Tag Archives: BricsCAD

The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

Erik discusses where Bricsys can go in future and the place BIM has in that.

Cyrena: So what is your vision, ultimately, of what Bricsys will become in tandem with your partners? Do you have limits or boundaries of which markets you will address and which you won’t? Are you going to be bigger than… “somebody else” one day?

Erik: If it comes to the number of customers, challenging AutoCAD is difficult. 12 million registered users. If you count illegal users it might add up to, I don’t know, 20 million, 30 million? I don’t know, nobody knows.

What are the boundaries of where we can go? It’s more or less dictated by the application markets. We have application developers in GIS, we have them in AEC, we have them in mechanical. In Mechanical 3D, AutoCAD was not present. They were present with AutoCAD Mechanical, but that’s a 2D product. If for a moment I leave Inventor out, because it’s another file format, but for DWG, the market for sheet metal and the things that Solidworks and others do, you don’t see third party applications with power participating in that market, with AutoCAD. With all the other markets, there are plenty of other applications: GIS, AEC, it’s endless. We want to bring everyone who wants to work with us, we’re going to feed and help them, and that’s more or less the boundary of where we can go.

For BIM, that’s something we are driving ourselves and it’s a huge market. There’s a lot of attention being paid to Revit [by elements of the press]. We think there are a lot of DWG users that want to move to BIM, but first of all Revit is too expensive, it’s too complicated by far, and it’s another file format. These are hurdles that not everybody wants to jump at the moment. It’s fair to say that we are working to eliminate all those hurdles. An existing DWG user, AutoCAD or BricsCAD already knows 80% of our BIM product. He has to learn 20% extra and he can participate, probably in an easier and more intuitive way than he can ever do with Revit.

We didn’t talk a lot about the differences between Revit and our BIM solution. I think in six months and a year we’re going to spend more time to really explain the differences. BIM is hyped, but there are studies that show that 19% of the people who talk about BIM are actually using it. It’s a couple of hundred thousands, it’s not millions already. There’s a lot of hype around it but the real challenge is to bring five or six million people on DWG in the AEC space into BIM. That’s our goal. If they want to stay on DWG, we are their only chance. For that part only, that’s already a huge start. If you then count all the applications on top of that and around it, the addressable market for us on that is immense.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 7 – the applications ecosystem

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik discusses the Bricsys efforts to work with and assist third-party developers. He does this without being prompted by a question – it’s obviously very important to him.

Erik: For our future growth it’s very important, the ecosystem of the applications we have now. We have talked a lot about what we are doing and about our own products, but we should maybe have spent more time on the importance of the ecosystem. The worst thing we could do is forget the application market for us.

We will not, and we are not able, to develop another HVAC system or a [inaudible] system. We are limited in our resources and focused too much in our development. We believe that if there are five or ten HVAC packages, one in Germany, one in France, one in the US and one in Australia, all those guys understand their local markets and it’s very difficult to take an HVAC package made in America and sell it in Germany. The last thing we want to do is destroy that diversity of the application market. On the contrary, we’re going to encourage it. Therefore we will continuously provide APIs to the application market and invite and encourage them to become more professional. This support is so important. That’s where we can make a difference with many of our colleagues, and we should bring the application market to the same level of professionalism. That’s where we are investing as well. They can use all our systems for free.

It would be a great and a wonderful world if you as a customer if you come to our website or you go to an application website and finds the same systems and buys something, and communicates… if there’s a problem, it’s our problem. He can tell us, the application partner can tell us, if it’s an application problem we will tell them or the customer will tell them. But that kind of trio between the customer, us and the application market is so important. We need that.

We need those kind of applications working with our system. And they are there! For over ten years they have wonderful applications. The point is, they lacked, for the moment, the technology to grow into IFC and the BIM market. That’s what we are developing for them now. Right now we need the apps, and we’re delivering to them. But it’s a very important thing for us, that ecosystem. And again I think that’s another difference between us and many, er, alternatives (laughs).

Steve: Not saying “the A word” there…

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

Steve: It’s something I’ve noticed for years, actually, that you guys look after the third-party developers whereas Autodesk sees them as a revenue source.

Erik: Absolutely. We are convinced we need them. They have to say they need us as well. That’s a very good symbiosis. And the top of that is Intergraph. For us, it’s an application partner, right? There’s scalability a bit more than before.  If Intergraph takes this step, let us invite every other application developer to do the same.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 6 – lean and focused

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, the dynamic duo explain the mystery of how Bricsys can sell smaller numbers of a more capable product than AutoCAD for a fraction of the cost – and still make money.

Steve: It’s kind of interesting that your product is so much cheaper than AutoCAD, and more capable. They’re making a loss and you’re making increasing profits. How does that work?

Erik: I think it has to do with being lean and being focused. I mean, we’re talking about Autodesk, and we’re talking about AutoCAD and Revit and Inventor, but did you have a look at all the products they have? The managers that have to work on those products… I don’t study the detail of their annual figures, but I think it’s obvious that if you have that ton of products, not all of those products are profitable. Of course, not all of them are losing money, but you can’t call it lean.

What we are doing is… we are forced to be profitable. We force ourselves to be profitable. And then we have to be lean. We have four developers that constantly automate our systems, and that four will be extended again. That pays off big-time. It’s an investment; continuous, continuous, continuous. To invent new things where we can improve to be lean as well.

Mark: Stressing again that Autodesk has one hundred products, we basically have one product. We can see for mechanical, we can see for BIM, basically it’s one product.

Steve: It’s the same core.

Mark: It’s the same core, absolutely. So when we started to develop BIM, we used the same toolset as we used for sheet metal; exactly the same. Of course it’s tweaked to be used in BIM or sheet metal, but in the ground it’s the same.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Props to Bricsys for supporting education

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Some time ago I raised a glass to Autodesk for supporting students and educators by making its software available free. I have been remiss in neglecting to point out that Bricsys also does this.

So I raise a glass of dark, tasty and ridiculously strong Belgian beer to Bricsys for doing this. Cheers!

The big Bricsys interview 5 – perpetual licensing and choice

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik confirms the Bricsys commitment to perpetual licensing. That’s a statement important enough to preserve, so here’s the recorded audio for posterity.

We also learn what proportion of CAD customers choose perpetual licenses over rental when given fair pricing and the choice. Hint to Autodesk: it’s not 0%.

Steve: Are you committed to the perpetual licensing model?

Erik: Yes, yes. We are committed to choice. If somebody wants another way of licensing our stuff, that’s fine as well. I mean you can hire our stuff, you can pay per month, it’s possible.

Steve: That’s not in all markets, is it?

Erik: We don’t promote it, but it’s possible if somebody contacts us, no problem. It’s choice, and we believe in choice. It’s not up to us to impose how people work with our stuff. But perpetual, it’s fair, I think. Somebody buys software, it’s always been like that, and we have to continue that. And we will continue that. Read my lips! We will continue.

All: (laughs)

Cyrena: Speaking of choice, can you talk about the type and portion of users who go for rental rather than perpetual?

Mark: Of course the vast majority go for perpetual.

Erik: 95% buyers.

Mark: When you see these clients in Russia that have these big oil projects in Siberia for six months or whatever, then it [rental] might make sense. But with the channel… 95, 97, 98% is just perpetual.

But what we see more and more is people are asking about it [rental] more and more, because of course in the Autodesk world there is no other option. So of course people just want to compare apples with apples.

Steve: So they’re just asking for the numbers?

Mark: Yes, for the numbers, “What would it be?” That’s the feeling that we have, ultimately when they make a decision they’re going to go for perpetual.

Erik: Because the price is acceptable as well, I think. It’s not that high a price for a substantial amount of software, so it’s not a problem.

Mark: Our price levels are completely different, of course. It’s affordable.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 4 – thank you, Autodesk

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, we learn that Autodesk’s move to all-rental has helped drive BricsCAD sales higher and continues to do so.

Cyrena: Backing up just a step to sales, were you able to track any impact on your sales numbers with the chronology of Autodesk’s announcements of ending perpetual? Did you see an effect that you could map to that?

Erik/Mark (together): Yes.

Erik: We see that especially with large companies. I hear it from Mark always!

Mark: That’s what I wanted to explain this morning too, although we have an indirect sales channel, we have our resellers at work out there, especially with the large deals, we are involved always. So there’s always one of our guys, a business development manager together with the local sales person in touch with those larger corporations.

In the last few weeks, we have received tons of emails from large corporations; of course it’s hard to disclose them, but… [names a corporation]. It doesn’t mean they will switch right away, but we have meetings where they say that, “Our contract with Autodesk ends in July, August, whatever, that’s the time we will not extend it. We will not renew it, we will not go to subscription, and we are looking for alternatives.” These are really big, big, corporations. So yes, yes, we see an impact.

Erik: When it comes to alternatives, and with all respect to our colleagues [competitors], we are not the only alternative, but I think we are in a good position. If you see what we have to give people a perspective beyond AutoCAD, well…

If we would only be an AutoCAD clone, and AutoCAD stops further development, it would mean the clones stop further development more or less as well. And all of a sudden the market is going to 3D mechanical, 3D BIM, etc., then it’s a problem. I think that’s where we can play an important role.

The DWG market, the DWG community, if they really want to move on slowly, slowly (and everyone makes his own choices about staying on 2D AutoCAD-based, fine as well), but at least there is a growth path. And I see that BricsCAD is the only product that goes in that direction. All the other alternatives more or less stay around what Autodesk is presenting, with a few differences here and there.

But it’s not really mainstream that there is investment in R&D or really a big jump of other stuff than just being compatible with AutoCAD. It makes a difference.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 3 – looking after people

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, I learn about Bricsys’ astonishingly good staff retention record and the reasons behind it.

Autodesk likes to periodically pat itself on the back for being a great employer, but history shows it’s a company that discards about 10% of its workforce every few years to keep the share market happy. I suspect another round is coming up soon, unfortunately. There’s a stark contrast between a company that disposes of its chattels in that way and one with a CEO that says, “…every time somebody leaves the company that’s really, really bad.”

You as a customer may not think that matters to you, but it does. I believe there is a direct correlation between Autodesk losing knowledgeable staff and Autodesk repeating old mistakes and breaking things. If today’s developers don’t know why some things in the software are the way they are, or why most changes should automatically come with an off switch, or why some things shouldn’t be done at all, or even how a feature can be maintained (e.g. Visual LISP), then the product suffers. AutoCAD users have to deal with the consequences of those knowledge holes with every release.

As in so many other areas, Bricsys proves to Autodesk that it doesn’t have to be like that; there is a better way.

Steve: Speaking to your people, they appear to like working here and they stick around. What’s your staff turnover like?

Mark: It’s very low, very low.

Erik: Job-hoppers, you mean? People who leave? I think in the last fifteen years… maybe five, six, something like that?

Steve: Wow.

Mark: I remember the reasons, maybe two or three times here, maybe having to leave to move to another city or another country. There as well, we try to find solutions.

We really have a good team atmosphere and if those people can work, if they’re a developer for example, people can work from remote areas. We have a guy who has been working for us for years who is now working from Turkey. That was the discussion we had, “I have to leave because I’m moving to Turkey now.” No, you don’t have to leave, just work from there.

Erik: I will add that in Novosibirsk (Bricsys Russia) it’s more difficult to keep the people. We are growing very fast there. We started when we took over the LEDAS team with 3D modelling, we started there with six or seven people. We now have thirty. Along the road for the last four or five years, maybe five or six left. In percentage, that’s way more than we have here. We are stopping the bleeding now!

Steve: That’s still fairly low!

