The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers.
Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.
I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.
There's a zillion others I no longer remember.
Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.
I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered.
I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.
I think people get into the habit of presenting their software as uniquely capable. And wrapping up their own skills in that particular software. It is similar to a young programmer assuming that Perl (for example) is uniquely capable. In truth talent tends to transcend packages and other factors like ecosystem come in to play.
A talented CAD technician would be useful using pen and a drawing board. We are just not very good at selling those more inate qualities. It is just easier to just sell yourself as an AutoCAD driver.
Of course these sort of packages take a long time to learn, and you are much more productive using something you know. And people adapt their mental model to a particular package. So there is often little obvious point in changing software.
What about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ )? It seems to be pretty popular among engineers. It reads DWG/DXF (AutoCad format) pretty well.
The software itself goes by various names, because Intellicad itself is a consortium. For a nominal fee, you get access to the codebase and can release your own version with your own brand. The thing is shared source, so as a consortium member you need to contribute your changes to the core back to the shared codebase. However this is closed-source.
Ya. You reminded me that any Excel clone (or interop) has to reproduce Excel's bugs too.
No fun.
Ages ago, I was buddies with a guy (Dale?) who reverse engineered DWG, which I think became the code dump for the Open DWG Alliance, which may be this group today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance, though I don't see McNeel & Assoc listed (Rhino3D).
Dale worked for a graphics card company, Appian?, writing drivers and file viewers. He'd reversed DWG to write a wicked fast viewer. Just like those guys from Atlanta (don't remember their names).
I now dimly recall that Dale's team had to also reproduce AutoCAD's rendering bugs.
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance
Network effects. Once you reach a certain level of dominance in the kind of market they are in, the fact that it easier to find staff that know the product and the people you exchange days with are using the product, the cost of unfamiliarity and potential data exchange errors means anything else has a very high barrier to overcome even to be considered. An incremental improvement isn't enough, you have to either be wordshatteringly better or have near infinite runway and some non-feature advantages to leverage (the latter is how Excel and Word dethroned 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, but who is going to play 1980s Microsoft to dethrone AutoCAD?)
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance.
Joel Spolsky explained it: most users use only 20% of the app. But each user uses a DIFFERENT 20%. Thus you won't go nowhere until you are almost at feature parity, because everybody will have one little thing you didn't implement, but which is critical for them.
Often it doesn't help even if you are way beyond feature parity. More often than not, it is a simple inertia, not some rational thought enumerating features.
Sadly I have to work in one of the sectors. It is very common for geometric design of roadways. I think it is a result of State Departments of Transportation buying into the system and never wanting to change.
The only way to change that- is to actually pretend alternatives are not used- meaning they have to mimick the output exactly- even the flaws. Then after 5 years or so- the department anounces- oh- and by the way, we completely replaced xyz.
My condolences. I'm still flabberghasted that semi-automated file repair skills was SOP for users, because the Bentley brothers couldn't figure out how to reliably save files.
Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?
I don't know if it's any cleaner internally but Dassault produces the free (2d focused) DraftSight which is very much on the level of like AutoCAD circa 2000, don't know what the paid version is like or how well it integrates with Solidworks.
That's the catch, I think. The market is not so large for 3D modeling tools.
The second hurdle is the ridiculous amount of inertia DWG has in the AEC industry. Any solution that would topple Autocad would need to likely provide DWG and/or Revit interoperability to even have a shot at the market.
There are no good options for Revit at the moment so, that's a deep vendor lock in. For DWG there is at least Teigha library from ODA which is based on reverse engineering the DWG format and offers reading and writing of it.
It would be a long shot. But until something changes, Autodesk is just going to keep layering tools, buttons, and menus on top of each other. It's such a rubber band ball now, they would have to start over to make something efficient. But there's no real competition, because even though it's incredibly cludgy, it will work if you learn it's labyrinth.
I've been perfectly happy using Google Sheets for 10+ years even though I'm sure it's no substitute for someone in finance. (I don't think CAD software has the same wide appeal, though)
I know there's plugins and I don't know what the pro version is like but for instance free Sketch Up doesn't even have the ability to draw an arc from three points and while it did have two points+tangent it made some internal and opaque decision on whether it would ever snap to that tangent.
If you're making 2D things, like blueprints for a human to make something, SketchUp isn't as useful. I admit, I haven't tried it in a few years, but when I did before its fundamental purpose was almost polar opposite to my needs.
Well AutoCAD has some tools for drawing 3D but their actual 3D program is called 3D-MAX. This is derived from the old 3D-Studio program that they bought from Kinnetix years ago.
Funny thing is in the shop environment 3DMAX is not used. It is the bastard child of Autodesk.
Solidworks is predominately used in machine shops these days.They have a SolidCAM that works well for generating G code for CNC usage.
Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.
Autocad's main customer base is the AEC industry, while 3D-MAX is used in video game and visual production. Solidworks, on the other hand, is used for modeling mechanically detailed structures - like you would produce in a machine shop.
Revit, on the other hand, is used for building information modeling. It's main domain is designing buildings.
Except for Revit and Autocad, which are somewhat interchangeable within their users' domain, none of these products really serve each others core userbase well. Hence, they are not really comparable. It's like saying Word is a bit like Excel since you can compose tables of numbers in each.
If you were to offer one to the core user of the other they would complain as much as if you were giving a steak for a vetenarian to cook.
Sketchup is intended as a 3D "sketching" tool. The post to go this through in detail would be quite long but the gist of it Sketchup does not scale very far in terms of model complexity. You can model e.g. a factory floor or a complex office building in Autocad while still being able to navigate the model. Not so much in Sketchup.
AutoCAD and Sketchup are very different. AutoCAD is vector based for starters. Zoom into a curve in Sketchup and you find that it is segmented. Solids in Sketchup are made up of triangles. In AutoCAD they can be actual solids.
Bricscad has everything AutoCAD has and more such as mechanical design (Inventor like) and sheetmetal and full BIM for things like Architecture and all are still just .dwg!
I have been developing on Bricscad for years and it is far faster with a much less buggy API as well.
Bootup times smash AutoCADs :)
Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.
I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.
There's a zillion others I no longer remember.
Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.
I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered.
I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.