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by teddyh 1024 days ago
All that could very well be true. The important question is: Is there anyone who is prepared to spend money to fix any of this?

Put another way: It doesn’t matter if you have a product which would help people and save them money, if people, for whatever reason, aren’t inclined to buy your product.

2 comments

Bentley has a market cap of around $15B. It's worth something to somebody. Their only serious market is DOT work and their position is attributable to administrative inertia and aggressive vendor lock-in.

The biggest problem isn't making better software, which already exists, but getting DOTs to stop making Bentley's proprietary file type a requirement for deliverables. The second problem is realizing that the CAD approach of imitating a paper process from last century isn't actually necessary.

Current owners, operators, and tenants. Buildings need to work for the occupants. Even in the best scenarios this takes ongoing upgrades and maintenance. In some cases buildings need to be significantly designed to provide for the needs of current tenants. This means that the whole construction sector needs the hardware equivalent of continuous integration based on the idea that construction is only the start of a process of keeping a building operational for its service lifetime.
It’s the same classic problem when selling business products; the buyers are usually not the users, so no user-friendly features are created; only features which would look good in a demo to the buyers.

Therefore, no products which only contain features which help users (and save them money) can be a success, since the buyers won’t be impressed by it, and will not pay for it.