Happy Days Ahead for Graphisoft, VectorWorks

Gregg Keizer of ComputerWorld reports on the stunning progress Macs are making in the business world:

Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.

"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

No longer "just" used by children and artists, we are even seeing Macs being used by some members of the CAD media.

The article mentions people running XP and Vista on the Mac hardware using virtual machine software. An AutoCAD developer who visited me recently did just that: his Mac ran AutoCAD through the vm software.

The trend away from the Windows monopoly is gaining. CAD vendors who are not locked into Microsoft's APIs will benefit.

Comments

[Tony]

Good news, but I just can't drink the Steve Jobs cool aid. OS/X is quite proprietary, too - what does Apple charge for each OS update?

Also, despite what some people claim, for any configuration I'm interested in, MacPro's are massively more expensive for inferior hardware (e.g. $1400 vs $2400).

And the difference between Microsoft and Apple is.. what exactly?

[al dean]

Ralph

yup - there's a lot of press peeps using macs and there always have been - I changed this year and haven't looked back. I have a big ol workstation in my office for running CAD apps on and that's all I need. the macbook air is battery efficient, lets me run all my office apps, link into our hosted exchange server (entourage does some very clever things that outlook doesn't strangely - Project Management for one).. its a nice bit of kit that doesn't require a huge freaking bag to drag it around in.

oh and the keyboard, for a professional writer, is a bloody dream - I was practically crippled with arthritis (I'm 32) the last couple of years and now its getting much better. so, yeah - they might be a touch more expensive, proprietary as hell - but I love them.. and I never thought I'd say that..

[Norman]

«CAD vendors who are not locked into Microsoft's APIs will benefit.»

I wonder: what CAD vendor today is not tied to MS's APIs? From Autodesk to SW to Siemens PLM to Bricsys, they (almost) all use them. And it's going to be a long time before it's otherwise, I'm afraid, more so when customers accept to get by with virtualization software or dual boot.

P.S. Some trivia: just this morning I installed Bricscad V8 demo in Ubuntu Linux 8.04 through wine emulation. The program kind of works, but it has graphic glitches that prevents any real work.