PB wrote:
rm wrote:
Not much here for smaller firms. The bulk of these "Major" upgrades are for larger architecture firms. Hopefully they have not announced everything added into AC 23 and these are just the major bullet points aimed at appeasing larger practices! It's clear that we should only expect small incremental improvements since GS has fully adopted a yearly release cycle. That said, based solely on the announced new features, buying the yearly maintenance contract seems like a pretty poor value at this point, especially for small to medium sized firms who cannot take advantage of volume pricing.
Definitely a goal of being at the forefront of digital information interoperability. Whilst seemingly at the expense of modelling improvements for the smaller practices & sole practitioners, it is a wise move by Graphisoft: ArchiCAD must be as useful to as many people - directly & indirectly - as possible in order to hold its own against the behemoths of Revit & Bentley.
Whilst there is perhaps little to enthuse the smaller users amongst us, I would like to point out the excellent support from Graphisoft (UK) via the UAS subscription: A very beneficial service when needed, before taking into account the annual upgrade in AC.
Counterpoint(s) :
Improvements that benefit smaller firms usually tend to be beneficial and useful also to larger firms that use the programs. Almost always invariably.
The same can't be same for improvements specifically aimed at larger firms or attracting bigger clients being beneficial to smaller users.
And there are more smaller firms and smaller users that comprise the user-base of ArchiCAD than there are larger firms ( I mean, just mathematically speaking) so one would question the wisdom of a development strategy that seems to ignore or neglect them in favour of pursuing firms whose software usage decisions might go beyond or outside the best software solution available (versus, say, partner office or consultant software synergy, for example, ).
Also, keeping up and keeping pace with the Joneses of the Revit's and the Bentley's of the world is all well and good, but try not to forget that the companies that make those rival software (and indeed the software themselves) are not solely or primarily aimed at the Architecture market the way ArchiCAD is, so again one would question the wisdom of modelling your business, marketing and development strategy on what they're doing or with keeping up with them.
And I would also have to seriously question who really benefits from a yearly release cycle.
Other than the obvious bean counters and money men at Graphisoft and Nemetschek, I mean.
The developers seem to struggle to get out a product that seems stable enough every year, and then follow it up with a bajillion hotfixes to catch all the bugs and problems they couldn't get in the impossibly short beta testing period.
The users are stuck with ever more increasingly diluted upgrades year and year that have hardly any new features to justify the cost, time and effort to upgrade and migrate their projects to the new version.
And really it just seems like it's only the bean counters who are happy to see those subscription and licensing fees coming in every year whether or not the product justifies it.
And I know our constantly clamoring and complaining against it is not going to change anything, but I easily foresee them having to switch to an Autodesk-style subscription-only model in the near future to force everyone to switch to their new versions every year whether they like it or not or whether it's justified to do so or not - as the number of people choosing to upgrade to new versions voluntarily continues to decline if they don't see a reason or need justifying a yearly upgrade.
And that's not going to be a happy situation for anyone at all.
