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As a person who makes these decisions in an engineering company, I can tell you for the first time management is now coming around to the fact that the autodesk

As a person who makes these decisions in an engineering company, I can tell you for the first time management is now coming around to the fact that the autodesk licensing model needs to be contained and reduced. For a good 50% of drafting (perhaps much more), zwcad will do. It has a .NET and lisp dev environment, and many tools run natively. Most importantly, the application can be purchased permanently. The autocad product for almost all drafting is essentially unchanged in 15 years, and yet the yearly licensing cost is now more than the total capital cost that was originally incurred. Autodesk is really starting to look like they're pricing their own product out of the market. Will it be completely removed? Probably not. But if you can translate CAD formats from consultancies into the format for your work, and then transfer them back, and the solution to doing that costs 50K to develop, and saves you 150K a year, it's hard to ignore. The only reason I think it hasn't happened up until now is the boiling frog situation. But the frog can't take much more heat.

JBlue42 9y ago
Thanks for the reply and perspective. I only helped support an arch/design firm in terms of CAD/Revit. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this earlier but it wasn't my job to make those decisions and, as much as it was a struggle to get the executives on board with Revit, going to an 'unknown' brand like ZWCAD might have taken some teeth pulling (or maybe an entire root canal). They were also a firm willing to have bought and installed the suit for each year on certain machines. I think it's great if there is this competitor in the market. Most of the architects experienced in CAD lamented that it was their only option and that instead of improving the product, Autodesk just continued to add different ways of doing the same thing.

JBlue42 9y ago

Thanks for the reply and perspective. I only helped support an arch/design firm in terms of CAD/Revit. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this earlier but it wasn't my job to make those decisions and, as much as it was a struggle to get the executives on board with Revit, going to an 'unknown' brand like ZWCAD might have taken some teeth pulling (or maybe an entire root canal). They were also a firm willing to have bought and installed the suit for each year on certain machines. I think it's great if there is this competitor in the market. Most of the architects experienced in CAD lamented that it was their only option and that instead of improving the product, Autodesk just continued to add different ways of doing the same thing.