Erik: That’s still fairly low but every time somebody leaves the company that’s really, really bad. We are investing a lot in making it comfortable for our people. To give you an idea we have a culture here of every Friday, we go to the pizzeria for lunch here. We have our own floor there in the restaurant every Friday. Sometimes we talk about software but sometimes we talk about politics and sometimes just rubbish and nonsense and a lot of fun.

Mark: Mostly!

Erik: But we give a budget to all our teams. In Novosibirsk they do that as well. So they have a budget and we force, well, encourage them very strongly to do that.

Mark: Same in Singapore, [inaudible], all our teams.

Erik: Every year, with all the families, we go to a chateau near Paris for three to four days. In Novosibirsk they have a budget to go for a trip with their families once a year, if there is a special occasion. That’s investing in your people.

If anyone has a problem, everyone knows that all doors are open, that we will try to find a solution to make you comfortable. We always say to our people here that the last thing we want is if they are stressed. It doesn’t work for developers and for a company like ours. No stress.

I was really sorry with Dieter yesterday [one of the presenters at the press event]. They only told him the day before to give a presentation! He’s not used to doing that. He was really good about it as you all saw, but he was really stressed. We will avoid putting him in that situation ever, ever again. It doesn’t work.

But for the rest, even with deadlines, we change priorities then, but we don’t want people stressed. And that has a very good result. If you see where we are coming from, what we have, in fifteen years, millions and millions of lines of code, of testing code as well, it’s a ton of development that is done, quality that we have developed. So far, so good, without stressing our guys. Why would we change that?

Mark: Also, the transparency we show to the outside world with the bug reports and so on, that’s also done internally. Everything here is open. On a quarterly basis we get everyone together, we show the numbers, it’s no secret at all internally. So everyone knows how the company is going, how things are moving, new projects that we are doing, and that feels nice with people.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 2 – making money

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, I ask about Bricsys’ profitability and growth.

Steve: Do you publish your numbers?

Erik: No we don’t. We are a private company.

Steve: Can you give us an indication of what’s happening with your sales at the moment?

Erik: Last year we grew in revenue 25%. First quarter this year was up 27% over the same quarter last year. If you compare the sales in total of 2016 compared with 2015, it was 25% in growth. It means that the growth is going faster and faster and faster. That’s what we expect normally as well.

This is without any sales to Intergraph. We expect that the Intergraph deal will have an impact on our growth for sure. Mark as COO is responsible for sales and managing of that network. [To Mark] And I see you’re very occupied!

Mark: That whole Intergraph network is coming to us. It’s huge.

Erik: It’s more than doubling what we have, on sales partners.

Mark: Just to add to the numbers, we are very profitable: 24, 25%. We have very good profitability which is also significant. We’re not burning money.

Erik: Year after year.

Steve: So you’re making money every year and that’s increasing every year?

Erik: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The percentage is always around 24-25% but as we’re increasing revenue it becomes exponential.

Mark: We started in 2002 and I think we have always been profitable.

Erik: I think the first two years are what we call a black zero. We have started with an investor, but we have always kept a majority within the company. I won’t give the total shareholders but you must know that most of the people here, if somebody works here two years they get stock options and becomes a shareholder. The goal is we always keep the majority with the employees and the management.

We have a good partner investor. He’s satisfied with the growth, of course. There’s no big deal.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 1 – why invite the press?

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This is the first in a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

On April 26 and 27, I attended Bricsys Insights, a press event in Ghent, Belgium. Other attendees included Cyrena Respini-Irwin (Cadalyst editor in chief), R.K. McSwain (CAD Panacea), Ralph Grabowski (upFront.eZine), Randall Newton (GraphicSpeak), Roopinder Tara (Engineering.com), Martyn Day (DEVELOP3D), Jeff Rowe (AEC Café), Anthony Frausto-Robledo (Architosh) and Paul Wilkinson (pwcom).

Although Bricsys has invited some of these people (including myself) to previous events, this was the first gathering of such a significant number of illustrious industry press, bloggers and observers. So when myself, Cyrena Respini-Irwin and R.K. McSwain had the opportunity to interview Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh, the first thing that we asked was this:

Cyrena (clarifying earlier question): What was the change that led you to bring in more people for the press event?

Steve: Why are we here?

Erik/Mark: (Laughs)

Cyrena: That’s a big question!

Erik: If you look to the history of what we have done and it goes together with what we said in the beginning, that we chose to grow by organic growth, and for a long time we didn’t do any marketing, and especially for the American market, because if you do it too early… And really, if we had done that massively, five years ago we would have been categorized as just another clone of AutoCAD. Once you have that, it’s very difficult to leave that, and that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid.

And so we waited until we had really substantially different product technologies that add a lot of stuff to… if you compare it to AutoCAD, I think that’s the moment where we are now. And we decided from that moment on, probably it made sense that we tell it a little bit more to the world. And of course what do you do then? You invite influencers in the market, which is the journalists. That’s the reason we invited you all.

We’re going to repeat this more and more.

Mark: Just to add to that, just sitting here for just two days with you guys also helps us to really talk about everything. If you go to a conference (you [Steve] were also in Munich), the time is limited and so we don’t show the systems behind, the testing system, we cannot show everything.

The idea here was, OK, these are the things we’re doing, what you see of course but also what is behind, the people behind the DNA of the company. We thought that’s a good idea to do that in depth with an audience like you guys.

Erik: That’s an important element as well that we wanted to show: the DNA of the company. It’s a bit different from others. That’s who we are and it’s important to know.

Steve: You’re about 90% developers, programmers. Do you think that’s going to change as you put more effort into marketing?

Erik: I think that the awesome part of the company that has to be improved, and on the marketing side we’re going to need to improve… to give you a rough idea we think that over the next two, four years we’re probably going to grow to maybe 200-250 people.

Steve: So where are you now?

Erik: We’re at 130-140. We just hired six new developers here in the office last week so we have to recount where we are in total. Dmitri is hiring in Novosibirsk (Bricsys Russia) as well.

