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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:

Trusting Autodesk – poll results

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I have closed the polls asking if you trusted various companies to do the right thing by their customers. Here is a summary of the results, showing the percentage of “Yes” votes for each company. The most trusted company is at the top, the least trusted is at the bottom.

  1. Honda 69%
  2. Amazon 65%
  3. Target 52%
  4. Bricsys 43%
  5. Apple 36%
  6. Autodesk 23%

Remember, this is not a scientific poll and as with all polls and surveys there will be some self-selection bias. Does anyone find anything about the above results surprising?

Why don’t you trust Autodesk?

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As I mentioned earlier, any company that wants to move its customers to the Cloud is going to need the trust of those customers. Three months ago, I started a poll to try to get some measure of how trustworthy you consider Autodesk to be, in terms of doing the right thing by its customers. The results of that poll look pretty awful for Autodesk. Right from the start, the distrusters have outnumbered the trusters by three to one, with the current results showing an overwhelming majority of respondents (77%) not trusting Autodesk.

Why? What has Autodesk done in the past, or is doing now, that leads people to this level of distrust? If you have voted in this poll, I’d like to know your reasons, so please add your comments whichever way you voted. If you think there’s an issue with the question wording and/or its simple Yes/No choice, feel free to say so.

There will be a number of people who have an inherent distrust of corporations, so as a control I’ve added a number of polls to try to see how much that influences the results. There are near-identical polls for a wide range of different corporations. There’s a poll for an on-line retailer and Cloud service provider (Amazon), one for a computer and gadget maker (Apple), one for another CAD company (Bricsys, makers of Bricscad), one for a maker of cars, motorbikes etc. (Honda), and one for a traditional retailer (Target). I’ll be interested to see how trustworthy you consider those corporations to be, and how they compare to Autodesk.

Poll of evil

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I have closed the Which of these is most evil? poll, which had been running from 20 February 2009. It attracted 2,351 voters, each of whom could distribute up to three votes among thirteen (yes, that number was deliberate) candidates. Here are the ranked results:

  1. Satan (36%, 846 Votes)
  2. Microsoft (31%, 721 Votes)
  3. Apple (26%, 614 Votes)
  4. RIAA/IFPI/MPAA (26%, 601 Votes)
  5. Miley Cyrus (23%, 546 Votes)
  6. Autodesk (23%, 536 Votes)
  7. Disney (16%, 382 Votes)
  8. Google (10%, 230 Votes)
  9. Dell (7%, 172 Votes)
  10. The Pirate Bay (6%, 147 Votes)
  11. Sony (6%, 140 Votes)
  12. Steve Johnson (4%, 89 Votes)
  13. Gaahl (3%, 82 Votes)

That top three is not going to shock anyone (except perhaps some fanbois), but are some surprises in the list. For example, more than a quarter of voters were aware enough of the evils of Big Content to be able to decipher the alphabet soup RIAA/IFPI/MPAA choice and select it. More than four times as many people think this litigious pack of demons is voteworthy than think the same about arch enemies The Pirate Bay. That’s not so shocking for those of us with our fingers on the pulse of popular opinion, but I was surprised to see so few people choose Big Content arch-villain Sony. Rootkit, anyone?

For Autodesk, this poll is something of a triumph, with less than a quarter of voters putting the company in the top three. Mind you, Autodesk was faced with some very stiff competition, being very narrowly edged out of fifth place by Miley Cyrus.

Only one in ten of you thought Google was worthy of selection. This is Google, a company that knows more about you than you do. Google, which passes out your information whenever it feels it might gain some strategic advantage from doing so, and really doesn’t care when it violates your privacy. Google, which insists on knowing my phone number before it lets me sign up for its Facebook-copy thing, because it obviously feels it doesn’t already have enough information about me. Google is apparently “do no evil” enough to attract far fewer votes than more sinister recipients such as, say, Disney.

Dell has been on my personal brown list for some years now, since repeatedly sending out fax spam to me and many other Australian businesses. It forced me to deal with its abysmal “customer service” [sic] Indian call centre in order to try to get it stopped. After making me wait for ridiculously long times while passing me round between various clueless, indecipherable people, a manager finally lied to me to get me off the phone. He assured me I would be taken off the list. The Dell fax spam continued until I finally gave up and threw the machine away; rather that than attempt to deal with Dell again.

Prior to this, I had no dealings with Dell and had just assumed it was a reasonably respectable company. It was only after this episode that I learned that Dell is utterly without ethics; my experience was perfectly normal. Indeed, victims of its shonkier practices (illegal bait-and-switch marketing, lying about stock and deliveries, repeatedly sending out “repaired” units that are totally non-functional, etc.) will probably think that I got off very lightly indeed. Dell has never seen a cent from me and never will. I’ve been very happy to pass on my feelings about the company to everyone who has ever asked for my hardware advice, as happens from time to time. 7% or not, Dell can go to Hell.

