If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning.
The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers, the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.
The situation is way more severe than this makes it sound:
* The benefit you get from $10b is not actually 200 times as much as the benefit of $50m. (Economists would talk of a "utility function" - that's what you should actually be taking the expectation of - and what I'm saying is that it's nonlinear.) How much it's worth very much depends on your personality, but for most people (maybe all?) it's worth well under twice as much, maybe barely 10% more? Either way, you never have to work again, and maybe your kids never have to work again, and you can enjoy your lifetime retirement in a great deal of luxury, so the difference in experience is minimal. It's probably not a big deal if you have to be careful not to charter private jets too often. So even if the chance of getting $10b is 1 in 10, or even 3 in 4, you still might find the $50m option wins.
* The $50m is right now whereas the $10b dollar requires effort. Not just 9-to-5 effort either, but possibly a CEO-of-a-startup 90-hours-a-week effort. Again, the benefit of $10b is not actually that much compared to $50m, so you might consider that marginal benefit less than than the extra work. If that's so, you would take the money now even if the big win were 100% guaranteed!
The thing is a piece of software that could replace and update Revit is not going to be built by a lone developer. I know people have built some pretty amazing stuff, but for something to operate with that amount of polish and reliability it's going to take a pretty big team and some experienced people to lead them which means some hefty VC investment. While you or I might be easily bought off a group of VC firms are not going to let it go so cheaply.
The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])
Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".
In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]
If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...
Well as you said, no, is it better to have a company valued $50M growing 30% per year, or having $50M in your bank account ? Most entrepreneur will prefer the latter
I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...
The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under no pressure to sell.
"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to acquire Google, which lasted several months.
The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5 billion."
That sort of logic is true if you're starting from scratch. But if you've already grown to a $50M company, your chances of being a $1B company are much better.
Put another way, if I pick a random person and ask you what the probability is that they'll finish a marathon, you'd probably say it's not very likely. But if I tell you they just passed mile 26, you might revise your estimate.
$50m realized, now... cash in your pocket vs. maybe $1B.... but you don't know - there's a very real chance the company will die before that.
50m now vs 1b later is way too simplistic of a view.
The list goes on and many different tactics are perfectly legal or can be ambiguous requiring proof of motive (nearly impossible). You're engaging in war with someone who has far more resources than you. Sure, you couod win and shift or supplant their market share but more likely you'll be crushed.
Choosing between that option and $50m retiring happily, I'll choose the second option every time. I like the idea of competing but let's be realistic, this is not your restaurant competing with the other guy down the street where it might really come down to your actual competitive advantage in what you're providing a customer. Many times it comes down to business strategy and resources to execute those strategies.
In fact, it would probably make more consumers better off than if your company had remained independent: Users who were unwilling or unable to abandon Autodesk in order to use your software would be able to use it if it became part of Autodesk's offering.
Plus you'd be rich.
In your example, before giving you an offer, the big software company will conduct an internal analysis to figure out how much money they'd have to spend to develop the bare-minimum featureset to prevent their customers from fleeing to your competing product, then they'll back that number off a little bit, and try to buy you out. This number will probably be significantly higher than the amount it costed you to build the thing, because for them to replicate your features, they have the added overhead, bureaucracy, and inefficiencies that come with being a megacorp.
If you accept the offer, it saves them money and time.
If you decline the offer, they'll just greenlight their internal projects and steamroll you.
We can handle this sort of thing in software because we can try compiling something, see it has errors, and fix the obvious syntax problems that have been introduced by a merge or rebase. We have tools that make it easy view and copy data from a previous version, and all of this makes things easier. For more structured data those low level conflicts need to be handled much better so that the user can concentrate on the higher level aspects. If they need to restore sub structures deleted in a merge then they need to be able to see those, so our version control starts to bleed right through the tool chain.
The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility.
But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.
Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.
Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.
Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.
I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.
If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.
They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.
I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.
That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.
Yes, C4D is fast and more importantly, extremely stable. It's crazy how often I got Maya or even Houdini to crash, compared to Cinema (which basically only crashed due to Octane...)
The pearl is the story, not the speck of grit.
I wonder if they moved to different solutions when they started bringing in subbies?
for a counter example. I'm currently getting a small house built and the near by land developers are mostly using the SAAS solution I worked at to manage the construction\design of each subdivision.
People who haven't used change control have a hard time imagining what they're missing.
Almost every subbie I've met even those building residential properties have a few mobile apps for doc management and so many ipads for plan review\access\defecting
The last plumber I worked with had the quote in my email with updated pricing and online billing before they got back to their ute.
:P
(and yarp.)
Anyone on the inside, am I wrong? Would your company readily switch to a superior product, retrain its employees for it, deal with business partners who haven't heard of that new product, etc.?
The problem is the software isn't just used by one team at one company. Architects hire subconsultants- MEP engineers, Structural Engineers, Civil Engineers, Landscape designers, Lighting designers, many others. They all need to share files so whatever you make has to be compatible with whatever everyone else is using (which is probably Revit).
There are some competitors like ArchiCAD, which some architects love and swear by, but it is a pain in the ass for their subconsultants to work with them, because the ArchiCAD file has to be converted to a Revit file and this doesn't usually work quite right and of course Autodesk has no incentive to make this easier.
We really need to stop with all that siloing going on. OpenBIM with IFC and BCF are the only way of going forward.
Revit is a mediocre product in all categories, but that's the thing: People are using Revit since it somehow can do all the stuff a bit. Architects love Archicad because it's a software tailored to their needs and far superior to Revit in that domain, but if you're a consultant doing e.g. MEP work you will be probably not so happy. You still won't be while using Revit, but since "everybody" is using it at least you won't have to deal with OpenBIM and correct file workflows.
Source: I'm an architect myself.
In the context of design projects that don't always have the most realistic schedule, it's just one additional hurdle to deal with that isn't there if everyone is using Revit.
True however, you need people who know what they are doing :)
Btw I'm glad we have options in the market. Same as with browsers, OS, etc. Mono cultures are hurting everyone.
Selling the product to some smaller companies is probably easier. I have some family working in industrial drawing, I think it's doable if you sell hard enough, as long as the software is as good and can import and export seamlessly.
I think it's quite doable overall but it's a 10 year endeavor. Need to start with $10M and a couple developers and play the long game before you can replace autocad at Boeing/Airbus.
In Adobeland, slowly Affinity Photo and Designer are gaining foothold. I don’t think at this point it is any danger to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. But a Affinity version 2 might be pushing the monopoly back.
Adobe is the Autodesk or 2D world. I’ve heard they don’t even have Dev teams in the US anymore, for the most part they have teams in India. Profit maximisation at its worst, since now they no longer deliver meaningful updates to their software. I haven’t had a significant update for Premiere/After Effects that made any sense in at least half a decade. If you go into reddit/r/editors you’ll see it’s full of people working their way out of Premiere, which is garbage software.
Cavalry is interesting and does a lot of things a modern professional app should do but it really isn't anywhere close to an After Effects competitor.
AE isn't just for animating some vectors, AE is non-destructive Photoshop with a timeline it's possibilities are absolutely vast.
Cavalry looks very interesting!
Inkscape has it and it’s free.
I’m stuck not using Affinity Designer because I can’t export to DXF.
I paid for Affinity Designer, just assuming it’s would have DXF export because why wouldn’t it.
So sad ),;
Productivity lost by adopting new tools would render firm non-competitive in this thin margin business, will likely make your P/L red.
[1] Some of which frankly should just be built-in, but either way it wouldn't make creating a replacement any easier.
Granted, it has also existed for a quarter century so it has its own network effects going.
It happens in all industries. For example InDesign currently has a dominant position as a DTP tool. However, after so many years it still doesn't support many basic functions such as multiple indexes (Index of People, Index of Places, etc.). Adobe simply doesn't care because there is no competition (Affinity Publisher is not there yet, and Scribus has its own quirks, although got much better recently; paradoxically Quark finally got competitive, but they don't support multiple indexes either...).
Anything that is standardized (engineering-wise -- and many things are) does not actually need a designer working with design software. It needs a generation algorithm (a script) with input parameters.
The biggest problem of why this area does not get more attention? We just don't build shit anymore. So, there is less money and opportunity than ever in it. Like really. We don't build shit. We need to fix corruption in politics long before we fix the lack of a proper marketplace to create incentive for maximizing the engineering potential of our society.
I don't adhere to a luddite attitude. It's my opinion Autodesk's tools are deeply lacking and this is based on my experience and knowledge on software.
When I first starting learning AutoCAD, I was very annoyed at the slow snail pace to designing things (as to pen/paper). I used to be a web designer/developer for a handful of years, those tools are much more refined and allow a person to do more with less time.
Revit is a step in the right direction for the building industry but it has many drawbacks too. I strongly believe this is due to lack of competition and innovation on Autodesk's part. Adobe should be seen as the model. They've developed many tools that empower it's users and they continue to push the envelop forward.
Autodesk will be unseated, if they don't continue to push their tools forward like Adobe has with many of it's products. The software isn't terribly hard, just needs a lot of investment upfront for a MVP competitor that chips away the market, then reinvest back into improving the tools with AI/DL/ML. I.e. One agency may use specifically a specific contractor, the AI recognizes revisions and highlights them to the architect. Or using specific materials. Etc. Etc.
Construction industry is stuck in the 1940s, IMHO. Hopefully a competitor arises to bring it into the 21st century.
I guess actually swinging your hands around in air like Tom Cruise in Minority Report was too tiring for most people. I wish Apple had bought them and integrated them into the macbooks instead of the touchbar.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Motion
[1]: https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap-motion-controller/
His tweet before that video was "We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator. Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium". That's really disingenuous. First of all, it looks like a typical demo made by an intern and some toys. Second, mechanical engineers don't need or want that type of interface. Actually manipulating and rotating CAD is such a small part of the process the time sink (aside from all the design and documentation aside from CAD) is adding dimensions and relations to geometry and relations. This video is the equivalent of a software developer's manager showing off a visual programming language and declaring text-based languages and keyboards are obsolete.