So for sure we are starting what I would call a second life now. There’s been a lot of development, but still the majority of people in our company will be developers. I think we’re always going to stay around 80% developers. But there’s a part of the business, and especially in the marketing, that we will have to improve.

What we have encountered now, with the new modelling techniques we have introduced for BIM, we have to teach all the resellers. We have to produce material to teach the people how to work with it. These are not developers we’re going to need. We’re going to need seasoned architects that have experience for the last six to ten years with BIM already, maybe with competitive products. But that understand the concept, have experience with it, those guys we are now attracting and we’re going to need. Those are not developers, but in that sphere we have to extend and we have to grow. And that’s what we’re doing. We are hiring.

The focus will always be… what we’re good at, is basic research and development. That’s really what we’re doing, that’s the focus, and the results are the products we make.

We have a good partnership network I think, we’re going to continue to feed that, so I expect that balance between developers and non-developers to remain always above or about 80%.

If you have a look at the system, how we sell and support our products, we are scalable, to maintain that balance of a high level of developers. There’s no need for us to change that model. But in certain aspects we’re going to have to extend.

BOA (Bricsys Online Administration) is helping us tremendously to be scalable. If we were to double our revenue we wouldn’t need that many more people to manage that. We are constantly investing in automating all the systems we have, and it pays off big-time.

Cyrena: So that very heavy R&D investment you’ve sustained thus far will be scaled back a little in order to invest in other areas such as marketing?

Erik: Yeah, but it doesn’t mean we will scale back from development. We will grow in development as well, but the balance will be a little bit different; the proportion is different. We will grow tremendously, even more still in R&D when it comes to number of developers than in any other area over any other field or kind of employee that we have.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Disclosure: Bricsys covered travel and accommodation expenses and provided some meals. Oh, and beer. Mustn’t forget the Belgian beer.

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates

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BricsCAD V17.2 is out. Although there’s nowhere near as much new and useful in this mid-term update as in the full upgrade from V16 to V17, there’s more here than in Autodesk’s last mid-term update, AutoCAD 17.1. There’s even arguably more than in the uninspired AutoCAD 2018 upgrade, including those 17.1 features.

But that’s not the main reason I say Bricsys is schooling Autodesk in how to do mid-term updates. While Autodesk is restricting such updates (including the bug fixes and security updates included in those updates) to subscription and maintenance customers, Bricsys is doing no such thing.

BricsCAD V17 customers who have a perpetual license, even without maintenance (called All-In by Bricsys), will be receiving V17.2 free of charge. Bricsys still considers such users as customers who have paid good money and still need to be looked after, rather than a non-paying irritant, which appears to be Autodesk’s attitude.

Oh, and you don’t have to install some piece-of-junk automatic updater or malware-like download manager to get the software. You just do a straightforward browser download of a small file (by Autodesk bloatware standards) which is the entire product, and install over the top of your existing installation, effortlessly preserving your settings. If you’re doing a new install of V17.2 from scratch, you just install from that downloaded product. No need for multiple downloads and multiple-step installations. No need to have every PC in your fleet nagging your users and downloading the same huge files.

Autodesk isn’t in the hunt here for ease of maintenance. Not remotely in the same league. Seriously, go home and start again, Autodesk. Your ideas are bad and your execution is worse.

Here are some links to information about the V17.2 update (not neutral sources, obviously):

I will be benchmarking BricsCAD V17.2 and AutoCAD 2018 with great interest. In my preliminary tests, BricsCAD V17.0 performance walked all over AutoCAD 2018 in most areas, but commands involving object selection were the exception, with AutoCAD significantly quicker there. Bricsys is claiming large improvements in that area, but we’ll see.

Autodesk license costs options 6 to 10 – abandon maintenance or Autodesk

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Note: due to new information from Autodesk, an updated summary has been posted.

In this series of posts, I’ll examine various payment options for CAD software and compare them with the cost of staying on your Autodesk maintenance contract long-term.

In this third post, I examine what happens if you do something out of the box. Something Autodesk didn’t plan on you doing, and something it won’t like. What if you don’t renew your maintenance and then maybe hop on the subscription gravy train later? What if you don’t renew your maintenance and switch to a non-Autodesk product?

As stated in my first post, staying on maintenance is the baseline with which I’m comparing these options:

Option 1 – stay on maintenance
Assumptions: maintenance cost 20% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: keep your perpetual license, keep it up to date, retain previous version & home use rights
Cons: increasing costs, expect more unpleasant “persuasive” surprises from Autodesk

3 year cost $1957 (average $652)
5 year cost $3951 (average $790)
10 year cost $13665 (average $1366)

Let’s say your maintenance renewal turns up this year and you ignore it. Keep using your AutoCAD 2018 perpetual license. Do the same in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, you assess the situation and decide if you really need to keep up to date. Let’s say you are convinced of the need to keep current by all the brilliant improvements Autodesk made to AutoCAD in the meantime. At that stage, become a new renter by signing up for subscription. You still retain your AutoCAD 2018 license and can revert to using it if Autodesk really screws up AutoCAD 2021. Best of all, Autodesk doesn’t get a cent from you for three years.

Option 6 – abandon maintenance, subscription in 2020
Assumptions: subscription cost 10% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: permanently retain your perpetual license, zero cost in the short term
Cons: lose previous version & home use rights for 3 years, expensive from 2020

3 year cost $0 (average $0)
5 year cost $3881 (average $776)
10 year cost $17532 (average $1753)

Or you could leave it another couple of years, in which case it looks like this:

Option 7 – abandon maintenance, subscription in 2022
Assumptions: subscription cost 10% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: permanently retain your perpetual license, zero cost in the short/medium term
Cons: lose previous version & home use rights for five years, expensive from 2022

3 year cost $0 (average $0)
5 year cost $0 (average $0)
10 year cost $13651 (average $1365)

It’s very possible that in 2022 or thereabouts, Autodesk will try to invite recalcitrant customers like you to the rental party with special offers (such as we have seen over the last year or so). For example, trade in your perpetual license and get 50% off subscription if you sign up for 3 years.

