To generalise, the CAD software industry, on the micro scale, appears to have evolved to deliver the yearly evolution of authoring tools, executed on rolling 3 – 5 year development plans, along with equally evolving business models. There is a lifecycle of software and to understand this better it helps if you can think a bit more like a software developer. However, this furious initial phase typically slows down as a product ages and competition subsides. Updates can be frequent and big the potential can be seen.
The excitement of innovative code and doing things much better than previous generations of software is typically reserved for the early phases of development. The Revit acquisition protected Autodesk dominance in AEC and eventually proved to be a savvy investment. Had Autodesk bought Solidworks, it would not have spent millions on developing Inventor and then Fusion and would have been the number one player in desktop MCAD. One of the underlying key driving factors to the acquisition was that five years previously Autodesk dropped out of buying mechanical CAD (MCAD) tool Solidworks (Dassault Systèmes paid $310 million) which then went on to dominate desktop MCAD as users moved from UNIX to Windows.Īutodesk’s CEO at the time, Carl Bass, didn’t want to make the same mistake again. Up to that point Autodesk had been trying to morph AutoCAD into a full-on architectural modelling tool with the unfeasibly complicated ‘Architectural Desktop’ variant. While RTC made a lot of noise, and its core parametric technology was innovative, it did not generate much revenue and, in fact, had few customers. Autodesk acquired Revit Technology Corporation (RTC) with its Revit application in 2002 for $133 million cash.
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