Next Revit Release?

[Scott Hopkins]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I seem to remember that one of the big selling points of Revit was what I think they called the “Rapid Release Cycle.” I recall being told to expect two major updates of Revit per year. Well things look to be slowing down quite a bit over at Revit Headquarters. Revit 5.1 doesn’t really qualify as much of an upgrade and at this point, it is seems pretty clear that we are not getting a Revit 5.5. Is one upgrade a year really all that rapid and more importantly is it really enough to justify the hefty subscription price?

[aggockel50321]

I'd agree.

Rumors abound that 6.0 will coincide with Autodesk Univ. in December. From 3.x to 5.0 releases seemed to come approx. every 6 months.

Those east coast programmers must be falling into that Marin County lifestyle...

[J-G]

I agree. While I am still happy enough with Revit that the subscription price seems justified, I think that rapid development of the product was somthing that helped Revit gain momentum. It was being developed so quickly that when I was looking at other programs, I figured they would be left in the dust over the next few years. Autodesk needs to keep Revit on the same track that it was before. They killed ADT, we waited for years for an upgrade and only got the "productivity enhancement tools"...or whatever they called them, which weren't worth anything. I prefer smaller updates anyway. The 6 month cycle would have been nice.

[Vincent Valentijn]

Seems like you got a point there Scott...
In my opinion it's quite logic too, Revit's slowly reaching a point at which a single development team can no longer keep up the tempo of Rapid -significant- updates they've had in the first years. Simply because the workload grows.. it's quite a crucial development though because other CADsoftware producers like Bentley and Graphisoft are determined to defeat Autodesk.
Just today I've received this from Cadalyst news:

Graphisoft RAIDS Autodesk roster
Graphisoft, developer of ArchiCAD AEC software, appointed Dominic
Gallello as its new CEO. He's charged with leading "the company's
transition into its next phase of aggressive growth as the
architectural design and construction industry is poised for dramatic
changes over the next decade." Gallello most recently was an executive
vice president at Macromedia in charge of product development. Before
that, he spent 10 years at Autodesk, as vice president of Asia/Pacific
and vice president of the Mechanical Market Group. He also headed
Autodesk's now-defunct RedSpark Web-based mechanical design
collaboration spinoff. Before Autodesk, he was Intergraph's director
of Asian operations. Also joining Graphisoft as vice president of
worldwide field operations is Mark Sawyer, formerly the vice president
and general manager of Autodesk's AEC division.

We've recently had a little discussion about API for revit on this board.. I stated that it might be necessary.. to sort of expand the network of people working on it's development? I donno.. I'm not 'really' an insider to these things but it seems logic to me.

[Martin P]

Yes, we are thinking exactly the same - especially as we are being asked to pay £500 per license to keep or "subscriptions" up to date this month. we are paying the money for something we do not have yet and have no idea what are going get - nor when we will get it. Nice work if you can get it I am sure......

I had a discussion with our re-seller about the amount of Revit releases this year, as she and autodesk claim there have been 2..... release 5.1 basically fixed all the bugs that were in 5.0 in my opinion, but thats just my opinion and this is not what we pay £500 a year for as I am concerned. But we are told we should pay the subscription as this release is going to be a "big" one - oh? so you mean like the way things have always been, we get great big releases once or so year - fantastic...... what is the difference then? other than we are paying first, before we get the chance to decide if it is worth getting???

sorry to rant, but my boss is going to throw all of this at me - and I do not have a decent answer for him, do I?