wadlinger]

Believe me, something has changed! The AC26 roll-out was a desaster which blew up straight into the face of GS and Huw in person.

Of course, the direction in which GS is developing will not change. We have talked about this a lot, but as customers we will no longer have any influence on it. I hope that the new direction will be successful, because otherwise GS is screwed. But we can still influence how GS communicates with us. And we as customers can control that.

The roadmap is way too thin and way too vague.So, let's talk about it in social media exactly. GS can't control that. And Nemetschek won't be able to ignore it either. Archicad is in the process of rebuilding. Here, too, I would have gone a different way. If I had been CEO, I would have developed an Archicad NEXT in parallel and only done product maintenance for the old Archicad. This would have made it possible to cut off the old braids and develop Archicad from scratch with all the advantages that Windows 10/11 and macOS offer. This costs money and time. But if you would have started with version 20, you would have now a system that would be lean and fast and we would not have many discussions.

We customers want Graphisoft to be like Space X, Graphisoft wants to be like Tesla and in reality is like Chevrolet (sorry GS).

[Algimantas Kuprenas]

Hello Holger,

Nice to see people from GS in Forums 🙂

If you gather specific data about users this is surely not about Voting, looks like some user/market analysis. Voting is simple democratic mechanism for everyone to see what points attracts most of voters. If voters do not vote then they don't care about question or have no interest it. Same principle as you are using in Q/A in Archicad events, people propose questions and ones with most Votes moved to top as to be answered sooner than others in bottom 🙂

[Holger Kreienbrink]

yes and no...

Example:

There is one office with 15 people and one of them is the active guy (call him BIM Manager). That guy will vote because he/she is responsible for the other 14 peoples workflow. He/she represents 15 people. Not just one vote.

We cannot ignore that.

[Bawar Tanay]

Yes, i do agree with you about this,

for example i am the only one working at studio infinite, but i freelancer which is hired by 3 to 4 offices with over 25 people all over the businesses.

[Algimantas Kuprenas]

Other employees in office might not even care about development of Archicad software at all. They are doing their tasks and not looking into details, enjoying their lives in other ways than Voting or Posting in AC forum threads.

If voting will have complex weighing mechanisms it could be that it will get too complex and hardly manageable. Voting is fast way of showing which direction most of voters want to go. Sometimes voters votes against Your Super Duper idea and You might need to rethink it again and again to be approved for development in future.

Could be interesting Live discussion about voting mechanism 🙂

[mija]

I agree! Trust me, only people who genuine care about development of Archicad will be bothered to vote.

Voting is necessary and that's a fact. If you are gonna limit the voting system than it has no point IMO. Might as well continue what you are already doing.

[Bawar Tanay]

hahaha yes for sure other employees in office dont like to waste there time in this voting and looking new ways to work in archicad, but for me it is crucial haha because i have to solve their problems and teach how to get their design the right and simple way in  archicad.

[thesleepofreason]

You are making it more complicated than it is - I assume that votes wont be followed strictly anyways. One vote for each Graphisoft ID gives a good baseline for the needs and wants of the userbase regardless of how offices are organised.

Worrying that larger offices would be at a disadvantage is strange as they just through their size already have an advantage over smaller offices / single users when it comes to influence. Larger offices are also much more likely to accept a sub-optimal product as there is a disconnect between procurement/management and use while also better ability to push the cost of inefficiency to costumers.

If there truly is a worry that unweighted voting would put larger offices at a disadvantage I suggest that they (or GS) make an effort to increase participation of their users. Currently they seem rather absent from the community. 

[DGSketcher]

The vote of one BIM Manager with 15 staff should not carry any more weight than a single user with a valid opinion. What you are suggesting is simply a commercial bias that gives one vote for an office of 100 the power to override 100 passionate individuals who care about every frustrating click of the mouse. So for example 50 individual votes desperate to see basic tool improvements would be out gunned by one BIM Manager with 100 seats who says "Oooh wouldn't it be interesting if we could just... (place Main Upgrade Feature here)". The improvements stop and we end up with a new tool that probably helps a minority of bigger businesses only. Long term you retain your 100 seat client, but you risk loosing 50 individual seats (who pay more per seat), because they don't feel listened too and the basics aren't getting fixed.

If individuals on this forum are passionate enough to give their time, opinion and innovative suggestions then show some respect and forget about commercial bias. One user, One Vote. And if the big office staff can't be bothered to engage here then all the more reason why they shouldn't have a vote.

[Holger Kreienbrink]

that is even more complicated than my example.... 😉

we need to have a proper weighing system, that includes these information.

[Paul King]

I am similarly a one person company but as a freelancer act as something like a roving BIM manager / tutor to staff/BIM project leader for multiple companies.

On the other hand, most (not all) users I encounter at the offices I work for do certainly do not feel motivated enough to get involved with ArchiCAD forums, let alone consider future ArchiCAD development strategies and priorities, let alone vote on them.  

If I hear from them at all about ArchiCAD, it tends to be only when they are inconvenienced by some change or bug or confusion.  And even then, the default behaviour when something becomes even modestly difficult, is to draw it in 2D.  Because deadlines.