Choose the next option at this stage and you’re pretty much tossing a coin hoping that the offer will be made, but you can sit happily in zero-cost land, waiting for the opportune moment and that improves your chances of getting what you want. If that happens, the numbers pan out like this:

Option 8 – abandon maintenance, subscription in 2022 (3-year 50% discount)
Assumptions: subscription cost 10% compound rise annually from 2020, 3-year 50% discount
Pros: retain your perpetual license until 2022, zero cost in the medium term, long-term average costs not too bad
Cons: lose previous version & home use rights for five years, lose your perpetual license eventually, expensive from 2025

3 year cost $0 (average $0)
5 year cost $0 (average $0)
10 year cost $9951 (average $995)

Not too terrible an option, then. Plus you have lots of options depending on how things pan out in the next five years. Here’s a graph that shows how the average annual costs compare over time for these three options:

Here’s how the annual costs look:

What if you’re determined to never rent, never pay Autodesk another cent and never give up your perpetual license, but you still want to keep up to date? Then you need to look to Autodesk’s competition. I’m aware that there are a lot of non-AutoCAD users now reading this blog, so you’re going to have to forgive me while I get AutoCAD-specific. You’ll have to research your own Autodesk product replacements and run your own numbers.

For the purpose of the exercise, I’m going to use BricsCAD Pro as the AutoCAD replacement. You should also consider others such as DraftSight, ZWCAD, progeCAD, etc.

I’ve chosen BricsCAD because I know from personal experience it is a capable product with a very high level of AutoCAD compatibility including commands, CUIs, LISP, etc, AutoCAD-beating performance and a long-standing trustworthy parent company committed to the perpetual license model. It’s so close to AutoCAD that training requirements will be close to zero and you can run the applications in parallel using a common set of custom files, even in a very complex custom environment.

It’s also ridiculously cheap compared with AutoCAD: US$880 including maintenance ($680 without), with both ongoing maintenance ($235/year) and upgrades ($265 V16 to V17) available.* Putting those numbers into the equation gives us this:

Option 9 – BricsCAD Pro with maintenance
Assumptions: BricsCAD maintenance cost 10% compound rise annually
Pros: permanently retain your AutoCAD perpetual license, gain an BricsCAD perpetual license, very low cost
Cons: lose AutoCAD previous version & home use rights, possible future compatibility issues if Autodesk throws a spanner in the DWG works

3 year cost $1423 (average $474)
5 year cost $2080 (average $416)
10 year cost $4390 (average $439)

Or you could combine options 6 and 9: do nothing for three years and then buy into BricsCAD when you’re sure that’s the right thing to do.

Option 10 – BricsCAD Pro with maintenance in 2020
Assumptions: BricsCAD purchase and maintenance costs 10% compound rise annually
Pros: permanently retain your AutoCAD perpetual license, eventually gain an BricsCAD perpetual license, zero cost in short term, very low cost overall
Cons: lose AutoCAD previous version & home use rights, possible future compatibility issues if Autodesk throws a spanner in the DWG works

3 year cost $0 (average $0)
5 year cost $1515 (average $303)
10 year cost $3826 (average $383)

Obviously, switching to BricsCAD is a way, way cheaper option than any method of keeping current with Autodesk, even allowing for the BricsCAD initial purchase price. Let’s see how those options look for average annual costs:

Nice low, flat lines there for the BricsCAD options. It doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether you hop in right away or wait a few years. Here are the annual costs so you can see where the cash requirements get lumpy:

It’s worth mentioning that in some markets, Bricsys offers an annual rental option at 40% of the perpetual-with-maintenance price. It’s not offered in the USA, and given the low cost of purchase I don’t think there would be much demand for it anyway. I wouldn’t bother with it; it’s not as if you want to encourage that sort of thing among CAD companies, is it?

That concludes the options I intend examining at this stage. Next, the summary.

Posts in this series:
1. Autodesk license costs options 1 & 2 – stay on maintenance, subscription now
2. Autodesk license costs options 3, 4 & 5 – bait and switch
3. Autodesk license costs options 6 to 10 – abandon maintenance or Autodesk
4. Autodesk license costs options – summary
5. Autodesk license costs options – summary 2

* Thanks to Malcolm Davies of Techevate for providing the Bricsys US price list. Yes, that  Malcolm Davies, former Autodesk 2IC.

BricsCAD’s LISP kicks sand in the face of AutoCAD’s

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If you’re a power user or CAD Manager transitioning from AutoCAD to BricsCAD, one of the things you’ll like is that almost all of your LISP routines will just work. That’s not an statement that can be made about various Autodesk products that bear the AutoCAD name, such as AutoCAD 360, AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD for Mac.

It’s not just simple old AutoLISP code that runs in BricsCAD, but complex dialog routines that use DCL, and Visual LISP stuff that uses ActiveX. Yes, even on the Mac and Linux platforms. Some DOSLib functions are built in and the rest can be loaded, as with AutoCAD. Even OpenDCL is supported. It’s a quite astonishingly high level of compatibility.

But it’s not 100%. There are minor incompatibilities, system variable and command-line differences that cause problems in a handful of cases. It’s often possible to work around these and still retain the same code that works in both AutoCAD and BricsCAD. Reporting LISP bugs and incompatibilities to Bricsys generally gets them fixed super-quick.

Also super-quick is the speed at which your code will run. It’s immediately noticeable when running any LISP code that needs to do a bit of processing that it just gets done faster in BricsCAD than AutoCAD. Fast enough to extract the following comment from one of my AutoCAD users trying out a linework cleanup routine in BricsCAD:

Wow.

 
User impressions are one thing, but how about measurements? Today, I had a support job to do that involved running one of my LISP routines. I ran it on both AutoCAD 2017 and BricsCAD V17 on the same PC. AutoCAD took 2970 seconds (about 49 minutes), BricsCAD 1030 seconds (about 17 minutes). Over half an hour saved on one operation. That’s 2.88 times faster, which is consistent with my previous observations with a variety of routines.

