Category Archives: BIM

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 6, future proofing

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This is the sixth and final post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post explains why adding a copy of BricsCAD to your stable of AutoCAD licenses is a good thing for your future and that of your company.

A CAD Management thing I did a few years ago was to examine the options for replacing AutoCAD and other Autodesk products. I was an AutoCAD loyalist (albeit a somewhat critical one) with over a quarter of a century invested in it. I was looking after the deeply entrenched and very heavily customised CAD environment of a major public utility company that had been using AutoCAD as its primary CAD system since the late 1980s. Hundreds of custom commands were in place and providing priceless productivity benefits. Hundreds of thousands of DWG files were on file, with thousands more coming through every month. The inertia behind AutoCAD was very, very strong. Looking outside the cage was a pretty radical step to take. What led me to that point?

  • Autodesk business policy. Autodesk has become increasingly anti-customer over the years in ways that will be familiar to all readers of this blog. I won’t rehash them here. This leads to…
  • Increasing costs. Autodesk software is expensive and getting more so. Autodesk has made no secret of its intention to move to an all-subscription (rental) model. This is an attempt to treble the ongoing income Autodesk receives, in return for doing as little as possible. Which leads to…
  • Lack of progress. It had become clear that the days of AutoCAD seriously improving from release to release were over, never to return. This isn’t because there is no room for improvement, it’s because Autodesk doesn’t want to improve AutoCAD. AutoCAD won’t be permitted to become too capable because that would just eat into sales of Autodesk’s other products. You’re not going to see 3D parametrics or sheet metal capabilities in AutoCAD: buy Inventor instead. You’re not going to see BIM capability: buy Revit. Beyond the internal competition issue, some years ago, Autodesk leadership lost interest in what it perceived to be an old-fashioned dead-end product. The income from AutoCAD customers is being diverted to fund purchase and/or development of more fashionable and interesting products.
  • Frustration with Autodesk’s Beta program. The goings-on within the Autodesk Beta program must remain private, so what I can say here is limited. I can say that I spent many years contributing large numbers of hours to that program in order to attempt to improve the product. As time went on, the positive results that emerged from that effort decreased; that much is no secret because it is apparent in the product. I felt I was fighting against Autodesk to try to improve the product, and losing. There were a few final incidents that persuaded me to stop bashing my head against that particular wall. I wasn’t the only one. I stuck it out for years longer than many very valuable people who had already given up before me.
  • Proxy server issues. Over the years, Autodesk’s habit of attempting to do sneaky things to access the Internet had caused a variety of problems in a secure proxy server environment. This caused several things not to work, and harmed performance severely in some places. As Autodesk’s developers turned over, things that worked in one release would not work in the next. Attempts to get this addressed as a support issue would result in the environment being blamed. These problems increased over the years as Autodesk threw in more and more connectivity-requiring features. There was a non-zero and ever-increasing possibility that one day, Autodesk would screw things up altogether and leave us with non-functioning software. That has already happened for some people, and although the stoppage has generally been temporary, it is important to have redundancy.
  • Poor performance. AutoCAD has been getting bigger and slower. Downloads are huge and Autodesk does its best to make them as difficult as possible. Installations take an age, as do uninstallations. Startup times are terrible and getting worse. My users were complaining – a lot – and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

That’s what moved me to take a very, very serious look at alternatives. Your motives may differ. Just the desire to have a Plan B in case of disaster might be enough.

If you don’t feel moved to investigate, you may eventually be faced with no option. Sooner or later, the person who holds the purse strings at your company may point to this year’s much bigger Autodesk invoice and ask, “What are we getting for this? How can we reduce our costs?” When that happens, you don’t want to be scrabbling round for answers before that invoice needs to be paid. Look into the options in advance. Are you really wedded to AutoCAD or are you actually tied to DWG?

Days of Future Past

Here’s my suggestion. Examine the available alternatives to AutoCAD and the other Autodesk products you use. Do it sooner rather than later so you get the chance to determine the answers to non-trivial questions like these:

  • Capability. Does the alternative product do everything that AutoCAD does, that your users need it to do? Does it do other stuff that AutoCAD doesn’t that you might find useful? What’s the performance like? How does it work on the hardware you have? Does it have user interface elements that don’t just look good but work productively in practice?
  • Compatibility. You will almost certainly demand extremely good DWG compatibility, but this question goes well beyond that. Will your LISP work? How about DCL? ActiveX support? DOSLib? Other programming languages? Can you carry over your customisation files? Can you make the interface look the same? If you have custom toolbars, or ribbon, or even image menus, do they carry across? Can your users carry across their skills without downtime, extensive training and a productivity hit? Can AutoCAD and the potential replacement coexist without issues? Can you use a common set of custom support files pointed at by both products? Will it work well on your hardware?
  • Add-ons. If you’re using third party products on top of AutoCAD, or if you’re using an AutoCAD-based vertical, is that product or an equivalent available? Does it work well? What do the objects they create look like in plain AutoCAD? Can you round-trip through AutoCAD and back and retain your intelligence? You’re probably going to have to test this with evaluation software and your own data.
  • Licensing options. Is perpetual licensing available? Can you stick on a release for a few years and still purchase upgrades later? Has the company committed to providing you with licensing options or has it made noises about going all-rental? Is network licensing available? Does it coexist problem-free with Autodesk’s network licensing software?
  • Costs. Compare the likely costs for all your options over several years. You’re going to have to make some assumptions. It can be difficult to work out what they should be.
  • Track record. Has the company been around for a while? What reputation does it have? Does it treat its customers with respect? How good is the support?
  • Future prospects. Is the company likely to be around long-term? Is it actively developing the product you’re interested in? Is it innovating? Is it merely following AutoCAD at a distance or charging ahead? Is the product going to be limited by Autodesk-like internal competition?

I went through all of these questions and settled on BricsCAD as the best option in my company’s case. In fact, several aspects made it really the only viable option. The product impressed me with high performance, capabilities well beyond AutoCAD in several important areas, a very high degree of compatibility (particularly LISP but also other customisation files), the availability of perpetual licensing and much lower ongoing costs. The company impressed me with its honesty and attitude toward customers.

Most of all, I was won over because I could see that the product had a future. Subsequent improvements have only strengthened that view.

Obviously, you need to make your own judgement based on your own circumstances. I would suggest looking at all the options, including sticking with AutoCAD permanently, with or without subscription or maintenance. Maybe you can use my investigations as a starting point, but I encourage you to start investigating now rather than when you’re under time pressure and don’t have time to do a thorough job.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and start preparing for the possibility of a different future. Maybe it won’t turn out to be part of your company’s future, but it could still be part of your future.

Options are good. Learning is good. Best case scenario, your knowledge is going to save your company money and improve its productivity, and you will end up smelling of roses. Worst case scenario, you’re going to spend some very justifiable time doing something new, different and interesting. I recommend it.

Other posts in the Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD series:

Part 1, fixing drawings
Part 2, 3D operations
Part 3, parts on demand
Part 4, efficiency
Part 5, LISP

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates – again!

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BricsCAD V18.2 for Windows is out. The new stuff in this mid-term update is again showing up Autodesk’s lack of progress with its once-flagship product, AutoCAD. I’m sure Autodesk would love customers to accept that there’s only so much anyone can do with a DWG-based CAD product once it reaches a certain level of maturity. Customers should get used to nothing of significance being added year after year. Diminishing returns, and all that. Pay to continue using the product, but don’t expect it to get better.

What a shame for Autodesk, then, that Bricsys exists. By consistently providing a raft of significant improvements with each full and mid-term release, Bricsys shows up that idea as nonsense. It’s perfectly possible to keep improving CAD at a very rapid rate, particularly if you’re not worried about competing with other products in your range. There’s a reason AutoCAD’s parametrics are restricted to 2D, and BricsCAD’s 3D parametrics in a DWG product proves that the reason isn’t technical. It’s strategic. Also strategic is cutting the guts out of an already much-weakened AutoCAD team, because you would really prefer your customers to be using your trendier and/or more expensive products.

I should point out that BricsCAD V18 customers who have a perpetual license, even without maintenance, will be receiving V18.2 with all its improvements free of charge. Contrast that with Autodesk, which is, despicably, withholding even bug fixes from selected customers. Autodesk’s attitude to customers who aren’t constantly paying up front is one of utter contempt. Autodesk feels entitled to your money; Bricsys wants to earn it.

So what’s Bricsys done to earn your money with BricsCAD V18.2?

Mostly, it’s lots of relatively small-sounding things that add up to significant productivity enhancements. There are several items that are playing catch-up to AutoCAD, such as long-overdue in-place text editing. There are big performance improvements in drawings with PDF underlays due to a smart multi-resolution cache mechanism. The 3D-to-2D generation mechanism has also been significantly sped up. Constraints (2D and 3D, unlike AutoCAD) are easier to create. Several 3D direct modeling operations have been made easier. That also helps with sheet metal design, which has seen other improvements.

