This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

How do I convince the company I work for that MicroStation is a better program than ACAD?

The company I work for has started on the slippery slop of changing to ADESK, (they have already started with Revit) with their main argument being that it is the norm in the construction industry in the UK.

So my question is how do I convince them that MicroStation is better than the opposition for the 2D work?

Parents
  • Stuart,
    same is happening here as well. absolutely no support from Bentley and tons of marketing AND support options for Revit. so I jumped that train and to be honest, I'm glad. the support is great and so are the resources. sure, Revit has its limits but it still suits my work better then anything made by Bentley.
    for plain CAD work I still prefer MS, since I've been using it for 20 years. when I say, I work in MS, everyone asks me if I'm survey or gas engineer ;-)
    as for the 2D work, there are still advantages MS has over Acad. if you want name just one, then let them see work with Ref files of various file formats. this is far beyond Acad can do.
    as for the 3D work, MS is much better in 3d modelling, though Acad in latest versions made also improvements in this area.
    in general, MS is more stabil, can handle more complex data (even in 32bit) and DGN file format is robust and resistant to errors.
    HTH

    /pt

  • Msn is better functionally than acad, most would agree. But these days, it is not just a question of cad platforms but BIM platforms.

    Aecosim on Mstn versus Revit is much less clear. For small to medium sized projects, Revit probably has the advantage at the moment.

    Marketing is important but I suspect that it will only pay dividends in emerging markets where the customers either haven't made the jump to BIM or cad. I don't think marketing will help in the established markets. There was a chance maybe 5 years ago when firms were starting to looking to replace their cad platforms with BIM apps. But to convince an ACAD shop to retrain on Aecosim versus Revit would have been a very tuff sell given how clunky Aecosim was and still is UI-wise. It was and still is a problem selling it to existing Mstn users who were given the choice between Revit, ArchiCAD etc and Aecosim.

    The biggest problem as with competing with ACAD for small to medium sized firms is the lack of user base. This places a big emphasis on making the UI intuitive and easy to learn and administer. Bentley has made some steps here but a whole lot more is required. Your typical new hire will take about a month to come up to speed. And this is with training and help from peers. The lost of productivity and in house overheads is probably equivalent to the cost of a perpetual licence.

    Bentley can help soften this by 'marketing' to universities and vocational institutions. Maybe even sponsor part time power users between jobs to teach in the flesh or virtually at local colleges. I am continually amazed how all the new grads all know rhino in spite of the lack of market share in the CAD/BIM world.

    Bentley has a reputation of being good at supporting big clients. Really? My experience is that those big clients always seem to have middle management that are pretty out of touch with the real world. They may have been admins in a production environment a while back but are not current with the problems and challenges we have today. BIM deliverables for big clients tend to be less clear and not very cutting edge compared to smaller outfits. I sense a lot of 'I don't want to spec something that I have no idea the cost impact of and will likely to be dismissed at contract stage or want to be challenged with a RFI later asking for an example of required deliverable /dataset which I don't have and don't know how to generate because i can't get to grips with those clunky DGS editor tools and how would this be plugged into the PW managed workspaces again?' problems.

    Bentley should 'market' to their big clients by coming in and auditing their setups and suggesting fixes and improvements. There should be a test bed set up where the big clients set up which will include all kinds of configurations of remote servers and lans etc can be replicated and tested. Mirror all the config files and test offsite to give those admins confidence.

    Aecosim already has a bad reputation of being buggier than the competition. I know a lot dev shops use (Fr)agile, but this means that updates and hotfixes and user feedback are important. I know of sites that never upgrade even if they know the fix is in the newer version because the admin is overloaded and doesn't want to or has the time to learn the new features. Never mind provide the BIM manual updates to capture the changes. Bentley don't waste your resources on salesmen here... provide auto hotfixes like windows and better automated error reporting. That would be a good start.