Upshot: if you’re doing work where there’s a lot of LISP processing going on, switching to BricsCAD is going to save you a shedload of time.

There is a downside to BricsCAD’s LISP, and it’s a big one; no VLIDE. No equivalent, either. There are various programming editors around that can help with editing code, but no substitute for integrated debugging. It means if you’re a power user, CAD Manager, developer or support person, you’re probably going to have to keep one working copy of AutoCAD around even after you’ve completed the transition to BricsCAD.

Because VLIDE has been in maintenance mode for over 15 years it remains virtually unchanged year after year (including ancient bugs). So it doesn’t matter that much which AutoCAD release you have hanging around. Assuming you’re a perpetual license holder, when you drop the maintenance contract on one of your AutoCAD licenses, you’re entitled to keep using the software as long as you wish, albeit only the current release at the time the contract ends. How long the software will keep working is another matter, depending as it does on factors not entirely within your control.

This is an imperfect solution. Even keeping a copy of AutoCAD around won’t help much if you’re debugging a problem caused by something specific to BricsCAD. Filling the VLIDE hole is something Bricsys needs to work on.

Undo, U, Redo, Erase, Oops differences explained

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It’s been a while since I posted any beginners’ tips, so here goes.

There are several commands in AutoCAD to do with reversing things you’ve done. They are in some cases subtly different and this can confuse newcomers. Here’s what they do:

  • U – reverses the last command you used.
  • Redo – reverses the last U or Undo operation you performed, if that’s the last thing you did.
  • Undo – displays a set of command options that allow greater control over undoing things. (This is rarely used directly by a user, and is more of a programmer’s tool, so I won’t be going into any detail).
  • Erase – removes from the drawing an object or set of objects as selected by the user.
  • Oops – reverses the last Erase command, even if you have done other things in the meantime. (It also reverses erasures performed by the Wblock command, but such reversal is rarely needed these days).

Note that many commands also have an Undo subcommand  which is different again from all of the above. For example, start the Line command, pick a few points, then enter Undo while still in the command. Just the last segment will be removed, and you can carry on picking more points. Most subcommands can be abbreviated, and this is true of the Undo subcommand within the Line command. While still in the Line command, enter U and this will have the same effect as entering Undo in full (or the other possible abbreviations Un and Und).

This is not the case when entering full command names; entering U and Undo at the command prompt will do different things, although command line auto-complete can confuse matters further depending on your settings. I’ll ignore that for the sake of brevity.

Let’s go through a command sequence that uses all of these things.

  • Enter the Line command (type LINE and hit [Enter]). Pick 6 points to create 5 lines but don’t hit [Enter] yet. While still in the Line command, enter Undo (UNDO [Enter]). This will use the Undo subcommand of Line to undo the last drawn line segment, leaving 4 lines. Pick another 2 points, leaving a total of 6 lines. While still in the Line command, enter U. This will undo the last drawn line segment, leaving 5 lines. Hit [Enter] to finish the Line command.
  • Enter the Line command, pick 4 points to draw 3 lines and hit Enter to finish the command.
  • Enter the U command. The effects of the last command (Line) will be undone, removing all 3 of the lines created by it.
  • Enter the Redo command. The U command is reversed, restoring the 3 lines.
  • Enter the Undo command. This will give you a few options, but the default is the number of steps to undo. Type 2 [Enter] and the last 2 commands will be undone (ignoring the U/Redo), removing the set of 3 lines and the set of 5 lines.
  • Enter the Redo command. The Undo command is reversed, restoring both the 5 lines and the 3 lines.*
  • Enter the Erase command. Select one line from the first group and two from the second, then hit [Enter] to finish the command and those 3 lines go away.
  • Enter the Move command. Select the remaining 2 lines from the first group, hit [Enter] to finish the selection process and pick two points slightly apart to move the lines a short distance.
  • Enter the Oops command. The 3 lines removed by the Erase command are restored, but note that the effects of the Move command are unaffected. If you had used the U command twice to restore the erased lines, the Move command would also have been reversed.

Clear as mud? There are other possible complications depending on various settings, and there are various user interface options for invoking the commands that I haven’t discussed, but this will do to explain the basics.

* The information in this post applies to any AutoCAD from the last 30 years, but as the command set in BricsCAD is almost identical, it can be used for BricsCAD too. Mostly. There is one exception; if you use Undo to perform several undo steps at once, then follow that with a Redo, only one undo step at a time will be reversed. If you want to redo everything, you will need to hold your finger on the Enter key to repeat the Redo command until it runs out of things to redo. Depending on what you want to do, this can either be very handy or rather inconvenient.

BricsCAD startup LISP bug fixed

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In my previous post I have a real problem with BricsCAD, I related my then-latest interaction with the Bricsys support system:

Steve Johnson
05-12-2016 05:30 UTC
I don’t know if this is a BricsCAD problem or a DOSLib one, so I am reporting it to both Bricsys and Dale at McNeel. I’m also not sure if this was happening in earlier versions.

If I load DOSLib during an S::STARTUP call and then use the (dos_msgbox) function later in that call, this fails the first time round because BricsCAD things the function is not defined. Opening a second drawing results in the call working as expected. I’ve chopped down our startup routine so you have an example.

; error : no function definition ; expected FUNCTION at [eval]

Awesome Bricsys Person
05-12-2016 12:32 UTC
Hi Steve,

There was a regression introduced in V17.1.10 that caused startup code to execute too early under certain conditions, before the lisp engine document context was properly initialized. This has been fixed now for the next update.

Steve Johnson
06-12-2016 02:43 UTC
I must say, the responses I’ve been getting to my support requests have been absolutely bloody brilliant. Cheers!

Let’s just finish the sequence, shall we?

