With the U.S. dollar plummeting and U.S. exports becoming more lucrative I thought it might be a good time to reiterate this idea.
A fundamental problem I've found with Vectorworks over the years is the way it is produced and distributed; my understanding is that NNA produces Vectorworks for the U.S. market and then distributes this directly to U.S. customers and to international vendors who then distribute that app with localised content and changes, if you?re lucky.
The problem here is two-fold: one, international customers effectively subsidise the U.S.-centric content and, two, they end up with an app that contains within it a lot of decisions and content derived from thinking about U.S. customers, resulting in tools and content for international customers that are sometimes unintuitive or worse, that just don?t work.
We may live in an increasingly globalised world but if there's an industry that should understand the importance of one's local environment it is the architectural industry.
At the moment it seems NNA is heading down a road of including everything and the kitchen sink. "Flexibility" I think I've heard it called. While this helps in the short term it doesn't seem like a good long term solution to me, unless they're going to build localisation into the app's preferences. But this could end up being a beast.
The obvious answer, in my mind, is to change the way NNA is set up so that instead of producing Vectorworks directly for the U.S. market and distributing the result to international vendors, they produce a base application that is country neutral, while still including as many tools and as much usable content as possible out of the box, and all optimised as much as possible to be extendable and configurable (for example, to the point of being able to change the terminology used for window parts, etc.).
At this point NNA can do a few things:
1. Maybe retail this base app internationally and in the U.S. (as the new "Fundamentals"?), or maybe better not to (it may compromise neutrality), I don't know.
2. Pass it over to a new division within NNA that does localisation and distribution for the U.S. market.
3. Distribute it to international vendors who are able to localise it, working closely with those vendors to keep the base app as usable and neutral as possible.
4. Where international vendors exist that do not do localisation or only to a limited extent, NNA passes it onto yet another division within NNA that deals with localisation for international markets, before passing it onto the vendor (e.g. the UK).
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Christiaan
With the U.S. dollar plummeting and U.S. exports becoming more lucrative I thought it might be a good time to reiterate this idea.
A fundamental problem I've found with Vectorworks over the years is the way it is produced and distributed; my understanding is that NNA produces Vectorworks for the U.S. market and then distributes this directly to U.S. customers and to international vendors who then distribute that app with localised content and changes, if you?re lucky.
The problem here is two-fold: one, international customers effectively subsidise the U.S.-centric content and, two, they end up with an app that contains within it a lot of decisions and content derived from thinking about U.S. customers, resulting in tools and content for international customers that are sometimes unintuitive or worse, that just don?t work.
We may live in an increasingly globalised world but if there's an industry that should understand the importance of one's local environment it is the architectural industry.
At the moment it seems NNA is heading down a road of including everything and the kitchen sink. "Flexibility" I think I've heard it called. While this helps in the short term it doesn't seem like a good long term solution to me, unless they're going to build localisation into the app's preferences. But this could end up being a beast.
The obvious answer, in my mind, is to change the way NNA is set up so that instead of producing Vectorworks directly for the U.S. market and distributing the result to international vendors, they produce a base application that is country neutral, while still including as many tools and as much usable content as possible out of the box, and all optimised as much as possible to be extendable and configurable (for example, to the point of being able to change the terminology used for window parts, etc.).
At this point NNA can do a few things:
1. Maybe retail this base app internationally and in the U.S. (as the new "Fundamentals"?), or maybe better not to (it may compromise neutrality), I don't know.
2. Pass it over to a new division within NNA that does localisation and distribution for the U.S. market.
3. Distribute it to international vendors who are able to localise it, working closely with those vendors to keep the base app as usable and neutral as possible.
4. Where international vendors exist that do not do localisation or only to a limited extent, NNA passes it onto yet another division within NNA that deals with localisation for international markets, before passing it onto the vendor (e.g. the UK).
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