In Bricsys BIM V18.2, a lot of smarts have been added. The mechanism for converting CAD models (including those made in BricsCAD Shape) to BIM models, BIMIFY, already did some fascinatingly clever things, but that’s been improved further particularly in the areas of structural member and room recognition. For those of us in Australia, support for our steel sections is very welcome.

For me, that’s not the big news. Oh, no. The big news for me is a thing called BLADE – the BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment.

If you’re a CAD Manager or in-house developer and you’ve been waiting until BricsCAD had VLIDE, wait no longer. But this isn’t just catch-up. This is a big leapfrog over Autodesk’s sadly neglected IDE for CAD’s primary user programming language. There’s so much good stuff in BLADE that I can’t hope to do it justice here, so I will be covering it extensively in future posts. For now, here’s a statement for you:

If you program in AutoLISP or Visual LISP, you should be doing it in BLADE.

It’s that good. Really. Watch this space for details.

The download is small, the install is fast, it won’t harm your AutoCAD installation, and you can evaluate it free for 30 days. Links:

That awkward moment when I just failed to create BIM

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I recently updated my resume, and I thought it might be relevant to include an episode from my early career. This post is an expansion on what I had to say about that episode.

I was managing a tiny CAD training and development company, Educad. Much of my time there was spent developing software called NIDIS (originally called NEEDS), a project that was started in 1987 or 1988 with Nixdorf Computer as the client. It was intended to take over the market among first the home building companies of Western Australia, then Australia, then the World!

What’s special about NIDIS is that it was a precursor to BIM. Using a 3D-adapted version of the 2D Educad architectural software within AutoCAD, designs of domestic homes could be efficiently created and infused with a degree of intelligence. This was then linked to the Nixdorf minicomputer-based software that contained pricing and other information about the various building components. This combined system enabled accurate quantity take-offs to be performed.

This was supposed to be a short project, but due to a massive amount of “scope creep” it took two years. I was really pushing the limits of what AutoCAD could be persuaded to do at that time and had to break new ground in several areas. Some of it was a kludge, but I made it work. Finally, the software was essentially completed, with a custom tablet menu (remember those?), full documentation and everything. Nixdorf CAD-spec PCs with big screens, tablets, AutoCAD and NIDIS were installed in the drawing office. It was successfully tested in Beta. The take-offs were very accurate. Everything looked good to go.

Then, two weeks before it was due to go into production, this project died. The building company that was sponsoring it, Mansard Homes, went into liquidation as it struggled unsuccessfully with the combined effects of very high interest rates and bad publicity about poor building quality and cost overruns. Nixdorf dropped the whole project like a hot potato and the product was never sold. I didn’t have any rights to the software and couldn’t do anything with it.

But it was software that was based around a 3D model of a building that contained some intelligent information, albeit extremely crude by today’s standards. I wrote, quite literally, Building Information Modeling software. It was completed in 1989, before the name BIM had even been used. The idea had existed since the mid 70s, but I didn’t know that at the time so I made it up as I went along.

I didn’t actually invent BIM, but I made something that resembled BIM that actually worked. And then it didn’t.

This is easily the most spectacular failure of my career. Still, I’m kind of proud of it.

Edit: for historical context, this video shows an unrelated system that was developed at about the same time as NIDIS.

BricsCAD V18 – showing Autodesk how to do DWG CAD

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For years now, Autodesk has done very little worthwhile with AutoCAD. There have been a few small but welcome improvements, but it’s really just tinkering at the edges. The product as a whole continues to stagnate and yet blimp out. It’s getting bigger and slower with each new release. The downloads get bigger. The install times get longer. The startup times drag out. The responsiveness suffers. And for what? Pretty much the same old thing, every time. Sometimes you don’t even get a new desktop icon. Don’t get me started on value for money.

It’s as if Autodesk considers DWG-based desktop CAD to be a solved problem. Many CAD users accept this. There’s not much more that can be done to improve it, right?

Wrong.

