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The future of R Autodesk’s recent admission that there’s been a multi-year lack of development of Revit because of the concentration on cloud and construction has left many frustrated architectural practices wondering what the future of this 20 year-old BIM tool will be. Martyn Day examines the tea leaves
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utodesk acquired Revit Technology Corporation (RTC) with its Revit application in 2002 for $133 million cash. While RTC made a lot of noise, and its core parametric technology was innovative, it did not generate much revenue and, in fact, had few customers. Up to that point Autodesk had been trying to morph AutoCAD into a full-on architectural modelling tool with the unfeasibly complicated ‘Architectural Desktop’ variant. One of the underlying key driving factors to the acquisition was that five years previously Autodesk dropped out of buying mechanical CAD (MCAD) tool Solidworks (Dassault Systèmes paid $310 million) which then went on to dominate desktop MCAD as users moved from UNIX to Windows. Autodesk’s CEO at the time, Carl Bass, didn’t want to make the same mistake again. Had Autodesk bought Solidworks, it 16
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would not have spent millions on developing Inventor and then Fusion and would have been the number one player in desktop MCAD. The Revit acquisition protected Autodesk dominance in AEC and eventually proved to be a savvy investment. The excitement of innovative code and doing things much better than previous generations of software is typically reserved for the early phases of development. Updates can be frequent and big; the potential can be seen. However, this furious initial phase typically slows down as a product ages and competition subsides. There is a lifecycle of software and to understand this better it helps if you can think a bit more like a software developer. To generalise, the CAD software industry, on the micro scale, appears to have evolved to deliver the yearly evolution of authoring tools, executed on rolling 3 - 5 year development plans, along with equally evolving business models. For
instance, we had perpetual licensing, where customers bought the perpetual right to access a version of software. Now the trend is for subscription licensing, where customers lease the right to use the software over a set time. The future looks to be heading towards a pay-peruse or subscription hybrid. However, eventually software applications age; years of new layers of features compound to make products cluttered. The internal ‘wiring’ gets messy and fundamental changes can cause ‘regressions’ bugs in features that used to work but now don’t. At this point software companies need to make important decisions on how to maintain their success. In the software world, a ten-year-old software program is deemed old. If a software package is extremely successful, the common-sense thing to do is to stretch it out and to do enough to retain the loyal base and keep the competition at bay. If www.AECmag.com
19/09/2020 07:26
