If I had one on one time with Jay Bhatt these wouldn’t have been the questions I’d have asked. However, what’s even more of an issue is they don’t seem to be able to get some of the answers right. So here’s my answers to some of the questions(tongue in cheek):
Upcoming suites/bundles?
"We are more focused on solutions rather than the kitchen sink approach and "Ease of use is priority #1". So despite Users wanting a unified modelling application with extensions for specific disciplines we’re going to stay with the kitchen sink and a complex workflow;-)
What about data interoperability? Many Autodesk products cannot read each others' native formats?
Autodesk Revit is the future. Certainly Inventor and Revit interoperability is important ,write to AutoCAD less so long-term. Revit has unique features which makes real interoperability a difficult task.
File size is a big issue in Revit. What are you doing about that?
Actually Revit’s file size is remarkably efficient given the data rich nature of a Revit project. I’m not sure what your problem is? Probably your Reseller did the typical undersell on hardware requirements, but we do recognise we’re not doing a great job of communicating hardware requirements. AUGI has some great benchmarking tools and results though.
But 500 toilets in Revit is 500 separate copies of the same toilet! There is something wrong with the database structure.
You are WRONG. Family Instances do not grow the model size significantly and are extremely efficient.
Hasn't AutoCAD already solved that problem using instances, XREFs?
see above. AutoCAD is not a benchmark for a BIM application. Revit was and is designed exclusively to model 3D BIM projects as efficiently as modern hardware will allow.
Will there be Revit for the Mac?
Who cares? Oh wait, there was one but he left. Honestly, with a move to DirectX on our platforms and the .NET API’s makes this difficult plus with the strength of VM’s there is now no need. You can run Revit on Mac’s now.
Even Buzzsaw, an online application, won't work on Mac. Next time, can you make sure a web tool is not just for IE?
Well Buzzsaw isn’t a true online application. Given all our Building platform products are Windows based is this really a problem?
Nobody wants to deal with the IFC. Why are they there?
IFC is no longer relevant. It’s there for political reasons rather than functional.
Are you looking in model servers?
Model servers and cloud computing are creating a lot of noise at the moment. However, Revit being a distributed object database is not a good fit for existing solutions. We’re working on it but this is complex problem that requires significant resource and the best programmers money can buy.
The process I saw this morning was daunting. Freewheel is dumb to the point of being brilliant.
Yes, Freewheel is dumb isn’t it……..
Revit can't do free form building.
That is not historically true you can do them but it requires working with a 3rd party modelling tool such as Rhino for defining the forms before linking to Revit. We do have NDA’s which we rigorously enforce but because I’m the VP I’m going to ignore these;-) Stay tuned for the next release of Revit/
When is the next Revit beta available?
Normally in February.