One More One More Thing…

Ok – I’ve received a lot of private email about the last post.

So yes – there are some interesting improvements – but neither required an overhaul of the UI. I could have been swayed to move to R2010 if learning a new UI (downtime) was offset by substantial functionality enhancements (uptime). As it is, I’m not convinced I can make the business case to move to R2010. More organic modeling tools are great and will help us resolve more than a few geometric edge conditions. But at what cost?

I moved from CAD to Revit 1.0 not because I was smitten by the UI, but because of a philosophy and gains in efficiency that (in spite of significant room for improvement) represented a far more elegant approach to describing a building. Does Autodesk really believe that potentially new users will finally be convinced that they should move to Revit because a new UI is similar to their old UI?

Does ADSK really think we’ll buy this marketing speak without holding our collective noses?

The reason Autodesk’s tools look different (and should continue to do so) is because ground-up innovation is no longer Autodesk’s key strength. Disruptive innovation is too hard and moves too fast outside the confines of 9 to 5 (and even farther outside the confines of being a publicly held company where the “customer” isn’t the end user – but the share holder). Autodesk’s last decade of growth has been through acquisition and the democratization of those tools. We get that – it’s ok. So we expect the tools to look different because we learned to use those tools as soon as they were available and long before they were acquired. The real challenge is the distribution of new technology is fundamentally disruptive to large, pre-internet technology companies that for a time were able to enjoy the control of distribution. But this is no longer the case. And so innovation gives way to democratization. Big deal.

But unfortunately, democratization has now given way to homogenization. Case in point? Site Tools. They should have been in Revit years ago (and would be if Revit were still an independent company) because 1) their customers would have demanded it and 2) they would have faced no internal, existing tools and functionality to disrupt or displace. But in my opinion the reason that Revit does not have site tools is because it would disrupt other business units within ADSK: ACAD, LDT, C3D. Perhaps the idea is that so long as the user has another ADSK flavored tool for site design, Revit doesn’t need one. So which site design tool is the tool of choice by Architects?

SketchUp.

It really simple:

1) Let the Revit team fly the pirate flag and disrupt your other business units by making insanely great technology

– or –

2) Continue to disrupt your customer’s businesses by drip feeding functionality that when finally released will be far too late to be much used, much appreciated or of much consequence.

>One More One More Thing…

>Ok – I’ve received a lot of private email about the last post.

So yes – there are some interesting improvements – but neither required an overhaul of the UI. I could have been swayed to move to R2010 if learning a new UI (downtime) was offset by substantial functionality enhancements (uptime). As it is, I’m not convinced I can make the business case to move to R2010. More organic modeling tools are great and will help us resolve more than a few geometric edge conditions. But at what cost?

I moved from CAD to Revit 1.0 not because I was smitten by the UI, but because of a philosophy and gains in efficiency that (in spite of significant room for improvement) represented a far more elegant approach to describing a building. Does Autodesk really believe that potentially new users will finally be convinced that they should move to Revit because a new UI is similar to their old UI?

Does ADSK really think we’ll buy this marketing speak without holding our collective noses?

The reason Autodesk’s tools look different (and should continue to do so) is because ground-up innovation is no longer Autodesk’s key strength. Disruptive innovation is too hard and moves too fast outside the confines of 9 to 5 (and even farther outside the confines of being a publicly held company where the “customer” isn’t the end user – but the share holder). Autodesk’s last decade of growth has been through acquisition and the democratization of those tools. We get that – it’s ok. So we expect the tools to look different because we learned to use those tools as soon as they were available and long before they were acquired. The real challenge is the distribution of new technology is fundamentally disruptive to large, pre-internet technology companies that for a time were able to enjoy the control of distribution. But this is no longer the case. And so innovation gives way to democratization. Big deal.

But unfortunately, democratization has now given way to homogenization. Case in point? Site Tools. They should have been in Revit years ago (and would be if Revit were still an independent company) because 1) their customers would have demanded it and 2) they would have faced no internal, existing tools and functionality to disrupt or displace. But in my opinion the reason that Revit does not have site tools is because it would disrupt other business units within ADSK: ACAD, LDT, C3D. Perhaps the idea is that so long as the user has another ADSK flavored tool for site design, Revit doesn’t need one. So which site design tool is the tool of choice by Architects?

SketchUp.

It really simple:

1) Let the Revit team fly the pirate flag and disrupt your other business units by making insanely great technology

– or –

2) Continue to disrupt your customer’s businesses by drip feeding functionality that when finally released will be far too late to be much used, much appreciated or of much consequence.