Does Cheap Software Make Good Business?

In an earlier post I mentioned that IntelliCAD was now available at a price of $50 from Rolek Ltd, a reseller of DP Tech, a French IntelliCAD vendor. I ended by saying that a licensed copy of IntelliCAD was now cheaper than a cracked copy of AutoCAD.

A reseller of another IntelliCAD vendor took it a step further. They went ahead and lodged a complaint with Rolek's web host stating that Rolek's was selling pirated software and that the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium was in the process of initiating legal action against Rolek. Apparently, the web host bought the story and took Rolek's web site down. Rolek claims that the ITC intervened and sorted things out with the host to get it's web site back online again. The gory details can be found in the comments of this post on the IntelliCAD.net blog.

Personally, I am not too happy with the direction which IntelliCAD's price is headed. Cheap CAD software may be a good thing for end users, but it makes third party developers like me lose interest in developing plug-ins for them. Our IntelliCAD plug-ins are priced at 95 Euros ($140) and that is already way lower than our plug-ins for other CAD systems. Convincing a prospective customer to buy a plug-in that costs three times his CAD system is not an easy task, unless the plug-in is going to save his job or his life.

IntelliCAD vendors can probably still make money by selling cheap but by selling more. The problem is that the market for plug-ins is quite limited and third party developers cannot drastically cut prices and hope to increase sales to make up for lost revenue. To make it worse, there are so many flavors and versions of IntelliCAD out there, with each vendor adding bells and whistles and in the bargain preventing standard IntelliCAD plug-in DLLs from loading. As a result we need to build different versions of plug-ins for different flavors of the same version of IntelliCAD. Yes, its that bad. DWGeditor and ZWCAD are two such examples which need plug-ins to be compiled using special libraries. At SYCODE, we have stopped tweaking our plug-ins to make them work with all the variants of IntelliCAD. We are now waiting for IntelliCAD 7 to be released and eventually rebuild all our old style SDS plug-ins using the new DRX SDK, and then hope that the IntelliCAD vendors do not go ahead and mess things once again.

Developing and maintaining IntelliCAD plug-ins is a hell of a job and takes too much time and resources. And the dropping price of IntelliCAD is making it less worth taking all that trouble.

IntelliCAD 7 At Last

The much awaited IntelliCAD 7 platform seems to be ready for launch. It will be introduced at the three day IntelliCAD World Meeting 2008 to be held in Athens, Greece, between 29th to 31st October 2008. Details here.

PTC Is For Sale

Financial Times is reporting that PTC has hired Goldman Sachs to sell itself for $2 billion. Makes me wonder. Are we going to see the entry of another giant like Siemens? Or will one of the major CAD vendors put on extra weight?

CAD/PLM Survey

Cyon Research and Merrill Lynch are conducting an interesting survey on the CAD/PLM industry. As a software developer, I am particularly interested in seeing the results of the survey, especially the answers to questions like:
At what stage do you typically adopt new software?
When do you typically deploy updates of existing software?

If you want to send out a message to CAD vendors, this is a chance. Give it a shot. It won't take more than 2 minutes.

You can opt to receive the results of the survey by email if you want.

IntelliCAD for $50 Only

This thread on the IntelliCAD.net forum alerted me to the fact that you can now get the latest version of IntelliCAD for $50 only. Rolek Ltd., a Hong Kong reseller, posted this download.com link in reply to a question. Take a look at the comments at the bottom of the page. The price is so low that one person has called it illegal and has requested CNET to take down the listing from download.com. The responses from Rolek (the reseller) and DP Tech (the French IntelliCAD vendor) are also interesting.

I went ahead and downloaded the 24 hour trial. I tried to load one of our IntelliCAD plug-ins, but it failed to load. In fact, it could not even load some of it's own DLL's. Maybe they block plug-ins in the trial version.

Such a low price got me wondering. Back here in India, where software piracy is rampant, it is not uncommon for people, especially professional like architects and freelancers, to buy an IntelliCAD license to be legitimate and use pirated AutoCAD for their real work. I did a quick search on the internet and found that I could purchase an AutoCAD 2009 cracked DVD for $75. So a licensed IntelliCAD is cheaper than a cracked AutoCAD. I never thought I would live to see this day.

Bricsys Takes A Slice

Bricsys, a founding member of the OpenDesign Alliance and a member of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium, today announced in a press release that they have struck a volume contract with German based Kemper Gmbh for distributing Bricscad V9 along with a sanitary installations software developed by a plug-in developer. "Volume" in this case turns out to be a thousand licenses. And that's only an initial order, which can be extended to thousands in the coming months.

What is not mentioned in the the press release is that the developer currently offers the solution for AutoCAD. So this Bricsys-Kemper deal is actually taking a slice out of Autodesk's market share pie chart.

In a comment to an earlier post on this blog titled "New Clone on the Block", Ralph Grabowski wondered, "It's all fine to claim compatibility with ARX. I would like to hear of the results of third-party developers porting to DRX and BRX." I guess a thousand licenses should be a good enough answer.

In that same post I said, "Basically, they [Bricsys] are making it a lot easier for AutoCAD users to dump AutoCAD for Bricscad, especially those who find themselves tied to AutoCAD due to to third party ObjectARX plug-ins." Looks like Bricsys' BRX SDK strategy is beginning to pay off.

Bricsys is positioning itself to be different from other IntelliCAD vendors. But it is not the only one. Graebert is working on an ObjectARX source compatible SDK of their own. They are calling it an AutoCAD compatible CAD engine and have code named it "Argon". And I believe there may be others.

So should Autodesk be worried about this trend? While I am pretty sure that a thousand licenses is a large number for Bricsys, I highly doubt it is a small number for Autodesk.