The Open Letter Group pointed out that despite two years of engagement, collating feature requests, Autodesk decided to put the established Revit roadmap on project management portal Trello for the public to vote on. While there has been rejuvenated development on Revit, the kinds of features being enhanced are not the deeper, more structural underlying parts that these customers say the product needs. Two years on and the feedback from both groups is that ‘Autodesk didn’t listen’. They entered into the process in the hope that Revit re-development would be possible – and if not possible, would offer to help Autodesk develop the next generation. These customers were all heavy Revit users. From what I can tell, other than the Open Letter Group getting an additional initial ‘listening’ session where Anagnost was present, the two groups were engaged with exactly the same rounds of meetings with the Revit development team. This second group included BIG, Grimshaw, Herzog de Meuron, Heatherwick Studio, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and at least three other global signature architects. While one set of firms went the public letter route, the other chose to seek engagement directly with Autodesk contacts.
For several reasons, there was a split in approach between groups. The first open letter was originally going to come from a much bigger group of BIM managers and design IT Directors. This, in turn, made every design IT manager’s job a nightmare, because Autodesk ramped up a voracious non-compliance unit that pursues minor and accidental infringements, which especially irks longstanding Autodesk customers. Even the Autodesk CEO, Andrew Anagnost, told wall street analysts that customers were in ‘licence hell’, managing so many different licence types within a single organisation. Network licences were stopped and replaced with named user licences, with mandates of a licence per user. ‘Collections’ replaced Suites, and customers were price-coerced into exchanging existing perpetual licences for subscription licences (in a 2-for-1 deal). First there were ‘Suites’, then new perpetual licences were phased out for subscription licences. During the same period Autodesk spent billions of dollars on construction applications and rapidly developing cloud services.įrom my conversations with architects, many are thinking that it is inevitable that they will end up moving to something elseĪutodesk pushed through business model changes at pace too. It is yet another sign that many architectural customers are fed up with the lack of depth in Revit’s development, pricing, poor interoperability and a failure of Autodesk to meaningfully engage with customers to explicitly define Revit’s future.ĭespite Autodesk’s AEC Suites and design / documentation tools generating the lion’s share of Autodesk’s AEC division’s revenue, customers saw Revit development languish in the years running up to the first open letter (2020). The latest open letter concerning Autodesk is from Architectural Associations in the Nordics. In the case of Autodesk, its customers are expressing their feelings with open letters.
AUTOCAD 2020 MAC FULL SOFTWARE
Typically, the worst thing that can happen, from a software developer’s perspective, is customers vote with their money and migrate to a product which usurps a market leader because of cost, capability, or a technology paradigm shift. In the world of CAD, customer revolts are few and far between. With the release of a second ‘open letter’ to Autodesk, this time from Nordic architectural associations, Martyn Day explores what this means for Autodesk, AEC firms, and the AEC software industry as a whole
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