These days everything revolves around the “cloud” and mobile devices, so it comes as no surprise that Autodesk announced the availability of Revit 2015 in the App Store and Google Play.
They really worked hard this year to keep the new version devoid of too many new features and fixes. Some users felt quite disheartened when they saw how little their hard-earned subscription money had yielded, but soon realized that this was a well-planned maneuver by Autodesk to increase Revit’s circulation amongst smartphone aficionados. The Marketing geniuses at Autodesk pointed out that subscription has not increased that much if you think about it, since you can re-use all your Revit 2014 learning resources for the forseeable future. Publishers are quite upset as this will likely hurt their sales, but popular authors of Revit guide books are quite happy since they can now enjoy a lavish vacation with their families instead of updating their work. In fact a few have even suggested that publishers simply start printing books in binder format so they could just slip in a couple of pages each year moving forward, and just change the binder cover with a new pretty picture that clearly cannot be done in Revit.
Rumors on the Internets hint towards efforts by hackers to even make Revit 2015 run on the “Jitterbug” or your old Nokia flip phone. I’m quite excited about this potential development, which could increase the use of Revit exponentially and also aid in breaking any existing generational barriers. I’m still quite skeptical about how they’ll manage to get the download package to fit, but I think if they removed broken and incomplete features, the application would probably fit with some extra space to spare.
In the meantime Graphisoft continues in the struggle to capture market share. They think that the cloud has promise as well, and are now playing catch-up to Autodesk once again.
Close sources of mine (sorry, I‘m not about to go Snowden on them) think that this is a huge, visionary move by Autodesk. I frankly disagree, as evidenced by my overall lack of amusement, which is further emphasized by my deliberate omission of any exclamation marks in this beautiful piece of writing.
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8 comments:
Oh David. Such cynicism from one so young :-) Better to let it out though, methinks. Not feeling quite so negative myself, not sure why. Maybe I am more focused on doing interesting things with the existing tools than clamoring for lots of new features. Maybe I am just a tired old man. I do think that navigating in perspective mode would have been a better feature to borrow from s*****p than fuzzy lines though. It's a big barrier to getting "designers" to use Revit. Enjoy April fools day !
Dave, you rock! I'm already charging my nokia 3310 and trying to find the data connection cable ;)
Haha!! Why an app?? What use will this be for a user?
Hey Andy, gotta poke some fun at our friends, right? :) It is no secret that there's a certain percentage of truth. I really don't care for new functionality at this point either, but none of the big ticket items are being addressed. Even though we continue to contribute valuable feedback, it is having little effect on shaping the software's development/improvement. And those of us that are results-driven get quite upset by that, yet we keep our heads down and continue on contributing feedback. It's like someone that doesn't walk in our shoes day in and day out just thinks we're stupid, not smart enough, and believe they know better than us common folks in the trenches (God complex?). I'm not saying that we don't need visionaires, but we also need realists.
I love your work and posts by the way! Geometric challenges are few and scarce for me these days in my role, but it's always great to keep those brain muscles sharp. Unfortunately in real practice, a lot of our time is burned up in production and unless we see significant improvements there, we will not be able to push for more analysis, more design iterations and innovative explorations. That's what really gets most of us going (ex: Dynamo), but what will all that goodness be worth if we have to contend with so many struggles and inefficiencies when supporting the mundane?
Laura, perhaps voice commands instead of mouse and keyboard input? :) Get that data cable!
Thank you for letting off steam on all our behalf. .-) Not sure I could have said it better.
Dave,
You are spending way more time to come up with this April's fool than your Revit 2015 post. Way to go though!
Trust me, I was on a roll and didn't take too long ;)
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