Bricsys has, yet again, proven Autodesk wrong. It is very possible to significantly improve DWG-based CAD. The improvements to the just-released BricsCAD V18 go far beyond anything Autodesk has done for many years, and that’s improving on an already-excellent and innovative product in V17. I’ll be covering some of the most important changes in future posts, but for now here are a few Bricsys links:

Don’t take my word for it. The easiest way to test the validity of what I have to say is to try it out for yourself. Unlike Autodesk products, Bricsys downloads and installs are small, fast and efficient. How efficient? This efficient (R.K. McSwain, Twitter):

It’s a 258 MB download for an entire DWG-based CAD application which is significantly more fully-featured than AutoCAD. No nasty malware-like download manager. It’s not a stub or a pre-installer that expands itself before even starting the install proper. It’s a ready-to-run installer for the entire top-of-the-range product capable of parametric 3D, sheet metal design and BIM. It installs and starts up quickly. You can have no trace of BricsCAD on your computer now and be editing your DWGs with it (yes, including your AutoCAD 2018 and Civil 3D DWGs) in a few minutes.

Here’s the download link. You can evaluate it for 30 days.

Did I mention that perpetual licenses are available? Or that it’s way cheaper than AutoCAD? Or that when you report a problem it goes to a real developer who actually cares about fixing it in a reasonable timeframe?

The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?

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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 10 – platforms

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, R.K. McSwain asks about BricsCAD running on three different platforms. Erik explains why BricsCAD for Mac (and Linux) is so much more complete than AutoCAD for Mac, which has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

R.K.: Do all three platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) contain the same functionality?

Erik: Yes. Sometimes it’s a bit hard with the Mac to bring it along but so far, so good. The only problem sometimes is in the APIs.

We are using wxWidgets and not the Microsoft classes. This gives us the ability, with the same source code more or less, to serve Mac, Linux and Windows. By far Windows is the most important one. By history, all the applications are on Windows, because AutoCAD was only Windows. What we have as APIs, and the most important ones are BRX and .NET. If you want to port an application to Mac, it means our API must support that as well. BRX is doing that for 90 to 95%; there are a couple of functions that only work on Windows. For most of the applications, they can port their application to Linux or the Mac without any problems.

Steve: And you support the Visual LISP COM functions as well, right?

Mark: Yes, we cover them and they are also available on Mac and Linux.

Steve: You have a solution there that Autodesk doesn’t, which gives us the strange situation that BricsCAD for Mac is more AutoCAD-compatible than AutoCAD for Mac.

R.K.: AutoCAD for Mac leaves a lot of holes.

Erik: That’s because they rewrote the whole interface for Cocoa, and we didn’t. We are using one code base. You can be more Catholic than the Pope, yeah? If you rewrite AutoCAD completely for the Mac, the result is many holes, no applications possible, it doesn’t help anybody. We’re better off being pragmatic and doing it the way we did it.

Still, we must say that applications availability for Mac and Linux is not much. That has to do with 95% of our sales being on Windows. We expect that might change for BIM, because more architects are Mac users, partly because the first version of ArchiCAD was on Mac, Vectorworks is, so it’s really an Architect’s machine. We expect that maybe for BIM, it might change and we might sell more versions on the Mac.

Steve: Autodesk doesn’t have a competitor there, does it?

Erik: No, absolutely not.

Mark: I should mention that all of our keys are cross-platform. So when you buy a key, you can run them all. So every time you on decide to run on Mac and later on you decide to switch it to Windows, we don’t have any problem. You can switch whenever you want, from one to the other, on to Linux if you want.

Erik: Again, choice. It’s up to the users.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. Erik explains that Bricsys won’t trample over its application partners in Autodesk-like fashion, except…

Steve: Autodesk is known for treading on its third-party developers and replacing their market. Can you tell us about your attitude to doing that?

Erik: We have always said that we are not stepping into any application market. We will not do it.

There’s only one exception, that’s where there is no [other] possibility. There was no sheet metal. There is no viable [third-party] DWG sheet metal product in the market today for sheet metal. Then we do it, of course.

For BIM, there are. There is a German product. We have talked to those guys, but the problem is, for BIM the way we do it, it’s so deep in the core, the direct modeling engine that we have build… there’s no way that we could expect, of all the partners that are working on AEC, that one would have the strength and the force to bring the product where it is today. We have worked with maybe 30, 40 people for three, four years to do that. I don’t know of any application partner that has more than ten employees. And then those ten employees do everything.

Mark: Except for Intergraph, of course!

Erik: Except Intergraph! Except Intergraph! In the AEC space, I mean. When it comes to making an architectural modeler, there was no other possibility but to do it ourselves. Then we do it. But what we do then is provide all the APIs so the rest of the AEC community can profit off it. Otherwise, I think we would have lost the AEC space. If we didn’t do that, with what we have shown you today on BIM, we would lose the AEC space completely. That could not happen.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

Erik discusses where Bricsys can go in future and the place BIM has in that.

