This is the final post in a series covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. If you’ve made it through to the end of this series, congratulations! I hope you found it illuminating.
In this post, R.K. McSwain asks a question about a possible BricsCAD-based DWG viewer, which turns into a brainstorming session!
R.K.: Do you guys have a viewer? A read-only viewer? Is it something you’re looking to do?
Erik: No. BricsCAD classic costs, you know, $400.
Steve: Autodesk is giving one away anyway.
R.K.: They give it away, but you know what it is. It’s almost a 1 GB download, I was thinking as maybe a way to get people interested in BricsCAD? Here’s a viewer, I wonder what else it can do…
Mark: What? (disbelieving) The viewer is almost one gig?
Steve: It’s about 800 MB.
Erik: It’s a matter of choices and priorities.
Steve: It is a marketing opportunity. A viewer that’s easier to use, because you can download and install it within five minutes. And you could be providing them with basically BricsCAD with stuff disabled. You could even have a Buy Me button that un-disables that stuff.
Erik: Yeah, yeah!
Steve: This isn’t an interview now, it’s a product brainstorming session!
Erik/Mark: (laughs)
Mark: Let’s continue! Let’s continue! As you know, you can download our software and evaluate it for 30 days (and you can ask for an extension) but one of the options we’ve discussed is that after the 30 days it turns into a viewer.
Erik: Maybe we’ll do that.
R.K.: That gives them the 30 day window up front, even if they’re just looking for the viewer.
Erik: Yeah.
This is the complete set of links to this interview series:
- The big Bricsys interview 1 – why invite the press?
- The big Bricsys interview 2 – making money
- The big Bricsys interview 3 – looking after people
- The big Bricsys interview 4 – thank you, Autodesk
- The big Bricsys interview 5 – perpetual licensing and choice
- The big Bricsys interview 6 – lean and focused
- The big Bricsys interview 7 – the applications ecosystem
- The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM
- The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers
- The big Bricsys interview 10 – platforms
- The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?
That seems to be a great idea. The only concern I would have is often the viewer is needed by people unqualified for editing drawings. A kill switch of some kind might be in order.
Well, for comparison: Bentley View V8i is 246MB .MSI with another 80 for the RealDWG portion that reads the DWG natively. We use it for a viewer across DGN, DWG, IFC, and other file types.