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The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers.

Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.

I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.

There's a zillion others I no longer remember.

Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.

I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered.

I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.

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I think people get into the habit of presenting their software as uniquely capable. And wrapping up their own skills in that particular software. It is similar to a young programmer assuming that Perl (for example) is uniquely capable. In truth talent tends to transcend packages and other factors like ecosystem come in to play.

A talented CAD technician would be useful using pen and a drawing board. We are just not very good at selling those more inate qualities. It is just easier to just sell yourself as an AutoCAD driver.

Of course these sort of packages take a long time to learn, and you are much more productive using something you know. And people adapt their mental model to a particular package. So there is often little obvious point in changing software.

What about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ )? It seems to be pretty popular among engineers. It reads DWG/DXF (AutoCad format) pretty well. The software itself goes by various names, because Intellicad itself is a consortium. For a nominal fee, you get access to the codebase and can release your own version with your own brand. The thing is shared source, so as a consortium member you need to contribute your changes to the core back to the shared codebase. However this is closed-source.

Thanks. That looks bitchin. Will check it out.

Looking at its stock UI, I'm reminded of one of my basic grievances with CADD of the AutoCAD model:

I hate layers.

When doing architectural plans, which layer does the electric water heater go onto? 'ELECT', 'PLUMB', or a special case 'ELECT-PLUMB'?

Much better would be something set based. (Today we'd probably call them tags.) Instead of toggling visibility, views should be queries.

>> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance.

Saying it's hard to write something that's 100% compatible would be an understatement.

Viewing the same document in Google Apps, Microsoft Word, or Open Office makes me think of QA'ing a website in 3 different browsers.

Ya. You reminded me that any Excel clone (or interop) has to reproduce Excel's bugs too.

No fun.

Ages ago, I was buddies with a guy (Dale?) who reverse engineered DWG, which I think became the code dump for the Open DWG Alliance, which may be this group today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance, though I don't see McNeel & Assoc listed (Rhino3D).

Dale worked for a graphics card company, Appian?, writing drivers and file viewers. He'd reversed DWG to write a wicked fast viewer. Just like those guys from Atlanta (don't remember their names).

I now dimly recall that Dale's team had to also reproduce AutoCAD's rendering bugs.

> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance

Network effects. Once you reach a certain level of dominance in the kind of market they are in, the fact that it easier to find staff that know the product and the people you exchange days with are using the product, the cost of unfamiliarity and potential data exchange errors means anything else has a very high barrier to overcome even to be considered. An incremental improvement isn't enough, you have to either be wordshatteringly better or have near infinite runway and some non-feature advantages to leverage (the latter is how Excel and Word dethroned 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, but who is going to play 1980s Microsoft to dethrone AutoCAD?)

> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance.

Joel Spolsky explained it: most users use only 20% of the app. But each user uses a DIFFERENT 20%. Thus you won't go nowhere until you are almost at feature parity, because everybody will have one little thing you didn't implement, but which is critical for them.

Often it doesn't help even if you are way beyond feature parity. More often than not, it is a simple inertia, not some rational thought enumerating features.

"MicroStation was a hellspawn"

I think you mean is a hellspawn. I think they still have a solid foothold in some sectors.

My condolences. I'm still flabberghasted that semi-automated file repair skills was SOP for users, because the Bentley brothers couldn't figure out how to reliably save files.

Sadly I have to work in one of the sectors. It is very common for geometric design of roadways. I think it is a result of State Departments of Transportation buying into the system and never wanting to change.

The only way to change that- is to actually pretend alternatives are not used- meaning they have to mimick the output exactly- even the flaws. Then after 5 years or so- the department anounces- oh- and by the way, we completely replaced xyz.

AutoCAD is nowhere near as dominant as Office is; SolidWorks, CATIA, NX, Pro/E etc all have their users too.

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