Matthew wrote:
From what I've seen Revit has been doing pretty well in the San Francisco Bay Area lately....

True. And I continue to get regular mailings and email from Ideate too. They are really aggressive.

The question then is: are we, here in the tech hub of the world, a statistical outlier or are we the vanguard -the lead swell in a massive wave?

I tend to think that as goes California, so goes the rest of the country (and to some extent the world) but this will probably get me branded a geocentrist. Still, a lot of things that start here end up everywhere (Craigslist being the most convenient example).

With the gradual switch from 2D to 3D, Autodesk will retain its solid worldwide leadership in terms of license- and user-count --most (70%? 85%? 95%?) Autocad users will sooner or later become Revit users, at least before moving on to who knows what else many many years from now.

And Graphisoft's market will expand quite a bit, from being a niche product for the 0.1% or whatever of the architectural market using BIM/Virtual Building, it will grow into a niche product for the 30% or 50% of the architectural market using BIM/Virtual Building.

For whoever license-count or user-count in the foreseeable future is a big decision-making factor, I would tend to think that it is so obvious that things will go that way that real data is not really needed. And for whoever license-count or user-count is not a big decision making factor, I would tend to think that the thing just doesn't matter.

Ignacio wrote:
And Graphisoft's market will expand quite a bit, from being a niche product for the 0.1% or whatever of the architectural market using BIM/Virtual Building, it will grow into a niche product for the 30% or 50% of the architectural market using BIM/Virtual Building...

Not surprisingly, I don't see it that way. My contention has always been that there are powerful network and platform forces at work here. Groups tend to follow market leaders in a winner-take-all way. This becomes all the more true where there are limited open standards for file formats etc.

There are no real competitors to MS Office (at least no shrink-wrapped applications) because everyone wants to use what everyone else is using. We don't really seem to want a bunch of application-independent document formats, so instead we have, as a group, decided on Acrobat and PDF (however, there used to lots of players in this space).

Apple is able to compete a little in the OS space because they make something that is perceived by many to be vastly superior. For all of their effort and innovation they get maybe 8% of the market. But Graphisoft is no Apple. For a while now ArchiCAD has been the exact opposite: buggy and hard to use. What 30%-50% wants to migrate to that?

Chazz wrote:
I tend to think that as goes California, so goes the rest of the country

I know many Californians that think the same way, and this is so absolutely wrong! Absurd!

We resently were contacted by a Revit reseller, asking us why we were still using AC when so many of their clients had switched from AC to Revit. I interpreted this as a flat-out lie. First of all, I know most of the AC firms here, and none of them have switched. And secondly: WHY?

Chazz wrote:
For a while now ArchiCAD has been the exact opposite: buggy and hard to use. What 30%-50% wants to migrate to that?

For all its bugs it is still wonderful. And do you know whether or not Revit and others aren't also that buggy? More to the point, when comparing software you compare what they can do.

Its been only a few days since my "vitriolic" outburst. Andor contacted me immediately with requests for files. I assume he did this with others as well. Tests I did for them this morning went GREAT. The point is their EXTREMELY FAST response. Do other software companies respond anywhere near this level?