Cyrena: So what is your vision, ultimately, of what Bricsys will become in tandem with your partners? Do you have limits or boundaries of which markets you will address and which you won’t? Are you going to be bigger than… “somebody else” one day?

Erik: If it comes to the number of customers, challenging AutoCAD is difficult. 12 million registered users. If you count illegal users it might add up to, I don’t know, 20 million, 30 million? I don’t know, nobody knows.

What are the boundaries of where we can go? It’s more or less dictated by the application markets. We have application developers in GIS, we have them in AEC, we have them in mechanical. In Mechanical 3D, AutoCAD was not present. They were present with AutoCAD Mechanical, but that’s a 2D product. If for a moment I leave Inventor out, because it’s another file format, but for DWG, the market for sheet metal and the things that Solidworks and others do, you don’t see third party applications with power participating in that market, with AutoCAD. With all the other markets, there are plenty of other applications: GIS, AEC, it’s endless. We want to bring everyone who wants to work with us, we’re going to feed and help them, and that’s more or less the boundary of where we can go.

For BIM, that’s something we are driving ourselves and it’s a huge market. There’s a lot of attention being paid to Revit [by elements of the press]. We think there are a lot of DWG users that want to move to BIM, but first of all Revit is too expensive, it’s too complicated by far, and it’s another file format. These are hurdles that not everybody wants to jump at the moment. It’s fair to say that we are working to eliminate all those hurdles. An existing DWG user, AutoCAD or BricsCAD already knows 80% of our BIM product. He has to learn 20% extra and he can participate, probably in an easier and more intuitive way than he can ever do with Revit.

We didn’t talk a lot about the differences between Revit and our BIM solution. I think in six months and a year we’re going to spend more time to really explain the differences. BIM is hyped, but there are studies that show that 19% of the people who talk about BIM are actually using it. It’s a couple of hundred thousands, it’s not millions already. There’s a lot of hype around it but the real challenge is to bring five or six million people on DWG in the AEC space into BIM. That’s our goal. If they want to stay on DWG, we are their only chance. For that part only, that’s already a huge start. If you then count all the applications on top of that and around it, the addressable market for us on that is immense.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Another one bites the dust – Autodesk sheds Seek

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Following on from Autodesk’s announcement of the impending demise of 123D, the shedding of Cloudy applications and services continues. This time, it’s BIM content service Autodesk Seek. Here’s what Autodesk has to say about the reason for this change:

Autodesk… does not consider the Autodesk Seek service to be strategic to our core business at this time.

 
The timeline went something like this:

  • 16 January 2017 – Autodesk transferred the operations and customer support obligations related to the Autodesk Seek business to Swedish digital content company BIMobject.
  • 18 January 2017 – Autodesk posts a notice to that effect on its Knowledge Network.
  • 18 January 2017 – BIMobject posts a notice to that effect on its own site.
  • ~23 January 2017 – Autodesk customers attempting to use Autodesk Seek find out about the change when they are automatically redirected to the BIMobject site.
     
  • ~23 January 2017 – A well-known Autodesk personality also finds out about the change, unfortunately while presenting Autodesk Seek to a crowd. I’m sure the consummate professional in question would have handled this situation well, but it’s an uncomfortable position to be placed in.

It may well be that former Autodesk Seek users are not unduly inconvenienced by this change. This transition may be less stressful for customers than, say, Autodesk deciding to get out of the Facilities Management software business. Time will tell.

Autodesk can and will dump products and parts of its business as and when it sees fit, as it always has. Look back over Autodesk’s history and you’ll observe a long trail of corpses and weeping orphans. The difference with Cloud software and services is that very negative changes can take immediate effect. The vendor has total control; the customer has none.

Even if your Cloudy product is Autodesk’s Next Big Thing, that’s no protection. If Autodesk loses interest, the rug can be pulled at any instant, with unknown consequences. If you’re not uncomfortable with that, you should be.

When Autodesk dumped FMDesktop, customers could at least continue to use the software they had for as long as they liked. From the customer’s viewpoint, that’s the huge advantage of the desktop software perpetual license model; an advantage I can’t see customers giving up willingly.

BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years?

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I’ve been evaluating BricsCAD for a few years now, and have been looking at it pretty seriously as a DWG-based LISP-compatible AutoCAD alternative for a year or so. A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Munich for the Bricsys International Conference (at Bricsys’ expense – see the Legal page for disclosure) where I learned quite a few things I had failed to notice during my own evaluation of V17. As you may have noticed, I can be pretty hard-bitten and cynical about what CAD companies have to say about their products, but I came back impressed.