From the 'average users' I encounter, there is usually little evidence of interest or willingness to forgo gratification in the form of immediate lines on a page for the sake of longer term investment in future workflow efficiency - especially in some sweatshop top-down hierarchy type architectural firms where BIM ignorant bosses dislike investing time or money on anything they do not understand or care to understand.

Caring at all about BIM seems to take a special kind of nerd.   With that in mind, all votes from people motivated enough to be here at all are arguably worth weighting more than the average staff member's opinion (however this is obtained), because opinions expressed here almost certainly come from people offering a level of reflection about workflow and capability that is rare with 'typical' users. 

That said, even when trying to assess some sort of weighting between valid opinions, there is probably some tension between what good users in a large practice want, and what BIM managers/people making purchase decisions in a large practices want - Good users in a large practice want increased individual control and scope to explore new capabilities and methods (with associated risks of making mistakes that affects others in the team), while good BIM managers often want an easy life, and don't like being shouted at by the boss, so may want things more tightly controlled, locked down and de-risked -  of necessity they want things set up set up to withstand the lowest common denominator of user competence.

A tough balance for Graphisoft - probably quite hard to satisfy the risk averse big companies without excessively deprioritising innovation for smaller more nimble and more technically demanding customers.

I would certainly see scope for feeling disenfranchised if the process for ranking development ideas actually somehow became democratic rather than meritocratic - not all opinions are equal, and my opinion is of course the most important one.

[Algimantas Kuprenas]

"Caring at all seems to take a special kind of nerd.   With that in mind, all votes from people motivated enough to be here at all are arguably worth weighting more than the average staff member's opinion, if they were to be actively surveyed in the feild."

This one is totally 100% correct.

[Romans]

Hopefully, this will not lead to a situation in which small offices and/or one-man shows will be ignored in the end because they are just not the majority of a number of single voters. But these people represent the majority of AC businesses!

[Holger Kreienbrink]

This is why I wrote, that we need to understand the background.
A simple voting is not enough. Not for smaller offices, not for bigger offices.....

[DGSketcher]

I really don't get the fretting over user profiles, the system is self regulating. The AC core is used across the board, those on the sharp end of using it will have their own opinion whether they work in a single seat office or one with 250. The problems with AC are basically the same whatever the project e.g. when everybody is voting to get Instancing up and running or making text editing easier, it won't be down to the office size, it will be down to the needs & frustrations of core users. The area where you will start to see a bias will be with BIMx, BIM servers & DDS (which are separate products), but again this will be self regulating, as those with an opinion will naturally be from multi-seat offices. What I am saying is, whatever GS offers to the roadmap voting system, then if you group the response by product you should get an appropriate indicator of what is important to users of that product. If I don't use DDS then why would I vote for anything affecting that product?

At the end of the day GS will chose what they offer and develop, the point of enabling voting is simply to identify which of GS's planned upgrades / improvements users would most like to see implemented. Simple as. And if you find all the voting on AC biases towards workflow & productivity improvements then try not to disappoint everyone by ramming unwanted features into the upgrade. Deliver what your customers need and they won't wander far.

[mthd]

Hi Holger, I am at the end of my career and I am semi retired and I am also a solo user and I have no employees. I like the software, it’s the best in the business.

GS must have been holding out on us with DG’s “Design Guides” ? An absolute game changer for me and many other users who have come from a Chief Architect and Revit background. I think many more of these will now get onboard with Archicad now that it will be more user friendly. Congratulations with AC27 it will definitely be the best release since I started with version 7.

All the representatives of GS, all have to have a very thick skin to get bombarded by the few disgruntled users who ask the tough questions. You got to get your share of hecklers in your positions as GS representatives.

I don’t think any of these professionals users of Archicad are nerds unless of course they are self proclaimed lol.

[torben_wadlinger]

Guys, now let Holger do it! I've known Holger for quite a long time and as a rule, when he tackles something, it has a hand and a foot.

So, step 1 is: we get a voting system.

Step 2: a distinction is made between large and small offices so that GS can learn whether there are differences in requirements and wishes.

Step 3: weighting the voting results. This will be by far the most difficult.

This must not be left to a marketing guy, but to someone who knows statistics and stochastics. So that the wishes of the big offices do not dominate those of the others (and vice versa!).

If it were up to me, I would put the whole marketing department into the B-Ark ...

[DGSketcher]

>50k forum users, and they are all going to be profiled, weighted and verified? No wonder the voting system is taking so long to implement. Did I mention I have just taken on a 1000 new staff...

[Rex Maximilian]

I respectfully disagree with the steps.

As Nike says, "Just Do It!"

Some movement on this is better than no movement. They're suffering by paralysis from analysis of how to implement it.

[gavinNZz]

Not only does GS not want us to vote on their roadmap they also don't want to answer the questions in their own Q&A session that have been voted up by the attendees of the event. Madness. GS is NOT a customer centric software developer

[Rex Maximilian]

The. moderator served up softball questions. Anything controversial or requiring listening to an opposing viewpoint was muted... even though it was clear that the viewers wanted certain questions answered.