Autodesk responds to AEC customers’ open letter outlining Revit concerns
Aug 03, 2020 by CGPress Staff
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Autodesk has responded to an open letter by 17 AEC customers criticising the increasing cost and lack of development of its Revit application. Autodesk has now posted a response addressing several of the concerns listed in the letter, citing finite resources but ultimately promising progress in the future. Though a different sector, several of the points will chime with M&E users. Instead of reproducing the content here, we encourage readers to visit AECMag for a detailed analysis of the original letter and read Autodesk’s reply on its news blog.
Source: Nomad
Sounds like it has been written by market specialists/analytics. So i try to translate it for you: autodesk try to say “dear customers – go f*ck yourself. We do what ever we want or what ever our stockholders want”
Autodesk will never change anything unless everyone walks away, for them developing software is an necessary inconvenience to make sales. You might as well start complaining to MacDonalds about the low quality food they serve.
thanks god i switched to blender which is free and has better features and updates, and in few years everyone will do so because autodesk sucks, their prices are high but their software development is poor…
Here is a link that AEC folks might be interested in:
https://blenderbim.org/features.html
Not sure how far along this is, but its definitely something that the AEC community could get behind.
Lol at you trying to pretend you can work in Blender for any real BIM project. Go back to a 3ds Max thread
Are you an expert in Blender, Archipack, BlenderBIM and it’s IFC integration?
Nothing new under the sky, basically is what Autodesk answered small and medium customers since all this began.
Just the big players thought they could have some impact… but they don’t, they are in Autodesk hands no matter what since everything is based on rental, unless they change software, and I hope they will going to a different provider in general.
Autodesk does not care about customer care, success or satisfaction, Autodesk only cares about creating a milk-based system where they can squeeeze the most out of the customer with the smallest investment possible.
I always said it’s not about Max or Maya, or Autocad or Revit, IMHO it’s about Autodesk and their lack of ethics in business and interest in customer care.
Having Max and Maya under the same roof is like Coke buying Pepsi and trying to update each soft drink every year. I don’t use Autocad or Revit but I hear they’re industry leaders with their users.
They kind of are,the thing is that many of those users are looking and finding alternatives, and even Autodesk is having to comply and give support to the open format of the industry, IFC, and that’s important precisely because there are other competitors in the market, and not everyone uses Revit alone, or Revit at all.
Things move slowly, but move, things are not steady and if the people who pays detect they are taking leverage of them in any unfair way, they’ll look for ways to change direction somewhere else, faster or slower, they will change, and this answer from Autodesk will drive more of them to the change IMO.
At least in three years from now …most Autodesk user (Max, Maya) will have switched to blender and houdini! … I’m pretty sure blender will be the industry standard very soon 😀
…they are 10x too fast and innovative for the little dev-team at Autodesk.
It’s already becoming a standard, well deserved.
Many, yes. Most, no. It’s easier for small studios to switch in that time period. Whereas larger studios or those that still rely on certain plugins may use Blender as part of their arsenal no doubt, but still be using Max and Maya as their main package. If Autodesk saw that many licenses being dropped they would be doing sales left and right like they were to get Fusion360 adoption going.
Well, while it’s true that large studios are much slower to change their tools, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You are talking about a certain “time period”, which has already started many years ago. The dissatisfaction of users with the value of Autodesk software has been the sentiment for the past at the very least 3 years.
Like with pretty much anything, there’s never a contrast point you immediately feel from day to day, but one day in a couple of years, you will just wake up to realize that AD software makes up minority of new, available job offers, and the software names you’ll see most often will be in the direction of Unreal Engine, Houdini, Blender, Substance and such…
The tipping of the scales is very slow, but it’s important to remember it did not start to happen recently, but quite a while ago.
It’s a slow ripple which starts with what’s popular on social media, what’s being taught to students in schools, what people teach themselves at home (access to software that’s free always makes the choice much easier), what the influencers switch to and use, etc… It takes one “education generation” (about ~6 years) to feel it, but the momentum is hard to stop after that.
Another example would be an AD software based studio just renewing a couple less seats because they realized just couple of their artists can make due with just free alternative. Just 2 seats less from like 12 to 10 can already start a downward trend. Then, in a couple of years, they may realize they really only need 2-3 seats for their scene assemblers / generalists and not really waste them on asset creators, who are equally as effective in free alternative, because they don’t need to utilize the robust toolset AD software provides, in their very narrow specialized workload.
Then once you are left with just a 3 seats of a software from a company, which constantly expresses they don’t really value you as a customer with their actions (while saying opposite with their marketing words), it’s not that hard to imagine a leap to a completely Autodesk free world, since the alternatives are there these days. (At least in Media & Entertainment. It may be tougher in BIM).
stellar post, kudos.
They are losing the battle and they deserve it. Hope to see CAD brother of Blender in the near future.
They sincerely think there is no battle at all, Autodesk still thinks they are king of the hill, time to time :ó
Just wait to see the news tomorrow that the new 250$ 3dsMax Indie is not for commercial work… they missed this detail. The forums will burn.
I dont understand the indused missinformation about 3dsmax on a post… that is not about 3dsmax. The indie version is precisely for commercial work, and actually from all other comparable indie versions from other companies is the one with less restrictions.
