The nuclear bomb moment for BIM software
The Urban Forecast
Architectural software is a $6bn industry and 35 per cent of it goes to Autodesk. The CEO of That Open Company thinks that position just became a lot less safe. Five weeks later, Autodesk confirmed Revit's replacement.
Antonio Gonzalez Viegas runs That Open Company, and his argument is about the cost of building serious software rather than about any particular product.
The moment the nuclear bomb showed up, even a small country with no resources can suddenly be a huge threat to a big one.
AI, on his reading, has made serious BIM software cheap enough to build that incumbency stops protecting you. The incumbents are a big ship that takes twenty minutes to turn, and the people who can now build credible alternatives no longer need a thousand engineers to do it.
His sharper observation is about duplication. Every BIM company has built or bought its own geometry engine from scratch. Apply that to any other industry, he says, and it is absolutely insane. Games solved the same problem decades ago with Unreal and Unity: shared engines, competing products on top.
That Open Company is trying to be the Unreal Engine of BIM. Free, open source, with over 1,000 companies building on it, including Bentley, Acciona and Ferrovial. The business model is the interesting part. Give the software away, sell consulting, training and custom builds. They have turned down venture capital more than once, on the view that just selling software is not going to be enough.
The product unveiled at NXT BLD follows from that: a platform where you describe how your practice works and it builds the software around you, priced on usage. The thing he wants to kill is five licences for one workflow, paid every month whether you use them or not.
Then Autodesk answered the question directly
We ran this episode on 10 August. On 15 September, asked in a press FAQ whether Forma will replace Revit, Autodesk answered: over time, yes.
Our take: as AI accelerates, consolidation accelerates with it. Independent practices either get open tools or they rent forever, and the decision about which is now being made for them by a vendor roadmap rather than by a procurement cycle.