The conference and the product itself are not free of flaws, but I have to say the progress Bricsys has shown in developing the BricsCAD product is really quite astonishing. The rate at which serious, worthwhile-to-customers improvements have been made to BricsCAD over the last few releases is huge. Some of it’s just catching up with existing AutoCAD features, but most of it is going beyond what Autodesk has done. Overall, Bricsys lately has outstripped Autodesk’s efforts in improving its DWG-based flagship CAD product to such a degree that it’s frankly embarrassing for the much larger corporation.

I grabbed Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser for a brief chat at the end of the conference. I told him that while there were still important areas that need addressing, nevertheless if Autodesk had shipped a new release with a quarter of the improvements that Bricsys managed with V17, it would still have been the best AutoCAD upgrade in fifteen years. Yes, the gap in progress from Autodesk to Bricsys really is that big.

The difference appears to be one of attitude. The Bricsys development team (many were there in Munich to speak to) is focused, motivated and enabled. For Bricsys, BricsCAD really is the flagship product. That’s where all the effort goes; everything goes into the DWG-based product. High-performance 2D drafting, user interface innovation, parametric 3D models, IFC-certified BIM, sheet metal, everything. You would think this would lead to massive bloat, but somehow it doesn’t; the product remains small and fast.

For Autodesk, the emphasis has been elsewhere for some years now. The rate per release of worthwhile AutoCAD improvements, never stellar since the 12-month release cycle was adopted, has been trending downwards since AutoCAD 2010 and has slowed to a trickle. Autodesk is happy to accept the income from AutoCAD customers and use it to develop a hundred trendier products, neglecting the foundation on which the company was built. That’s relying on inertia, and there’s a big question mark over how sustainable that is.

Here’s a 5-minute YouTube marketing video outlining some of the changes. If you have a bit longer, here’s a 37-minute YouTube video of the new features from head of development Hans de Backer. The presentation lacks sparkle (no insult to Hans, but he’s no Lynn Allen) but the substance is there. Note that Hans was demonstrating live to the full conference using a pre-release product, including opening a huge drawing, which surely deserves marks for bravery! As a bonus, you can just about see Owen Wengerd and myself in the bottom left corner.

I’ll be going into more detail on BricsCAD V17 pros and cons later (yes, there are cons), but for now here’s the press release and here’s where you can download the product for evaluation. It’s a straightforward download of a 234 MB MSI file and the install takes just over a minute. That in itself is a breath of fresh air for people who are used to hanging around, waiting for AutoCAD downloads and installs to finish.

Battle of the Bullshit part 3 – Beyond Bentley

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Somebody at Autodesk really does seem to have it in for Bentley right now. I thought they were friends? Oh well, times change.

Autodesk has launched a campaign to promote its BIM offerings for transportation projects and is promoting this via emails to existing customers, all of which is fair enough. It’s suggesting BIM is a better tool than traditional CAD for such projects. Another reasonable claim, so it’s appropriate for us to evaluate the arguments and examine the options.

What did Autodesk decide to call its campaign? Beyond AutoCAD? Beyond CAD? To BIM and Beyond?

None of the above. It’s Beyond Bentley.

Huh? You may have noticed I’m keen on alliteration, but still, huh? What does Bentley have to do with this? Most Autodesk CAD customers are going to know and care nothing about Bentley products. So why mention them at all? The headline is “Move beyond Bentley to Autodesk, the makers of BIM”. The strong implication is:

Bentley only does traditional CAD. You should use BIM instead, and that means you need Autodesk.

However, I believe many Autodesk customers will think like this instead:

Autodesk seems very concerned about this Bentley mob. I wonder what they’re offering that has the Big A so worried? Bentley must be a big player in this area. I’ve been considering developing an Autodesk exit strategy anyway because of the forced rental thing and I’ve heard Bentley sells perpetual licenses. I must go check them out!

Those customers who do check out Bentley will learn that despite Autodesk’s implication, Bentley do in fact provide BIM products, and quite a few products specifically for transportation. I have no idea if Bentley’s BIM and transportation products are any better or worse than Autodesk’s offerings, but I do know you shouldn’t take either vendor’s word for it, including anything they say in webinars. Find out for yourself with a hands-on evaluation. Because BIM isn’t something you just pop in and out of, make sure you include long-term licensing costs into your calculations.