Life after/beyond PowerCadd?
Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 3:50 pm
Our small commercial architecture office is in a similar position as many others that have shared concerns about a future with (or without) PowerCadd.
We are 95% reliant on PC, with sketchup filling in at the front end for client visualization and marketing purposes. Interestingly enough, our average office age is around 30, with our most senior individual/owner in their mid-40s, so we cannot claim a long-standing user loyalty dating back to powerdraw, but we love and value the product. We were all trained in school on other cad platforms: Autodesk products, Rhino, Sketchup, the occasional flirt with Solidworks, etc. We have all learned PC in the office, "tossed-into-the-deep-end" style, and have come to really appreciate PC for what it is and can do in the scope of our business workflow. I will be celebrating my 2 year anniversary with PC this July (you could say our relationship is pretty serious now). We do not require BIM-level workflows (but we acknowledge the benefits of it and all have some experience with it) and agree that our business model does not greatly benefit from most of the BIM platforms available. We see the front-end work of transitioning our PC projects/resources into a BIM environment laborious, dreadful, and frankly we are so incredibly busy we cannot bring ourselves to disrupt our work efficiency at the moment if we do not have to. We do not want to, thats for sure. But we might have to.
So, we check this forum each week, hopeful of some news that lets us channel some Wilson Phillips and "hold on for one more day" (sorry/not sorry, i'm a child of the 80s/90s).
But, the color-wheel of death seems to appear more each week, and we keep losing time and patience to increasing frequency of click-and-wait moments while PC "catches" up; the writing on the wall grows larger and louder and we are now making plans for a painful transition to another platform. And I am pretty sure that if we transition away, we likely will not transition back.
So I am curious, and somewhat saddened to be asking this on this forum, what alternatives are folks using or transitioning to? While we will always have a copy of PC running somewhere in the office, we are eyeing a transition to Archicad, especially with our younger/newer staff. I would love to connect with others on how they have managed transitions and any advice they might have.
And if this post gets flagged and removed due to a solicitation for "other" software, so be it. But at the same time, what do you expect after so much silence in response to the pleas for communicating future intentions of PC? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction....
We are 95% reliant on PC, with sketchup filling in at the front end for client visualization and marketing purposes. Interestingly enough, our average office age is around 30, with our most senior individual/owner in their mid-40s, so we cannot claim a long-standing user loyalty dating back to powerdraw, but we love and value the product. We were all trained in school on other cad platforms: Autodesk products, Rhino, Sketchup, the occasional flirt with Solidworks, etc. We have all learned PC in the office, "tossed-into-the-deep-end" style, and have come to really appreciate PC for what it is and can do in the scope of our business workflow. I will be celebrating my 2 year anniversary with PC this July (you could say our relationship is pretty serious now). We do not require BIM-level workflows (but we acknowledge the benefits of it and all have some experience with it) and agree that our business model does not greatly benefit from most of the BIM platforms available. We see the front-end work of transitioning our PC projects/resources into a BIM environment laborious, dreadful, and frankly we are so incredibly busy we cannot bring ourselves to disrupt our work efficiency at the moment if we do not have to. We do not want to, thats for sure. But we might have to.
So, we check this forum each week, hopeful of some news that lets us channel some Wilson Phillips and "hold on for one more day" (sorry/not sorry, i'm a child of the 80s/90s).
But, the color-wheel of death seems to appear more each week, and we keep losing time and patience to increasing frequency of click-and-wait moments while PC "catches" up; the writing on the wall grows larger and louder and we are now making plans for a painful transition to another platform. And I am pretty sure that if we transition away, we likely will not transition back.
So I am curious, and somewhat saddened to be asking this on this forum, what alternatives are folks using or transitioning to? While we will always have a copy of PC running somewhere in the office, we are eyeing a transition to Archicad, especially with our younger/newer staff. I would love to connect with others on how they have managed transitions and any advice they might have.
And if this post gets flagged and removed due to a solicitation for "other" software, so be it. But at the same time, what do you expect after so much silence in response to the pleas for communicating future intentions of PC? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction....