I am back home after a whirlwind trip to the Bricsys 2010 Conference. I’m very happy to be back to Ohio food and my own bed. It was a great experience and well worth the trouble.
I’ve written before (and here) about the problem with food at conferences, and this one was no different. Unfortunately, there are no Burger Kings in Belgium, so the problem was compounded. I was excited when I saw a restaurant touting “American Food”, unfortunately it was “American Food as Europeans Imagine It”, which is not American food at all.
The hotel was, well, let’s just say you got that genuine experience of living in the past. Not quite the stone age past, but clearly before the age of modern locks and clocks — and well before air conditioning was invented. To make matters worse, housekeeping did not replace the provided shampoo and soap, so I had to make do with no soap on day 2 of the conference. The concert hall where the conference was held was also not air conditioned, which just compounded the problem — and certainly contributed to the dispersement of attendees from initially a small intimate group on day 1 to most of us sitting in the galleries by ourselves by the end of day 2.
The good news is that all the suffering was worthwhile. Bricsys was very accomodating, and it was a pleasure to meet modern day Robin Hood and Bricsys CEO Erik de Keyser and his merry band of men. Deelip Menezes’ keynote address about the future (cloud) of CAD (cloud) was (cloud) excellent, and the discussion that followed turned into a 12 round bout that Deelip played to a draw. Well done, Deelip, well done. I’m sure the fight will continue virtually, so take heed, and stay out of the line of fire.
I learned that Bricsys has made an impressive investment of time and resources into a foundation upon which to build a “DWG CAD” business. This is no longer about who can take on Autodesk. Autodesk conceded the AutoCAD (or “DWG”) market with their push toward subscription (aka “maintenance”), annual release cycles, and artificially high pricing on their platform technologies. There are literally dozens of companies trying to capture that market: products like ZWCAD and GstarCAD from China are hot on the heels of Bricscad. This is about who will emerge to control the market that Autodesk abandoned, and to some extent about how Autodesk will respond.
Bricscad is currently the clear leader among DWG CAD companies in terms of technical capabilities, but at least to date, it’s mostly AutoCAD application developers that recognize this (because of Bricsys’ very successful effort to make their BRX API source code compatible with ObjectARX). The question is whether they can convince consumers that Bricscad is the best choice. I think we will be a long way toward answering that question by this time next year, and of course the answer will be critically important to the DWG CAD market. I think it was shrewd of Bricsys to invite thought leaders like Deelip to this conference, but that is only a first step. Still, the very fact that I am writing and Deelip is blogging and tweeting about Bricscad is an important milestone on the road to respect.
[Full Disclosure: Bricsys paid for all my travel and conference expenses.]