My first "negative" post

I'm a pretty positive person, but when I smell an odor I don't like, my face will show it. So please accept my apologies for this somewhat negative post. It doesn't have to do with Revit, but it has to do with the direction that the marketing engine within Autodesk seems to be taking.

Autodesk is hosting World Press Days and thanks to the wonders of blogging, you can see exactly what is going on almost in real time. Take a look at this post and judge for yourself. I love fish, but I don't like the smell of this.

Now I don't know about you, but it seems that Autodesk is going to take the route of pushing other products into our industry and this makes me very pessimistic regarding the improvement of Revit's modeling tools. The beauty that most of us see in Revit is the fact that it brings together a lot of people within a firm that are talented in varying parts of project delivery. I find that the use of Revit helps to build a better team, a wholistic work environment. When we allow a practice to be fragmented in departments and separate disciplines (design separate from documentation for example), it gets to be quite destructive in the long term. BIM is not an easy thing to implement. Learning Revit or any other BIM capable software is a monumental task. I shudder at the idea of having to learn/teach/support more complex programs in order to find the forms that create great architecture (ps: most of us don't really need fancy tools as we don't design blobs). I'm not advocating the use of only one tool: always use what's best to craft the idea that's brewing in your mind.

Now you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that the larger the number of products you own that can be sold separately, the more money you can make. I honestly hope I'm wrong, but this marketing strategy doesn't bode well for making Revit do a lot more than it currently does. What's the incentive if Autodesk can sell you more software? Keep in mind how hard it is to learn and teach complex tools and use them at full capacity....now multiply that by 3 or 4.

I would rather learn a complex software so I'm able to use every single tool available properly and produce at 98% efficiency, than learning 4 different softwares that have different interfaces and lots of different tools to achieve different things, and be lucky to hit 40% efficiency. I'm not so sure it's "healthy" to have desigers becoming specialists of designing in one software versus another one. By the way, I know that already happens, but now if we introduce more packages into the mix, we start losing the fidelity that we're all striving for in a BIM environment, requiring us to hire a lot more software expertise within firms, because you need even more specialists to understand the complex behaviors and interactions between different software packages.

At the last AU, one of the big points that Autodesk made was that they were going to focus on interperability between their software. I actually chuckled when I heard that: partly in disbelief that such comment was a key hot topic of Autodesk's strategy (hmmmm, what have they been waiting for to make this happen?!) and partly because of a dose of cynicism that this could actually be achieved. And as I said, if the key goal is to sell us software, our industry will get tools that aaaaaalmost get us there: "But hey, if it doesn't fulfill all your needs....take a look at what other wonderful tools we can sell you to get you there!"

Ok, I'll put an end to this. I promise to be more positive next time :) I would really like to hear your points of view. I hope I'm dead wrong about my perceptions.

My first "negative" post