Archicad Marketing

[KeesW]

What a disappointment. Went to the annual RAIA conference and associated design exhibition in Sydney a few weeks ago. It is the largest building product exhibition in Australia. Autocad and Revit were prominant but guess who was missing? No prizes here - no ArchiCad! Was chasing building material information on the net and came accross companies producing details for about 6 CAD packages - even for DataCad would you believe. But --you guessed it --- not ArchiCad.

I think Graphisoft is taking its users for granted. I like seeing my software of choice prominantly displayed and used in our industry. I don't like being reminded that Revit is probably as good and are trying much harder to get market share. When was the last time Graphisoft made an irresistable offer to entice other CAD users? When did they last make existing users an offer they couldn't refuse? Instead, those of us on a subscription in Aus get access to 'freebies' that are mostly out of date, going back to version 6.5 that we can't even open!

But I am wasting my breath and indignation. Graphisoft is not interested. If I change to Revit (and I have considered it) it is because of Graphisoft's indifference to its competition, its complacency, and its habit of producing upgrades with ragged edges, that never quite work as promised.

[Anonymous]

I will be attending this years roundtable in Boston and will bring this up to them. I personally have been getting real frustrated myself with how Revit is kicking AC ass in marketing. Frankly, their biggest advantage is the amount of people who use Revit that talk up the program to everyone. I mean I really like AC and have avoided Revit but in all honesty I am seeing some real advancement in Revit and more importantly so is the management of our company.

As our management hears about all that Revit has to offer they drill me about why we can't do this or that in AC. It seems everyone we hire uses Revit. I don't know the answers but AC needs to find a way to combat it. irst and foremost by developing a program that works the way we work as architects.

Keep in mind, my office has used AC since 1998 and we have over 130 employees. If we decide to switch to Revit, I think it would be a serious blow. In my view, ever since AC was purchased by Nemetsheck, supposedly the equivalent to Autodesk! AC has really dropped off. I really expected more in terms of marketing. It makes me wonder if Archicad will even be around in the future or what there plans are? Hopefully, I'll get a feel for this at the Roundtable.

[TomWaltz]

Chazz wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:

Chazz wrote:
Autodesk has not killed off Maya on OSX so maybe there is hope of a Mac version of Revit

No, there's really not. There's a huge difference between maintaining and existing product in a platform and completely porting it to another platform....

Mind you, Maya was ported fairly recently (but I think before Alias was acquired by Autogiant). The more relevant difference is that there was, and is, a Linux version of Maya. .

If they are already writing cross-platform, then they were not using Visual Studio to hook into Windows the way Revit is.

Still, even if a Revit-on-OSX version does not seem likely now, its probability is governed by the same forces as all such decisions: bottom line. If Apple and OSX continue their metioric rise (and even their back door assault on the enterprise ), Autodesk will have no choice but to port. Plenty of Autodesk sharholders are --or will be-- Mac users.

Thatt growth from 4% market share to 8% market share looks good to investors, but it's not enough to sway development from major vendors. Its UNIX background makes it appealing as a server OS and even for workstations, but the availability of Boot Camp, Parallels, and VMWare removes the need to develop Mac OS applications.

[Chazz]

jorgec wrote:
I personally have been getting real frustrated myself with how Revit is kicking AC ass in marketing. Frankly, their biggest advantage is the amount of people who use Revit that talk up the program to everyone.

The discussion of marketing is a weird one. I mean, what do we as users care if a product that we rely on is marketed aggressively? All we really want to know is that it works today and will continue to work tomorrow. In fact, an argument could be made that GS/Nemetsheck would better serve its users by spending resources on development rather than advertising. Still, it seems to annoy people that the company is sort of invisible to all but this discussion group. I guess GS feels that no one is going to make the serious investment in time and money to use Hi end CAD and not at least do a web search.

Thus, if you allow me, I think that most of this grumbling about marketing is really displaced frustration with the quality of the development. Look, if ArchiCAD was quantum leaps above Revit, we wouldn't really care if it was the best kept secret out there. But the truth is that for many years the development has been visionless, shallow and really poorly executed. It sucks. Most of the remaining complaints about Revit appear to amount to approximately one juicy upgrade, maybe two. They are very aggressive.

[Chazz]

TomWaltz wrote:
That growth from 4% market share to 8% market share looks good to investors, but it's not enough to sway development from major vendors.

