It's quite hard to develop software by just throwing money at it. And even harder when the domain is a bit niche and a bit esoteric so your hiring will be even harder. The optimal person would be a game dev with a penchant for math and a MSc in an engineering field. And you would like to have a team of these, please.

Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse experience to start with you'll have to spend a few years just building the initial team unless you find a really good headhunter.

In CAD you have to combine at least two non-trivial[0] discipline, computer graphics and and computational geometry. And they are completely unlike 'normal' software fields where you can just plug in various third party components and call it a day. You have to write your stuff to a great extent. And you have to design it - there are not that many public examples of how to put such a thing together.

It's not magic, it's not intrinsically very deep, but it's complex in the sense that the systems that have to interact are far and wide. It needs a lot of work.

And there are lots of things that are not in books, you just have to understand how they go together and which ways to do things are better than others.

[0] Non-trivial as in "I'll just figure it out" vs. "I'll have to pour through a few decades of academia and industry research and technical publications plus scour obscure websites" to get a clue on what the state of the art is and where it could go on from here

Autodesk has gone "software as a service". For a long time they sold boxed software. But that market is over. So they went to "software as a service". That can get very expensive for users. That's apparently the real customer complaint.

I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked up Maya.

Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid, which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.

Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.

Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade animation business.

A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it was ahead of its time 20 years ago.

On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much. This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and "just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing consistent.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the company for decades.)

Lots of AEC users actually would prefer subscription model. The hand-wavy economic main reason is subscriptions go from opex and purchases would go from capex and companies generally prefer opex to capex.

The business model of large AEC companies is a bit different than that of hollywood VFX subcontractors. The projects for one are already expensive and the data itself is a critical part of the deliverables (instead of just a rendering of the data).

As a FreeCAD user I don't understand why FreeCAD absolutely despises chamfers and fillets. The dedicated chamfer and fillet tools are just bad. I can do the fillet by hand without any problems. Just create a sketch and revolve the cut or sweep the cut along the chamfered edge. Works perfectly fine but it takes much longer than it should.

PartDesign chamfer/fillet are so much better in git master now. No longer limited to 45 degrees, and they can be duplicated with linear/polar patterns!

You do realize the whole history of Revit started with a small team at an Architecture Firm. You have to start somewhere, I think bringing software back into architecture firms could be a good thing, even if it is just Grasshopper. All buildings are starting to look the same, and I blame the fact the tools (Revit) lead you in the direction of making those styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMW_Architects

How are GMW Architects linked to Charles River software, the original authors of Revit referred to in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Revit ?

Architect's margins are typically in 5-10%. Avg salary for architect is ~75-80k. They don't have the budget to even pay for small pilot or mvp, even if all 20+ firms pool their money together.

The domain knowledge + software engineer skills + computer graphics skills needed are extremely rare.

You are right on point, it even says in the letter:

"It is in this context that a number of practices, who represent a revenue stream for Autodesk of over $22m over the last 5 years"

A $22m over 5 years is not a large deal for the large CAD companies such as Dassault, PTC, Siemens, Nemetschek.

Revit as a software package started as Reflex and then acquired by PTC, PTC decided they couldn't make enough money off it, and basically let former employees leave and start Charles River Software with the Reflex code base. The amount of work required to create Revit, It would not be good return on investment for any company other than Autodesk to sell it. The only reason it makes sense for Autodesk is it keeps the AutoCAD DWG monopoly going.

Exactly, this is the main reason you don't see a lot of successful start-ups tackling problems for architects. Most end up pivoting to real-estate development.

If you think it will take less time and money for a firm of architects to build an equivalent to the most powerful architecture CAD system in the world, even for their specific use case, and that they wouldn't run afoul of Autodesk patents when doing so, then you have probably not played around with CAD software to much.

Let me clarify. I absolutely, completely, think doing this would be painful and take years. But if it's line of business critical and someone has you by the throat, then you have to make the long term investments to survive. Even better, when you're done nobody can take it away from you. I just think by the time you get to the EU lobbying, regulator rulings, Autodesk dragging their feet, the appeals process, the fines that Autodesk will just build into the cost of the next version, etc, in the end it would be shorter and easier to write the software. Bonus if you make it open source so nobody has to go through this garbage again.

> shorter and easier to write the software

There is nothing short or easy about writing Revit/BIM software and it couldn't be done with the 5 million dollars that these firms had been spending on ADSK products.