Finally, it’s official, I am more evil than Gaahl. Who? Gaahl is a Satanic death-grunt vocalist from black metal band Gorgoroth. He has performed in corpse paint on a stage decorated with sheep’s heads on spikes, and blood-splattered naked women hung up on crosses. Gaahl has been convicted of viscious violent assault multiple times, including one occasion where he was alleged to have threatened to drink his victim’s blood. I’m sure my metal friends will be very impressed by me being considered more evil than that. \m/

Why AutoCAD for Mac is a bad idea

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There has been a fair bit of open discussion from Autodesk lately on the subject of a possible future OS X AutoCAD version. The more I think about this, the more I am inclined to believe that this would be a bad idea. A very bad idea.

It pains me to write this, because I’m very much a user advocate and I’m arguing here against something that some users have been requesting for a long time. If you’re one of those users, I’m sorry, but I think this is one of those cases when giving you what you want would be bad for everybody, and bad for you in particular.

Now, this sort of platform discussion often degenerates into a quasi-religious debate, so let’s see if I can head it off at the pass. If you’re a Mac fan who wants to tell me the benefits of your chosen computer family and how inferior Windows is, save it. I’ll concede right here and now that you are probably right. My experience of Apple products has generally been very positive. They look good, they’re well made, they work well, the Mac OS has been shamelessly copied by Microsoft for decades, and so on, ad nauseam. Yup. Not disputed. Also, not relevant to the point I’m about to make.

Ever since the last multi-platform AutoCAD (Release 13), Autodesk has dedicated its primary product solely to Windows. Since then, the code base has been spreading its mass of roots deeper and deeper into the Windows soil. Any Windows-specific advantage the developers can take has been taken. Reversing or working around that process is a very substantial undertaking. If it were done, I think it would have the following outcomes:

AutoCAD for Mac would suck

The performance is likely to be poor, because all the Windows-specific stuff will have to be redirected, recreated or emulated. The stability is likely to be awful, because this will be new ground for almost all of the developers involved. Developers with AutoCAD experience are going to have little or no Mac experience and vice-versa. They would be trying to make significant changes to the code base at the same time that that code base is being modified for the next release. The bug level is likely to be abysmal, both for the above reasons and also because the number of pre-release testers available to Autodesk on this platform is likely to be relatively tiny. The user interface is likely to be an uncomfortable square-peg-in-round-hole effort, which will work badly and be derided by OS X users.

AutoCAD for Mac would be half-baked

Not just half-baked in the usual let’s-put-this-out-as-is-and-maybe-we-can-fix-it-later way, but half-baked by design. The Autodesk survey implies that serious consideration is being put into a version of AutoCAD that is missing some of the things that make AutoCAD what it is. Things like paper/model space functionality, the command line, 3D, LISP, the ability to use third-party apps… AutoCAD for Mac LT Lite, anyone? If the APIs are not all there, that means no OS X version of any of the AutoCAD-based vertical products, either.

AutoCAD for Mac would be bad for Mac users

Last time this was attempted, it was a failure. The early 90s attempt at AutoCAD for Mac lasted for two three releases: 10 to 12. Autodesk had little option but to pull the pin on a non-viable product, but the orphaned users weren’t happy. Fortunately, there weren’t that many of them.

Would this happen again? Yes, I think it probably would. Any Mac user with any sense wouldn’t touch the first new Mac release with a bargepole. That, of course, makes it much less likely that there would be a second or third release. Autodesk’s corporate culture (espoused very strongly by Carol Bartz, but dating back to John Walker) encourages brave attempts that may lead to failure. This policy has unfortunately left large numbers of orphans in its wake over the years. In the event of poor sales, Mac for AutoCAD users would just be another set of unfortunates to add to a long list.

AutoCAD for Mac would be bad for Windows users

The very substantial effort required to produce any kind of AutoCAD for Mac at all would be a major drain on very limited (and shrinking) development resources. That means Windows users of AutoCAD would look forward to a release (or more likely several releases) with fewer new features, less completion of existing undercooked features, and longer waits until bugs and other problems get fixed. This, in exchange for no benefit whatsoever to those users. In fact, the decoupling of Windows-specific calls and the likely introduction of extra bugs would probably make AutoCAD for Windows work less well than it otherwise would.

AutoCAD for Mac would be bad for Autodesk

Autodesk is currently trying to save money by closing down offices, dropping products, cutting down on expenses and sacking employees (some of whom were long-termers; irreplaceable sources of information about use of the product and why certain things were done the way they were). In such an environment, does it make sense to start up a new project with high resource requirements and limited potential benefits? Especially when it is just a repetition of a previous project that was a complete failure?

So, in addition to costing Autodesk a lot of money and harming the quality of its core product, a failed AutoCAD for Mac would leave behind more Autodesk haters and be rather embarrassing.

I must admit that a lot of this is based on guesswork, but it’s educated guesswork. I’ve been educated by history, if nothing else. Autodesk’s corporate consciousness has an occasional habit of ignoring the lessons of history and repeating old mistakes. I hope AutoCAD for Mac – The Sequel isn’t one of those occasions.