KeesW wrote:
Here we are again - yet a new update coming up while they haven't properly fixed the current version. I note that AC21's HELP is still a DRAFT version. They will presumably never get round to releasing a proper version because there is no point. Archicad add-ons such as Cadimage, have no AC21 versions of help and tutorial videos - theirs go back to version 18! I think that much of this is due to the annual upgrades to Archicad, driven, I suspect, by marketing, instead of customer, demand. Woudn't it be better if upgrades were bi-annual giving everyone time to find and fix bugs before the products are released to their paying customers?
.....which is basically to say that this issue has been beaten to death (in the past, and as far back as 10 to 15 years now) and beyond now, hence the flogging a dead horse metaphor.
And which is also to say that GS don't seem responsive to this (yours) point of view or way of thinking.
Your suspicions as to why we have yearly upgrades instead of bi-annual (or even per every 18 months which used to be the original model when I started using ArchiCAD almost 20 years ago) are spot on.
It's more a marketing and revenue mindset than a functional one that serves either customers or their own developers (who are forced to keep up with that pace and then have to pump out hotfix after hotfix to fix problems that were somehow not caught during the extensive Beta testing phase, or to fix problems created by previous hotfixes before them trying to fix other problems).
I suspect it's also to keep up with the Joneses, by which I mean their rivals who have yearly updates too (to much the same level of chagrin and frustrations among their own customers) and to sustain the subscription model from whence I imagine they get a lot of revenue.
What we've seen from it is a succession of increasingly diluted updates that offer little more than cosmetic changes if for no other reason than to justify that number change (even if nothing has fundamentally changed in the program) all while the real issues rarely get addressed.
I know of lots of people who are still on ArchiCAD 18 because they argue that they've seen nothing in recent versions that would justify cost of upgrading to the latest versions.
It used to be that one would upgrade every other year or every other version (i.e. only even number upgrades or only odd number upgrades), but then what do you do when they release 2 disappointing versions in a row?
Contrast this with a company like McNeel who often take as many as 5-6 years (or more) between numbered upgrades of Rhino3D, (they do release service packs in the interregnum) and use that time to properly and extensively beta-test the next version to ensure to any new version is really worth the upgrade and not just a cosmetic update.
Not to say that GS should go to that extreme route or time frame, but still, there is something to be admired about that level of consideration to your own product, and surely there's a more reasonable middle-ground.
Still looking?