The 4% to 8% or whatever includes the enterprise which Apple actively avoids (with the exception of the 2.0 iPhone which could be their Trojan horse), but even there, in spite of Apple's indifference, the number of Macs is growing. My own company --with hundreds of Dells-- is beginning to slowly turn from black to aluminum. The penetration within creative markets is obviously higher and within certain segments (such as video production) it's much, much higher. With the Vista debacle and Apple's continued strong execution, I sense a real change in the air. Not now and maybe not next year but perhaps in the 5 year horizon which is to me always the horizon that matters.

TomWaltz wrote:
...but the availability of Boot Camp, Parallels, and VMWare removes the need to develop Mac OS applications.

It certainly has not removed my desire for native OSX applications, Revit being #1. I find my MacBook Pro makes a rather poor Windoze substitute.

[TomWaltz]

Chazz wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:
...but the availability of Boot Camp, Parallels, and VMWare removes the need to develop Mac OS applications.

It certainly has not removed my desire for native OSX applications, Revit being #1. I find my MacBook Pro makes a rather poor Windoze substitute.

I said "need." There's no NEED for companies to make the product for Mac OS when they can just promote Parallels usage.

[Chazz]

TomWaltz wrote:
I said "need." There's no NEED for companies to make the product for Mac OS when they can just promote Parallels usage.

So you're saying that next year Adobe will announce that they're dropping all further OSX development and asking Mac users to go buy Fusion?

You may be right but so far, I'm sorry Tom, I'm just not convinced.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Chazz wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:
I said "need." There's no NEED for companies to make the product for Mac OS when they can just promote Parallels usage.

So you're saying that next year Adobe will announce that they're dropping all further OSX development and asking Mac users to go buy Fusion?

You may be right but so far, I'm sorry Tom, I'm just not convinced.

Geeez Chazz you seriously need to learn how to read..........or at the very least comprehend the distinction between porting a software from PC to Mac, starting from scratch and maintaining an existing dual-platform software on both PC and Mac.

Which is the point that Tom was trying to make to you.

Sometimes it actually helps to read carefully and think things through, rather than jumping into odd silly conclusions such as the above gem (Adobe ceasing development of it's Mac-based products) or worse yet, waiting for other people to think things through for you and then explain them to you.

Adobe already has most of its products as dual-platform software - I'm not sure about the recent Macromedia stream of products that they recently bought out, but certainly their own native Creative Suite (CS3 or CSxx) product line IS dual platform. That means that they don't have to port Photoshop over since it already exists as a MAc version. It also means they they don't have to drop OSX development for it or any of the other CS products because they already have an established product-line and corresponding marketbase for it, and it costs them way less to maintain an existing product stream (one which they dominate or in this case monopolize) than to port over or completely re-write a single platform software to be dual platform.

Ditto Maya - which was already dual platform by the time that Autodesk bought Alias. It's not like they are re-writing a Visual Studio-based Revit to work on Mac because that means having to start from scratch and that's very expensive from a development point of view given the difficulties or translating Visual Studio based programs to OSX.

Revit is already a complex enough piece of software such that to begin writing a Mac version would likely slow down the development of the PC version (despite the vast resources of Autodesk) or at a minimum result in a sub-standard port (with less features or generally less stable) given the pace of development and upgrades (1-year upgrade cycle) that they've established for their products. A firm like McNeel can afford to port over their software (Rhino) because they have a more extended, non-fixed and flexible development cycle between versions that will afford them all the time they want to port over their software from PC to Mac and not worry about not having enough time to produce a reliable dual-platform version 5 since they have as long as they feel is necessary to get it right.

Hence it would be easier, if you are most software development firms (a PC one at that) to promote the use of Virtual emulators ala Fusion, Parallels and Bootcamp, (and possibly even sponsor those developments) than to allocate your own resources into developing Mac-native versions of your own software.

And in a bottom-line, Return-On-Investment oriented firm like Autodesk, justifying such uses of R& D resources versus the potential or relatively diminutive Mac-based marketbase, to your B.O.G's and shareholders is never going to be an easy sell.
Macs have a long way to go ( in terms of market-share) before they can start compelling software firms to start switching over on their own.

So go ahead and wait for a Mac-based Revit all you want. Just make sure you're really comfortable while you're at it because it's going to be a hell of a while before it ever happens......if at all.

[TomWaltz]

Chazz wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:
I said "need." There's no NEED for companies to make the product for Mac OS when they can just promote Parallels usage.

So you're saying that next year Adobe will announce that they're dropping all further OSX development and asking Mac users to go buy Fusion?

Not at all. I'm saying that companies who make Windows-only products have no reason to start making Mac or Linux versions of their products.

Making extreme analogies like this just show how little you understand the issue. Either that or you're just now realizing that you're losing on logic so you thought a little sensationalism might help.

You may be right but so far, I'm sorry Tom, I'm just not convinced.