True, so far there is no information about limiting the commercial usage of 3dsmax and in fact it would make no sense to make such announcement and then release it under some non-commercial license, that would totally kill the purpose and put the users more against Autodesk.
This is a move they never thought they would need to do, and it’s a try to recoversome of the lost user base, but IMHO they don’t understand that what is lost is not the trust in 3dsmax, but the trust in Autodesk, and for many this would not be recovered with an indie version, being cheap is not everything 🙂
Hello Juang,
Sandro did not read everything.
Indie for 3dsMax is very likely the classic 100k revenue (not to mix with profit! revenue is all money that came in, no matter if you have spent it for your PCs and studio-rent) limitation from what i know.
Inside it, there will be another limitation, which is both crucial and at the same time very bizarre. The person who put this legal framework together has apparently limited knowledge of how the CG-world today functions. This limitation will make the whole concept to something unpredictable (i they keep it in release).
Finally. Autodesk customers needed this to happen publicly, but frankly, we’ve been at this point on numerous occasions. Still, very glad even the big names chose this path over negotiations behind closed doors. Probably because they know the next licensing twist is on its way.
I expect Autodesk to even further cut research and development, and judging from past events they will do the wrong thing for their customers to please the stock market.
3ds max users need to ask them where all the resources are going. Things are way too slow, not only for CAD/CAM/CAE but also for their DCC apps, and you really have to wonder what their coders are doing. Where’s Bifrost for Max, for example? Something doesn’t add up there.
2 weeks ago there was a webinar where they showcase some of the news and was a great time to ask this questions.
Bifrost in max its coming, you can join the beta if you are really interested in knowing whats going on.
eloi you should realize by now that I am a max user but I can see the writing on the wall, no amount of Bifrost is going to save you, save Autodesk.
3ds max is now being buried under the bureaucracies and inadequacies of a mammoth corporation too loud and large and blind to see itself running head on into a wall.
When you start caring for your shareholders over your users, your lifespan gets shortened dramatically. That Max is still standing today on its two feet getting some jobs done is a testament to its core small team of developers back in the 90’s which gave us this great tool to work with and its deeply saddening to see it neglected and diminished by its current owner.
“Join the army, you can see the world!”
Just as misleading as
“We have a roadmap now, everything is going to be amazing!”
You ask something, I reply where you can found your information. If you want to really find out or not its up to you. You can just keep ranting out online, for sure its easier.
I wish there was any information, maybe there isn’t and I know why I’m saying this.
“Join the beta and find out” is not holding up to the promise. As is so little we have been promised throughout the years.
As someone else put it here in another topic comment, Autodesk doesn’t deserve any benefit of the doubt and it proves right every time something ‘exciting’ is announced.
…quite right.
also the “join the beta, great things in the works” is the exact same crap i kept hearing for years and years.
its kind of a waiting for godot scenario and tbh pretty funny now when i am not paying and relying on autodesk.
The same Bifrost that’s coming for almost 3 years now? 🙂 And when it comes, will it be actual complete procedural content creation environment?
Or will it be the usual Autodesk style of initial implementation where it can do only about 25% of things it should at launch, and then we will be spoon fed remaining functionality at about 10% a year for a few years, until the development actually stops at around 75% of functionality and will be put to rest forever?
And will it be properly integrated within 3ds Max user interface in a way that makes it fluid, performant and comfortable to work with?
the open letter itself proves many of the gut feeling impressions i accumulated over the past 6 years or so, but the AEC breakdown was truly a fascinating, informative and a vindicating read.
kind of like seeing that an abusive ex went on to become a crackhead.
barring all of the real world impact adsk policies had, such as upping the prices, meager development, forcing rental on your existing customers via extortionate maintenance – it was clear that behind these changes lay a clear disregard, even disdain towards their clients. its all about the share price.
at times i was shocked at how brazen some moves were, even after witnessing all the BS they pulled over the years.
these renowned companies now screaming bloody murder is a pivotal moment and reading the same empty boilerplate words from autodesk brought a smile to my face.
it is also very indicative that adsk focused more on construction and manufacturing and it actually clarifies things quite a bit. the high quarterly profits simply stem from the fact that the many divisions had their budgets severely cut to make up for the numbers. and ofcourse by squeezing their clients.
funtimes ahead. as the AEC implies, even if the revit rewrite is in the works, its certainly years away and these companies are acutely aware of it.
at this point, with all of the money they keep investing, larger companies are 100% better of rolling their own software. not only architecture, but every industry gives a huge piece of cake to adsk – but more importantly they give up their freedom, controlo, IP and are entirely dependent on the tempo adsk choose to develop the software (or not develop as the case is).
its a horrible place to be in from any standpoint and they are rightly fed up with it.
im loving it. f*ck autodesk now and forever.
Revit software costs “reasonable” says Autodesk president and CEO Andrew Anagnost….
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/08/20/autodesk-ceo-andrew-anagnost-revit-architecture-software-news/
The fact that Autodesk is still in business is just sad! I’m going 100% Blender as I’m sick of even trying to INSTALL Maya much less run the dinosaur of a program!