    Do market PW Essentials in conjunction with Aecosim. But this won't get customers to flip platforms. It will be more likely to be a part of the effort to retain existing Mstn shops. Flexible licensing is probably something that should be looked at, marketing-wise.

    There is still a large ACAD user base that is 2d based that will need to convert to 3d. But they are not your usual AEC users and have one foot in the fabrication / manufacturing world. I still see a lot of cladding, ceiling etc cubbies using ACAD. Mstn has big advantages here even if they do go either Tekla or Inventor or SW or even Radon. With Connect's new MCAD flavoured parametric tools it would good to be able to invest in better-then-the-rest-by-far interoperability tools on par with dwg.

    Bricscad may be the more interesting competitor long term. It's Rhino /Vectorworks like price point and ACAD compatibility coupled with best in AEC constraints and solid modelling provided by LEDAS must make it very attractive as an upgrade path for any ACAD shop. Bentley is probably barred from doing too much with them by the dwg/dgn libraries deal.

    There may be a market segment of brics adopters who are worried that one day brics won't be able to reverse engineer dwg and are looking for a more long term solution.

Reply
  • Msn is better functionally than acad, most would agree. But these days, it is not just a question of cad platforms but BIM platforms.

    Aecosim on Mstn versus Revit is much less clear. For small to medium sized projects, Revit probably has the advantage at the moment.

    Marketing is important but I suspect that it will only pay dividends in emerging markets where the customers either haven't made the jump to BIM or cad. I don't think marketing will help in the established markets. There was a chance maybe 5 years ago when firms were starting to looking to replace their cad platforms with BIM apps. But to convince an ACAD shop to retrain on Aecosim versus Revit would have been a very tuff sell given how clunky Aecosim was and still is UI-wise. It was and still is a problem selling it to existing Mstn users who were given the choice between Revit, ArchiCAD etc and Aecosim.

    The biggest problem as with competing with ACAD for small to medium sized firms is the lack of user base. This places a big emphasis on making the UI intuitive and easy to learn and administer. Bentley has made some steps here but a whole lot more is required. Your typical new hire will take about a month to come up to speed. And this is with training and help from peers. The lost of productivity and in house overheads is probably equivalent to the cost of a perpetual licence.

    Bentley can help soften this by 'marketing' to universities and vocational institutions. Maybe even sponsor part time power users between jobs to teach in the flesh or virtually at local colleges. I am continually amazed how all the new grads all know rhino in spite of the lack of market share in the CAD/BIM world.

    Bentley has a reputation of being good at supporting big clients. Really? My experience is that those big clients always seem to have middle management that are pretty out of touch with the real world. They may have been admins in a production environment a while back but are not current with the problems and challenges we have today. BIM deliverables for big clients tend to be less clear and not very cutting edge compared to smaller outfits. I sense a lot of 'I don't want to spec something that I have no idea the cost impact of and will likely to be dismissed at contract stage or want to be challenged with a RFI later asking for an example of required deliverable /dataset which I don't have and don't know how to generate because i can't get to grips with those clunky DGS editor tools and how would this be plugged into the PW managed workspaces again?' problems.

    Bentley should 'market' to their big clients by coming in and auditing their setups and suggesting fixes and improvements. There should be a test bed set up where the big clients set up which will include all kinds of configurations of remote servers and lans etc can be replicated and tested. Mirror all the config files and test offsite to give those admins confidence.

    Aecosim already has a bad reputation of being buggier than the competition. I know a lot dev shops use (Fr)agile, but this means that updates and hotfixes and user feedback are important. I know of sites that never upgrade even if they know the fix is in the newer version because the admin is overloaded and doesn't want to or has the time to learn the new features. Never mind provide the BIM manual updates to capture the changes. Bentley don't waste your resources on salesmen here... provide auto hotfixes like windows and better automated error reporting. That would be a good start.