Google actually one-upped Leap Motion with Project Soli that's in the new Pixel phones It can track minute finger gestures in a much smaller form factor using radar. It similarly doesn't have any killer app that actually makes it useful for much of anything.
I had one when they first came out and while the tracking accuracy was quite good, it wasn't good enough for doing any precision work. Every so often the tracking would skip and glitch.
I bet the Index has potential for that with the finger control
Horrendous name though (for English first language speakers anyway), 'do' is the fallback - most primitive - verb for any kind of action implying a lack of precision or importance: "I'm doing the dishes" vs "I'm polishing the cutlery". There is also an unfortunate embedded word in there too.
Every time I think of how great the tools for building software (IDEs, etc.) are, that’s what I think next. What could help is having more devs with knowledge and interests in other domains, and not only focused on software itself, for example by interleaving software and non-software courses in students curriculums.
Same is true for many other industries. I've been hoping for a Quickbooks contender for years, but Intuit has proven to be very adept at shutting down the competition by virtue of the fact that relatively few CPAs will work with any other software.
I don't know CAD but in 3D software for movies/games most studios use expensive software (Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini, etc). The market for that software is relatively small and the effort to create and maintain it larger than many many other projects. So, the price is high. But, if they didn't make it hard to copy most companies would arguably not pay because they see it as a large expense. Especially for smaller companies if it was easy to copy and they could they would (and often do).
My point is getting that same money out of them instead for an open source solution (because the open source solution will require just as much income to maintain) is unlikely.
Blender is eeking by so maybe the tide is turning.
Maya is the default for animation pipelines, since it has the more robust animation tools.
Houdini is for FX and sims, and Houdini is STUNNING in its development speed at the moment. Each of their software updates has 100+ features a year, and these are complex overhauls or entire new toolkits. I don’t know anyone in 3D who isn’t salivating at what’s going on with SideFX and Houdini.
Such an underrated / understated feature.
Add another $10 million and take advantage of overseas rates and create a marketplace for support, bug fixes, plugins, etc.
It can be done though, maybe a foundation approach where high tier members get increased input into the product roadmap.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software provide such features.
PLM software exists since a long time but I agree that it might not serve user needs optimally. But this is more a market failure than a technical problem.
Most are the equivalent of JIRA, i.e. lots of features and bloat that sell well to managers. They work, but only if there are people dedicated to setting them up, enforcing workflows and maintaining them.
Something simpler and more standardized is needed in the physical engineering space to become part of standard practice, like git has for software.
This is true for most business software and very true for something like a PLM, and double super extra true for Autodesk PLM where it’s so unintuitive, clunky, “ Enterprisey” that no one wants to learn or use it without being required to.
Now, consider it like a really bad JIRA but at $75-150 per month. I’m probably overselling it still.
And the proprietary "Product Data/Lifecycle Management" tools are expensive, bloated and hard to use.
The industry standard version control here is Perforce. Perforce being Perforce, there even are 3rd party solution to de-duplicate users' workspaces in order to save gigabytes of disk space.
- Feature3, hole: diameter 3.0mm
+ Feature3, hole: diameter 3.1mm
- Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 400mm
+ Feature4, extrude: Sketch 1: dimension4 425mm
- control read/write access to files to prevent unintentional file changes due to rotated views, etc. The user would have to manually select which files are checked out/active. This might require a plugin to the CAD programs, so I may rethink this.
- Upon commit, the user adds comments, then all changed files are exported to the new interchange format
- text based diff is generated
- CAD with color highlights is generated
This is a pretty intensive operation, but it doesn't need to be instant. I think I would allow branches and make a workflow to automatically show conflicts based on diffs and CAD, then the user would manually resolve conflicts, declare a branch merged and select the files to go into main branch. After typing that, I am wondering if centralized control of read/write and one branch is the only way.
In the short term, I think an MVP could be scripted: - Before commit, user selects which files are to be kept and other files are rolled back to previous version and writes the commit message
- Updated files are exported to STL (there are many tools available to compare STL files visually)
- A tool generates combined/subtracted STL files for each updated file
- git commit
- git notes to cross-reference the combined/subtracted STL to the commit message
- Nice to have: built-in STL viewer
Github is supposed to have STL Diffs but it took me forever to find an example on github because everyone commits files as _v1, _v2 (highlighting my complaint that version control is not part of standard practice). Only to find out they removed this feature.
Grabcad has been great for me but I need to find an on-premises solution.
I have been working on STEP (ISO 10303) for 35 years. Every few years someone comes along to a meeting and declares that we need to start again and adopt their new model, they waste everyone's time for a bit then go away again.
PlanGrid was bought in 2018/2019 by Autodesk for 875 million, though, so good luck escaping the Autodesk family :D
oh, is that all
Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be.
I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X" to almost anything outside software and you'd be hailed as a revolutionary genius.
For Revit specifically, version control for construction drawings or a package manager for Revit families would both be huge.