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Nemetschek buys ArchiCAD


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I would love to hear what Sean has to say about the implications of Nemetschek's acquisition of Graphisoft. Will this mean that Graphisoft and NNA will join forces to challenge Revit? If so, how will this play out? The best of both VW and ArchiCAD for the price of VW???

Or something less appetizing to VW users? Sean, I think it would be worth thinking about how VW users, new and old, will respond to version 13.0 absent a clear statement about how your group sees the future of the enterprise. Obviously, the code for VW and ArchiCAD are two different species and can't magically be combined. Are ArchiCAD and VW going to be left to duke it out in the marketplace? Are there going to be collaborations on developing improvements, leading possibly to some kind of merger in the future? Or is there going to be a monumental effort to rewrite both programs with compatible kernels/classes/methods? Or what?

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VW has the numbers at least as comes to user base. The seriously expensive Allplan and very expensive ArchiCAD may be more profitable, I would not know. ArchiCAD must be VERY profitable for distributors, because even the simplest things must be bought from them: would you want to draw a wash basin by writing over 1000 lines of program code?

(I am NOT exaggerating - had a peek inside a "GDL Object" just a few weeks ago.)

Anyhow, ArchiCAD is an excellent program and in many aspects ahead VW. It could become a nice new add-on to VW, complementing Architect...

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I believe for financial reasons both these products will be on a friendly basis, but will serve different economic markets. The bigger question becomes how does this effect Allplan which may go after the same market as ArchiCAD (in certain ways) as well as economic bracket. ArchiCAD has a superior marketshare and has made more in-roads into the larger, English speaking community which makes it a more attractive product to invest in and develop.

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ArchiCAD has a superior marketshare

Does it? I would imagine that in the 400,000 VW users there would be more than 170,000 (which is the total number of ArchiCAD users) in the field of architecture. Allplan's 100,000 users are, revenue-wise especially, not a negligible niche, either.

I don't think Nemetschek is going to kill any of their product lines. For non-architect and multi-disciplinary users of VW they do not have an alternative. The Cult of ArchiCAD is very strong and there probably is not much bleed even to Revit; every member of that church pays the price of a new VW-licence annually in upgrades. Allplan is, I understand, such a high-end product that it easily pays for acquisitions like Graphsoft and Graphisoft.

Combined and - hopefully - united, the product family is a major player. A few twists here and there, some shared technologies, decent interoperability and a dash of German precision-engineering and the worried people are the Autodesk board...

Edited by Petri
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I purchased VW in about August 2004 and since then have done many landscape designs. 90% of the time I have recieved files from building designers, architects, engineers to base my drawings on and in that time - I think this is amazing - I have never come across professionally another VW user. Of course when getting files from others the question is always asked - What software do you use? When I am asked that and I say VW - again 90% of the time the other person knows nothing about the software or what it is capable of.

Hopefully over time this aquisition may change that. As an example; I have done some work for a huge company here in Oz for over 15 years and they use ArchiCAD. Of course they know I use VW.

Now these sorts of people may take a little more notice.

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