Is anybody left who still thinks BricsCAD isn’t a serious replacement for AutoCAD? If that’s you, perhaps the latest news might make you take it seriously. No, not the Heidi Hewett news. Even more recent news than that!
Robert Green, CAD Management guru, Cadalyst writer and consultant (not to mention a rather good guitarist) has been announced as the first Bricsys Certified Migration Consultant.
Image courtesy of Bricsys
Read all about what Robert has to say on this Bricsys blog post.
Anybody who has been reading this blog for the last few years will be surprised by none of what Robert has to say in that blog post. It’s not merely a repeat of what I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s all factually correct and easily verifiable by any competent CAD Manager.
I’ve been there and done that. I’ve gone through the process of taking a very complex custom AutoCAD environment, applying it to BricsCAD and giving it to my users. They loved it. No training was required to work as usual. Most things happened quicker, more conveniently, or both, starting right from the speedy installation. Once the product is in place and established, training can then be applied to take advantage of the places where BricsCAD is ahead of AutoCAD.
If you’re a CAD Manager where AutoCAD is used and you haven’t checked out BricsCAD yet, it’s about time you did.
This might come as a shock to those who see Autodesk domination of DWG CAD as a permanent fact of life, but the game has changed. AutoCAD’s stagnation and comments by senior figures show that the former flagship is clearly unloved by the powers within Autodesk. AutoCAD LT, even more so. An unimpressive AutoCAD 2019 shows that major improvements can no longer be expected in exchange for your ever-increasing annual payments, and with large numbers of people having been offloaded from the research and development teams, who would do it anyway? Meanwhile, BricsCAD development shoots ahead.
Thanks to decades of hostility towards customers that has only accelerated in recent years, Autodesk can’t even rely on customer loyalty for survival. When there’s a serious competitor that offers an easy migration path, the inertia that has kept Autodesk alive so far in the DWG space is no longer enough. The feeling among industry observers I meet is that Autodesk is in a decline of its own making. The only debate is whether that decline is temporary or terminal.
Back to Robert et al. Autodesk has lost many good people, and Bricsys is gaining them. The momentum is clearly with the Belgian company. Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?
Just wanted to comment on this part >”not to mention a rather good guitarist”
Who else among us has been invited to sit in with the band, on stage, in a Paris nightclub? 😉
“Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?”
Andrew Anagnost … but, I have doubts that Bricsys would take him.
Defector means someone who betrays their organization for good or not so good reasons. It implies you owe loyalty to a company that has shown no loyalty to you by laying you off.
This isn’t the case of betraying your organization. It’s a case of joining with like minded folks after you’ve been tossed out.
As I’ve said before, you’re seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the visible, customer facing folks. There are many more solid technical people who are more critical who have also been let go.
All good points.
Who cares. These people conveniently started to ‘love’ BricsCAD after they were fired from Autodesk. AutoCAD is still the superior product, BricsCAD doesn’t even come close, nor do all the other clones. I hate the subscription only model, but I’m not going to gamble my business just to save a couple of dollars. Not that it matters anyway. AEC is all Revit now and unless you can read its files, don’t even bother.
Robert Green wasn’t fired by Autodesk.
If you think AutoCAD’s still the superior product, I can only assume you haven’t tried BricsCAD lately.
Sounded as if he’s one of your big Autodesk ‘experience cull’. You have to stay objective. We looked at BricsCAD. It has some neat features but customers send us their files in Revit now. If we can’t read them, there’s no work.
Guess what? AutoCAD cannot open Revit files, unless you export to DWG first from Revit. After exporting you can also open it in Bricscad and not only AutoCAD.
It will probably be a matter of time before Briscad implements the Revit import functionality from the ODA libraries, which would allow Bricscad to import Revit files (though not perfect yet, it would still be better than AutoCAD in that aspect).
You should compare Bricscad to AutoCAD, not to Revit. That would be an objective comparison.
As good as Revit may be for what it does, that doesn’t mean it is the proper (or best) tool all the time for BIM. Time will tell if Bricscad’s attempt to do BIM in the DWG format is going to be a viable option/alternative but there is more to BIM than using Revit (or Bricscad BIM for that matter).
“AEC is all Revit now”
I don’t know about the A or the E, but I’m pretty sure the C stands for Civil and I don’t think anyone does Civil work in Revit.
(I’ve never heard of anyone doing Civil work in BricsCAD either, but I did find a couple of addons for it. I’d love to know more about them. Anyone?
http://www.civilsitedesign.com.au
http://www.stringersurvey.com.au
)
The C stands for construction, for which Revit is also used.
Autodesk is promoting the use for Civil projects as well though, so I can imagine you may have picked that up somewhere.
Civil work can be done in Bricscad, and is done in it, as there are quite a few addons, though I have not used the ones you mentioned as i am more towards the GIS/spatial end of the civil work.
SpatialManager could be an option for that; http://www.spatialmanager.com as well