I'm not convinced you know how to read through an entire post. You might want to learn a little about multi-platform development before you form opinions about it.

Adobe is already multi-platform. They don't have any need to divorce all their existing code from Windows hooks so they can create a Mac version of a product.

Visual Studio makes Windows software development easier by letting Windows to a lot of the work for the developer. They tie in to operating system memory commands, processor management, screen display systems, and dialog boxes. If you want an Open dialog or a Save dialog, you just call the one from Windows.

If you want to be a multi-platform developer, you have to split your code base, and then chose whether to native OS functions (with LOTS of Switch/Case statements) or you can write your own dialogs, which still use lots of Switch/Case statements, but at least you look the same from OS to OS. The processor and memory handling are a lot harder to work with since each OS handles them differently.

Multi-platform programming is a lot harder than you seem to realize. Heck, it's hard just for writing add-ons, never mind full programsIf you plan it from the beginning, it's not terrible. If you decide to change years into a product line, it requires a massive expense, and probably not one that will ever pay off. Unless of course, it's from a minority OS like Mac or Unix/Linux to a majority one like Windows.

[stefan]

TomWaltz wrote:
[...]Visual Studio makes Windows software development easier by letting Windows to a lot of the work for the developer. They tie in to operating system memory commands, processor management, screen display systems, and dialog boxes. If you want an Open dialog or a Save dialog, you just call the one from Windows.
If you want to be a multi-platform developer, you have to split your code base, and then chose whether to native OS functions (with LOTS of Switch/Case statements) or you can write your own dialogs, which still use lots of Switch/Case statements, but at least you look the same from OS to OS. The processor and memory handling are a lot harder to work with since each OS handles them differently.

To clarify, many cross-platform applications would use a toolkit/framework to enable these options.
E.g. Qt from Trolltech or wxWidgets are two examples. They are available on multiple platforms. You create a dialog once and it works in all systems.

The "File Open" dialog in Qt is using the native Windows and Mac OSX dialogs on those platforms, but provides a custom dialog on Linux. There is no need for switch statements for many things.

Using Visual Studio is not preventing to write a cross-platform application. It is only an "Integrated Development Environment". If you use the Windows-specific libraries (e.g. MFC or .NET), you have some benefits for Windows development. But you can also create cross-platform C++ applications, where you use Visual Studio on Windows, XCode on OSX and some other IDE (e.g. KDevelop) on Linux.

---

To get back to the topic, Revit is probably using many Windows-specific libraries (e.g. .NET for development of add-ons), but that doesn't imply that the program could not be ported. If they use too many Windows-only libraries, chances are that it is simply too expensive to start porting it.

Unless they are really convinced to port.

E.g. Microsoft bought Softimage (a former IRIX-only 3D application, that is the Unix dialect of Silicon Graphics) to port it to Windows NT. This was probably expensive, but convinced many firms that NT was a viable platform for 3D applications. And look where we are now: all former UNIX-only CAD systems have all become available on Windows (and some have even dropped the UNIX version). Most of them are not available on Mac OSX, despite its FreeBSD core being more related to UNIX than Windows.

---

And now I forgot what the topic was about...

[Chazz]

Bricklyne wrote:
Geeez Chazz you seriously need to learn how to read...........

TomWaltz wrote:
I'm not convinced you know how to read through an entire post. You might want to learn a little about multi-platform development before you form opinions about it.

Alright. Settle down. I grant that my comment that based on Tom's logic Adobe should abandon future OSX development was a provocative and perhaps snide riposte to Tom's overquick dismissal but I stick to my central points which are:

• 1) There appears to be a profound shift in the world of computing that, at the moment, favors Apple/OSX over Microsoft/Vista.
  
  2) The above shift unleashes powerful market forces on companies (particularly publicly traded companies like AutoDesk and companies in the "creative" field) to consider porting their wares to OSX. Are there technical issues involved? Absolutely. Still, back in 2003, many people claimed that rumors of Apple's port to intel must be specious because the technical issues were just too thorny. But for Apple, there were powerful market forces to grow share and so the company bowed to them and made the investment. I think it worked out well for them.
  
  3) For a large swath of users Bootcamp/Fusion/Parallels is no substitute compared with going native; I count myself as one such user, this guy is maybe another )

More broadly, I'm a little appalled that both of you (out of insecurity? lack of coffee? poor parenting, maybe too much coffee?) feel the need to impugn my intelligence with playground insults in order to make your point. I freely concede (and conceded) that I may be wrong about the outcome but there is little doubt of the contributing factors I cite, which I think are interesting and relevant. OK?