Second Excellent Bricsys Person
13-12-2016 19:18 UTC
Hi Steve,

I have very good news. The fix is included in BricsCAD V17.1.11, available for download.
Thank you for your help.

Following a fast and straightforward download and install, I can confirm that the bug is fixed. The elapsed time from my bug report to the fix being publicly available and me being informed personally of the fact was 8.5 days. Note that this isn’t a workaround, patch or service pack, it’s a permanent fix that is now automatically in place for everybody who downloads the software.

Edit: the new version was actually released at 4 PM on 9 December, so it was less than 4.5 days from report to fix. Outstanding!

I should mention that I also received a prompt and relevant response from Dale at McNeel, despite the fact that the problem was nothing to do with him!

For somebody used to dealing with Autodesk, this is a breath of fresh air. Bricsys team, take a bow!

I have a real problem with BricsCAD

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To be precise, I have a real problem with writing  about BricsCAD. I’ve written some pretty complimentary things about BricsCAD lately. In the interests of balance, I’ve been intending to write about some of the issues people can expect to deal with when moving from AutoCAD to BricsCAD. Such issues certainly exist. The problem I have with that is that the issues keep going away!

Here’s how it usually goes. I find a problem in BricsCAD. I submit a support request. Within hours, I get a meaningful response from a person who understands the issue. Within days, I’m informed it’s been fixed internally and the fix will be in the next update. Within a week or two, that update is released. I download and install the updated version. It’s basically a full reinstall, but all settings are seamlessly retained and it’s faster and less painful than an AutoCAD Service Pack installation. The whole thing from start of download to completion typically takes 5 or 6 minutes. The problem is gone, and I have nothing to write about!

Here’s the latest interaction. This is typical, and has been repeated many times:

Steve Johnson
05-12-2016 05:30 UTC
I don’t know if this is a BricsCAD problem or a DOSLib one, so I am reporting it to both Bricsys and Dale at McNeel. I’m also not sure if this was happening in earlier versions.

If I load DOSLib during an S::STARTUP call and then use the (dos_msgbox) function later in that call, this fails the first time round because BricsCAD things the function is not defined. Opening a second drawing results in the call working as expected. I’ve chopped down our startup routine so you have an example.

; error : no function definition ; expected FUNCTION at [eval]

Awesome Bricsys Person
05-12-2016 12:32 UTC
Hi Steve,

There was a regression introduced in V17.1.10 that caused startup code to execute too early under certain conditions, before the lisp engine document context was properly initialized. This has been fixed now for the next update.

Steve Johnson
06-12-2016 02:43 UTC
I must say, the responses I’ve been getting to my support requests have been absolutely bloody brilliant. Cheers!

 
Now, can you imagine the same scenario with Autodesk? I’m sure many of you have lived through it. First thing would be an automated response. A day or two later would be a confused support person coming up with totally unrelated links to Knowledgebase articles. A series of increasingly frustrating back-and-forth emails might go on for days or weeks until the Autodesk person finally plays their trump card, blaming the third-party routine (incorrectly) and/or stating that they don’t support users’ customization.

Such a problem would stay in AutoCAD indefinitely. Repeated reports, year after year, using subscription support and the forums and formal reporting mechanism in the Autodesk Beta program, would make no difference. Eventually I would give up and the problem would never get fixed. Again, this is typical, and has been repeated many times. This applies to bugs, incompatibilities, feature design, performance issues, user interface difficulties, documentation system idiocy, you name it. It’s massively frustrating and I know many very smart people who have given up even trying. The only exception is documentation content; that gets fixed as soon as possible, within the limitations imposed by Autodesk’s arcane systems.

The difference in attitude between Autodesk and Bricsys is glaring, stark, obvious. Autodesk pays lip service to providing customer service and software quality. Bricsys just gets on and does it.

BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years?

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I’ve been evaluating BricsCAD for a few years now, and have been looking at it pretty seriously as a DWG-based LISP-compatible AutoCAD alternative for a year or so. A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Munich for the Bricsys International Conference (at Bricsys’ expense – see the Legal page for disclosure) where I learned quite a few things I had failed to notice during my own evaluation of V17. As you may have noticed, I can be pretty hard-bitten and cynical about what CAD companies have to say about their products, but I came back impressed.

The conference and the product itself are not free of flaws, but I have to say the progress Bricsys has shown in developing the BricsCAD product is really quite astonishing. The rate at which serious, worthwhile-to-customers improvements have been made to BricsCAD over the last few releases is huge. Some of it’s just catching up with existing AutoCAD features, but most of it is going beyond what Autodesk has done. Overall, Bricsys lately has outstripped Autodesk’s efforts in improving its DWG-based flagship CAD product to such a degree that it’s frankly embarrassing for the much larger corporation.

I grabbed Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser for a brief chat at the end of the conference. I told him that while there were still important areas that need addressing, nevertheless if Autodesk had shipped a new release with a quarter of the improvements that Bricsys managed with V17, it would still have been the best AutoCAD upgrade in fifteen years. Yes, the gap in progress from Autodesk to Bricsys really is that big.

The difference appears to be one of attitude. The Bricsys development team (many were there in Munich to speak to) is focused, motivated and enabled. For Bricsys, BricsCAD really is the flagship product. That’s where all the effort goes; everything goes into the DWG-based product. High-performance 2D drafting, user interface innovation, parametric 3D models, IFC-certified BIM, sheet metal, everything. You would think this would lead to massive bloat, but somehow it doesn’t; the product remains small and fast.

For Autodesk, the emphasis has been elsewhere for some years now. The rate per release of worthwhile AutoCAD improvements, never stellar since the 12-month release cycle was adopted, has been trending downwards since AutoCAD 2010 and has slowed to a trickle. Autodesk is happy to accept the income from AutoCAD customers and use it to develop a hundred trendier products, neglecting the foundation on which the company was built. That’s relying on inertia, and there’s a big question mark over how sustainable that is.