    Do market PW Essentials in conjunction with Aecosim. But this won't get customers to flip platforms. It will be more likely to be a part of the effort to retain existing Mstn shops. Flexible licensing is probably something that should be looked at, marketing-wise.

    There is still a large ACAD user base that is 2d based that will need to convert to 3d. But they are not your usual AEC users and have one foot in the fabrication / manufacturing world. I still see a lot of cladding, ceiling etc cubbies using ACAD. Mstn has big advantages here even if they do go either Tekla or Inventor or SW or even Radon. With Connect's new MCAD flavoured parametric tools it would good to be able to invest in better-then-the-rest-by-far interoperability tools on par with dwg.

    Bricscad may be the more interesting competitor long term. It's Rhino /Vectorworks like price point and ACAD compatibility coupled with best in AEC constraints and solid modelling provided by LEDAS must make it very attractive as an upgrade path for any ACAD shop. Bentley is probably barred from doing too much with them by the dwg/dgn libraries deal.

    There may be a market segment of brics adopters who are worried that one day brics won't be able to reverse engineer dwg and are looking for a more long term solution.

Children
  • Unknown said:
    Bentley can help soften this by 'marketing' to universities and vocational institutions. Maybe even sponsor part time power users between jobs to teach in the flesh or virtually at local colleges. I am continually amazed how all the new grads all know rhino in spite of the lack of market share in the CAD/BIM world.

    That indeed is the key thing, tho it would be a slow-burn, not paying off for maybe a decade - but that's because there's been two decades of neglect.

    Bentley can and has done similar - remember the special lo-cost deal incl training at the time of the 2008 crash, available to certified newly-redundant draftsmen whether previously Adesk, Bentley, whatever? That was a very effective market-reclaim move - but I wonder whether it was effectively carried through and followed up, or just a momentary damp squib?

    From http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections as posted on Phil's blog:

    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.

    1) It seems that 2016 will just bring a simple port to the Connect platform, of BD more or less as-is; 2017 before the root-and-branch redeign of BD using the new Connect capabilities.

    2) When in the early 90s the bros wrested control back from IBM's Intergraph, Microstation had the bright, lively vibe of the 'democratic' alternative to lumbering Acad. How that's reversed! Big corporate profit-centred Bentley (as it's become) is blind to all but its like - big corporate architects serving big corporate developers and public agencies. It's like the rest of the built environment has just disappeared, for Bentley. No matter that 'the rest' is stiil far bigger, worldwide and even in the developed 'first world' - and is where massive grass-roots creativity has been stifled, first by the rigidites of early CAD, now even more so by the mundane capabilites of all the BIM softwares. Creativity (aka non-cuboid - it's as simple as that!) can be 'done' in BD but only with endless workaround - it's really misuse of the software's intention. Not sure if that's what Dominic means by

    Unknown said:
    big clients always seem to have middle management that are pretty out of touch with the real world ... BIM deliverables for big clients tend to be less clear and not very cutting edge compared to smaller outfits

    but it seems to fit.

    3) There's a gaping hole, an untapped market, waiting to be filled by the first BIM company to wake up from the corporate trance. With Connect, Bentley is technically well placed to be that one, but its glacial pace, dragging vast legacy behind it, and its 'we are the best' walled-garden myth, count greatly against it.

    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf
    Bentley says it will take well into 2016 before all of its more than 100 products are updated, which is fine by its clients. Years ago Bentley, the largest AEC-specific software company, set on a divergent path from its major competitor Autodesk by focusing on the design and engineering needs of the largest companies and government agencies. Unlike software for smaller companies or individual users, Bentley user sites generally buy their subscriptions and licenses by the hundreds as they create railroads, dams, power plants, and skyscrapers; these enterprise-class users prefer to upgrade their software based on internal issues, not a software company’s release cycle.  - See more at: http://gfxspeak.com/2014/11/05/bentley-microstation-connections/#sthash.lJNy6mcL.dpuf