Dave:
Dave Jones wrote
> ps: what's a "club cadet" ??
You have no doubt earned what you've earned by
honest hard work and planning. More power to you.
Its "Cub Cadet", and, sorry for the spelling error.
A Cub Cadet is a brand of power riding lawn mowers
that is sold at the Home Depot in Edison, NJ.
Regarding the marketing prowess of Autodesk...they
excelled at marketing the AutoCAD product. The did
gain huge marketing share, but they did lie in there earlier
days.
For example:
They badmouthed big iron [which was highly efficient
and profitable.]
They bad mouthed 32 bit machines. [but they were
losing market share just before the 32 bit machines
came on the market and saved their bacon.]
They lied about the supposed high costs and low profits
of big iron. [big iron did have a high cost because you had
to get 4 workstations to work on a mainframe with central
disk storage, a network server, and a plotter on the system.
That was +USD200k in the late 1980s. Each big iron CAD
worker could expect 4 times manual drawing productivity.
The Autodesk lie was that PCs were cheaper. The dinky PCs
indeed did have an initial lower cost but by the time you
added a faster CPU, graphics card, larger high res monitor,
more RAM, larger disk storage, display RAM, network,
network server, physical facilities, HVAC, more furniture
and floor space for the larger number of CAD workers
needed compared to big iron, you had a total price
that was in the same price ball park as big iron. One CAD
manager told me that when 32 bit computers came out and
he had added all the extras he still didn't have an
integrated system. Another guy, an architectural firm
business manager, told me that added to the technical
disparity between big iron and stand alone AutoCAD PCs,
the AutoCAD shop needed 2times the number of people
to run its [early] 32bit Intel AutoCAD shop, and that the
cost of the added employee benefits, e.g., insurance, made
the AutoCAD a break-even or worse business venture.]
AutoCAD started to achieve 2 times productivity with the
32 bit computer, allthewhile the "evil" 32 bit big iron, that
already had the above mentioned integrated system features,
had 4 times drafting productivity. [And, and that's a big and.
The AutoCAD shops had no networks or network servers -
which was the central system of the multi-user big iron
systems.]
AutoCAD, said an architect friend or mine, was the "CAD
program with the big mouth." [AutoCAD claimed more than it
delivered. It was touch and go for many firms for many years
whether or not their AutoCAD shop was profitable, and
the big iron shops, e.g., the largest engineering, architecture,
and construction management firm, CRS Sirrine, were
making tons of money.]
AutoCAD hung in there with the individual PC. [The jump from
small firm to large firm was too steep, and most firms
wanted to keep local control over their salary mark-up
employees, and they stayed with the small PC-based AutoCAD.
AutoCAD billed itself as a possibility for small business firms
that had one or more office PCs, or that they could additionally
acquire and upgrade.]
The big iron firms had beautiful raised floor computer rooms
with hidden cables, but have you looked inside the modern
AutoCAD computer server rooms? [The rooms are a mess:
no raised floors, tied bundles of exposed cables leading
everywhere up racks [yes, AutoCAD had to get rack mounted
servers and networks and copy everything that made big iron
profitable], and across ceiling ductwork and storeroom
shelves, for example. The AutoCAD server rooms remain a
mostly an ungainly afterthought.]
AutoCAD was lucky. [DEC had a great engineered product
and bad philosophic vision - and ultimately failed. IBM had
an ultra pompous cor****ate community and had no capacity
for structuring or evaluating market oriented software
innovations - and they failed. Tons of PC makers swarmed
over IBM and took it down. AutoCAD, if you've recently
read its web site, shows signs of incredible aloofness and
religiosity - and the seeds for their failure are now evident.
The PEs, SolidWworks, MicroStations, and TurboCADs are
moving into the future possible markets of AutoCAD.]
AutoCAD overbuilt its excessively rigid layer system.
[For years AutoCAD had no reference files - only the
selective layer system copped from McDonnell-Douglas.
AutoCAD's reference file system through version 2005
is still lame.]
For years AutoCAD had no reference files - only the
selective layer system copped from McDonnell-Douglas.
[AutoCAD's reference file system through version 2005
is still lame.]
The AutoCAD-is-CAD religion was deplorable. [The super-
speedy AutoCAD worker-exponents were an embarrassment
to rational hard working types.]
Due possibly to what I term the faith-based religion of
AutoCAD marketing and public relations, the customers
did not compare the AutoCAD and MicroStation CAD
programs is actual work and testing. [In all of my career
I know of only two firms that actually set about to
comparatively evaluate the two programs. What is happening
in the mid range civil engineering forms is that both
programs are in the same shops. Managers are seeing
the numbers. So called client requirements determine
what programs are employed on projects. Some client's
requirements are still based on that early draftsman's
AutoCAD 10 program that was hyped to the client's
management, and that was billed as automation. The
programs are probably for the first time being critically
compared. What is happening? AutoCAD is seen to excel
for drawing sheet production. MicroStation is far better
for large complex projects. AutoCAD has so many trained
and partially trained workers in the market that their
wage rates are 20 parent lower than MicroStation
workers. That competition is pulling down the wage rates
of the MicroStation workers.]
Those are the Cons of AutoCAD.
Some of the advantages of AutoCAD are:
The main areas where AutoCAD has excelled are in the
practical drawing commands and easy way to start and
plot separate individual drawings.
In spite of the basic design architecture of AutoCAD its
high sales enabled high investment in R&D. In time and
due to funding the product has become highly sophisticated.
The pan and zoom feature seemed to be a facile device.
[however, when it is compared to micro station's GUI
features, the pan and zoom are just about all there
is. Pan and Zoom were indeed useful for individual
drawings and local modifications. On a project level
reliance upon pan and zoom hampered productivity,
while the multiple window, reference file windowing,
and viewing capabilities of MicroStation enhanced
production.]
Plotting: [AutoCAD did enable preconfigured plotters
to be able to plot individual drawings.]
AutoCAD is a good program for making individual drawings
quickly. It makes one sheet at a time and plots them easily.
[for large pre-planned projects AutoCAD is less
efficient than MicroStation.]
Ralph Hertle
|