Here’s a 5-minute YouTube marketing video outlining some of the changes. If you have a bit longer, here’s a 37-minute YouTube video of the new features from head of development Hans de Backer. The presentation lacks sparkle (no insult to Hans, but he’s no Lynn Allen) but the substance is there. Note that Hans was demonstrating live to the full conference using a pre-release product, including opening a huge drawing, which surely deserves marks for bravery! As a bonus, you can just about see Owen Wengerd and myself in the bottom left corner.

I’ll be going into more detail on BricsCAD V17 pros and cons later (yes, there are cons), but for now here’s the press release and here’s where you can download the product for evaluation. It’s a straightforward download of a 234 MB MSI file and the install takes just over a minute. That in itself is a breath of fresh air for people who are used to hanging around, waiting for AutoCAD downloads and installs to finish.

Any BricsCAD users out there? v.2016

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Back in 2010 I asked the question Any BricsCAD users out there? and there were a few of you who had tried to replace AutoCAD with BricsCAD. Most who responded had made the change successfully, others not so much.

Six years on, the situation is different. The fact that you can’t buy a permanent AutoCAD license any more has prompted some Autodesk customers to look more seriously at alternative vendors who do provide that option. Bricsys is one of those vendors, and their DWG-based AutoCAD alternative BricsCAD has improved way more rapidly than AutoCAD over the same time period. No, that isn’t a guess, I’ve been keeping an active eye on things. BricsCAD today is by no means perfect, but it’s impressive in many ways. LISP compatibility and performance are excellent, for example. BricsCAD v16 superior to the also imperfect AutoCAD 2017 in several areas, despite the total cost of ownership being significantly lower.

Here’s the question I asked back then:

I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have adopted BricsCAD (either partially or fully replacing AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in your organisation), or at least seriously investigated using the product.
 
Why did you investigate changing over? How far have you gone? What are your experiences? What are the pros and cons? How is performance? Reliability? Bugs? Ease of use? Familiarity? Support and other aspects of customer service? Total cost of ownership? Are you experiencing interoperability problems when exchanging drawings with Autodesk software users? How did you go with incorporating in-house customisation and third party tools?

How would you answer that question today? Would you be interested in me providing more posts about BriscCAD, such as practical experiences with attempting a transition from AutoCAD?

Shout out to Robert McNeel & Associates

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Let’s start the rebirth of this blog on a positive note. I’d like to express my gratitude to Robert McNeel & Associates for what must surely be the most outstanding example of long-term customer service in the CAD industry.

These days, McNeel is best known for the 3D modelling software Rhino. I have heard good things about this product, but have never used it. However, I am a long-term user of another McNeel product, DOSLib. This is an extensive set of functions that adds greatly to the functionality of AutoLISP. It all works very well and has saved me many hours of work that I would have spent reproducing that functionality. Of course, many LISP programmers could write functions to calculate a cube root, or read a text file, or display a date in whatever format you like, or copy files, or generate a GUID, or toggle the Caps Lock status, or display an HTML file, or return a list of OLE objects in the drawing, or display a multi-select file dialog, or return a list of Windows printers, or a hundred other handy things. The point is, they don’t have to because all that has been done for them and handed over for nothing.

The documentation is straightforward and accurate, and is provided in the form of a good old-fashioned local CHM file. This Help system may be unfashionable, but it remains infinitely superior to the still-awful system that paying AutoCAD customers have had to put up with for the last few years.

For those investigating alternatives to AutoCAD for whatever reason, the availability of DOSLib for Bricscad may help make that particular alternative a more attractive proposition.

Despite McNeel and Autodesk breaking ties many years ago, McNeel’s Dale Fugier has continued to provide, maintain and improve DOSLib. What’s more, DOSLib has remained totally free of charge and ad-free throughout its history, which dates back to 1992! Sometimes, there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

So here’s a big raised glass to Dale and Robert McNeel. Thank you for the many years of outstanding customer service in exchange for nothing but good feelings. Long may you prosper!

Disclaimer: I have no pecuniary relationship with McNeel; no money has ever changed hands in either direction. This post is totally unsolicited; I hope it comes as a pleasant surprise to McNeel.

Why don’t you trust Autodesk?

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As I mentioned earlier, any company that wants to move its customers to the Cloud is going to need the trust of those customers. Three months ago, I started a poll to try to get some measure of how trustworthy you consider Autodesk to be, in terms of doing the right thing by its customers. The results of that poll look pretty awful for Autodesk. Right from the start, the distrusters have outnumbered the trusters by three to one, with the current results showing an overwhelming majority of respondents (77%) not trusting Autodesk.

Why? What has Autodesk done in the past, or is doing now, that leads people to this level of distrust? If you have voted in this poll, I’d like to know your reasons, so please add your comments whichever way you voted. If you think there’s an issue with the question wording and/or its simple Yes/No choice, feel free to say so.

There will be a number of people who have an inherent distrust of corporations, so as a control I’ve added a number of polls to try to see how much that influences the results. There are near-identical polls for a wide range of different corporations. There’s a poll for an on-line retailer and Cloud service provider (Amazon), one for a computer and gadget maker (Apple), one for another CAD company (Bricsys, makers of Bricscad), one for a maker of cars, motorbikes etc. (Honda), and one for a traditional retailer (Target). I’ll be interested to see how trustworthy you consider those corporations to be, and how they compare to Autodesk.

Any Bricscad users out there?

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I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have adopted Bricscad (either partially or fully replacing AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in your organisation), or at least seriously investigated using the product. This post is aimed at users and CAD managers rather than third party developers, who I expect to cover in future posts.

Why did you investigate changing over? How far have you gone? What are your experiences? What are the pros and cons? How is performance? Reliability? Bugs? Ease of use? Familiarity? Support and other aspects of customer service? Total cost of ownership? Are you experiencing interoperability problems when exchanging drawings with Autodesk software users? How did you go with incorporating in-house customisation and third party tools?

Please add a comment, or if you prefer, email me using my contact form.