I saw this previewed at my local user group in January. Dominic Gallelo, Graphisoft's CEO, was present and spoke. My take on what he said:
Gallelo and Co. have correctly identified builders/developers as the ones who have the money, not architects. For Graphisoft to grow and make money, it must now follow/court the money. To this end, it sounds like they have been successfully wooing builder/developers even building virtual models for them to demonstarate/prove/hook them on the ArchiCAD solution.
These large offices are driving Graphisoft's next level of development. The needs of large offices that have switched to ArchiCAD have aready led to the ressurection of the HVAC Ductwork tool and the creation of the Option manager etc. Sarcasm aside, this will have many trickle-down benefits for the smaller firms [who helped get graphisoft to where it is now].
Gallelo, after stating that Graphisoft was committed to mac then sounded as though he rued every penny spent on maintaining the mac platform. From a bottom-line view, this is easy to understand as the money spent to do this is no longer justified by the number of mac users. However, it seems prudent to them... to continue to support the mac... hedging their bets... apple on the rise... who knows what the future will be.
Back to the Option manager. This was was developed as a point-of-sales tool for the builder/developers. Clearly this could be useful for others. As yet, it does not work with Teamwork. How it works with I/S features for costing and schedules? No idea. Keep in mind, though, that this is just the first pass. We have seen other iffy tools, including the calculate menu, go from undecipherable to its present state which all in all works quite nicely. Your comments here will help it grow.
Input to Graphisoft from users like Rick could be very beneficial although I wouldn't mention, Rick, that you are a solo-practioner. I got the impression that we don't matter much any more.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System
"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"