Perspectives on AutoCAD
Will AutoCAD Stay Around?
Walt Sparling
I currently work as an electrical designer for a small engineering firm that uses both AutoCAD® and AutoCAD® LT, with the bulk of the work done in LT. Over the last 30 years of my career in the AEC industry, I have worked in the mechanical and architectural worlds as well—both using some version of AutoCAD. I have worked as a CAD drafter, CAD designer, project manager, CAD manager, and IT manager supporting dozens of in-house AutoCAD users. I have also been customizing AutoCAD for many years as well as providing training and customization options for outside companies. AutoCAD has been good to me.
My first exposure to AutoCAD was back in the mid 1980s (Release 1.3 or Release 3) when I first entered the AEC industry. I actually started using AutoCAD in production a few years later with version 9. Since that time I have used nearly every version of vanilla AutoCAD and a few of the vertical products as well. I have seen many improvements and advances in technology that have made the current version of AutoCAD (15 as of this writing) a very powerful and flexible product. As with any technical software though, these products have to improve in order to stay relevant and useful. But does AutoCAD have a future, and if so, how long?
Over the last few years 3D has taken a strong hold in the architectural side of the business for visualization, and although AutoCAD can do 3D, the push that has starting getting people to wonder about AutoCAD's future is Building Information Modeling (BIM). For BIM you need a much more advanced software package that is designed from the ground up to do 3D natively. Products such as Autodesk® Revit® are advancing and showing up in more and more offices every year. In recent years, the classes and technical conferences offered by vendors and Autodesk (Autodesk University) have taken on a much more Revit and BIM focus.
BIM and products such as Revit can do amazing things for coordination and visualization, but it all ends up on paper as 2D drawings at some point (the paperless world is still a ways off). Although many companies are making the move to Revit, many more are sticking to AutoCAD and its core functionality—very fast and efficient 2D drafting software. The companies that have already invested a lot of money in AutoCAD software and training will have to retool to make a complete move to products such as Revit, and from what I'm seeing, it just isn't happening.
Unless there are substantial savings for the companies that utilize the Revit type products, which are needed to justify additional training and hardware costs, or there are governmental or industry edicts given that require its usage, AutoCAD will keep pumping out drawings for a variety of industries for many years to come with a very minimal learning curve.
Generation expectations and user relational abilities will factor in the molding of future software based on their experience and expectations. Current gaming and media platforms are heavily into 3D and full sensory immersion. As the technologies explode and the new generations grow to expect relating to everything in a 3D environment, the push will get stronger.
Conclusion
I predict you will continue to see AutoCAD used for many years to come. There is a huge existing customer base for the standard drafting duties required for most projects/products produced from its output. Revit and products like it will continue to add value to existing projects for coordination and visualization and eventually will swing the pendulum in the other direction where 2D becomes secondary. Even with advancing technologies, often pushed by the industry suppliers more than the industry users, there will continue to be a huge user base—both existing and new—for the traditional AutoCAD product.
Will AutoCAD Change?
Brian Benton
AutoCAD is a 30-year-old program that I have been using for more than 20 years. It has gone through dramatic changes over those years, yet is still the same. I currently run AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2015 on a daily basis and had to work in Civil 3D 2008 on some ancient add-on software. It was horrible! No ribbon. No command line auto complete. I hadn’t realized how much I depend on those two features to work quickly. Everything else was nearly the same.
I expect AutoCAD to go one of two ways.
Way 1
AutoCAD will continue to see small iterations through tweaks to the interface, small enhancements to existing commands, and simple new commands. These changes will keep happening on a regular schedule. I believe this is the most likely way AutoCAD will change: small bits at a time that keep adding up over the years.
Way 2
Complete rewrite to the code. It’s probably needed, to be honest. Scrap the entire thing and redo it from the ground up. That’s tough to do, though, and this is not likely to happen anytime soon, in my opinion. I would love to see the code modernized so that it can finally take advantage of multiple cores on my workstation—especially in AutoCAD verticals such as Civil 3D that use data connections.
I started using AutoCAD professionally in the mid 1990s. We were running it on a 486 Intel Processor (dual floppy drives) in DOS and I was using a tablet (not the iPad kind today) and puck for the majority of the input; along with the keyboard of course. No ribbon, no toolbars, no palettes—just the menubar and menu screen. Eventually we moved to Windows, got rid of the tablet and puck, and added a second screen. But I still use the keyboard for most of my inputs. It has changed dramatically, but also remains the same. It looks different, but the line command is still the same. Each command has gotten better and as much as I loved the stability of working in DOS, I would never want to go back.
Change is hard for CAD users so I don’t see major changes being made to the software. Look at the outcry there was when Release 11 added paper space and 2009 added the ribbon. Granted, those were major shifts in how you used AutoCAD so some of that is to be expected.
I don’t see major change happening in the software itself, but maybe change will occur in the way we get access to it. Autodesk has already announced the end of the license upgrade path for perpetual licensing. Last year they introduced “pay as you go” pricing plans. The only major change I see possibly happening to AutoCAD is the way it’s licensed and paid for. Autodesk has been a huge proponent of the cloud and cloud-based systems for several years. I really think that eventually we will have a yearly “subscription” with consistent updates via the cloud similar to Adobe CS and Microsoft Office 365. In fact, I suspect most software, not only AutoCAD, will move to that type of model in the future.
Walt Sparling has worked in the building design industry for 25+ years, starting as a hand drafter. He moved on to CADD in the mid 1980s and then into CADD and networking training and consulting. Walt has served as project manager and designer in the mechanical and architectural realms and currently works with an electrical engineering firm in Tampa, Florida. In his spare time, Walt maintains a couple of blogs and a personal website: FunctionSense.com and waltsparling.com.
Brian Benton is a Senior Engineering Technician, CAD Service Provider, technical writer, and blogger. He has more than 19 years of experience in various design fields (Mechanical, Structural, Civil, Survey, Marine, Environmental) and is well versed in many design software packages (CAD, GIS, Graphics). He is Cadalyst magazine’s Tip Patroller, and Infinite Skills AutoCAD training video author. Contact him at cad-a-blog.com.
