Bentley Systems cto Keith Bentley does a good job explaining why they made the interoperatiblity agreement with Autodesk: The Bentley/Autodesk Agreement - what does it mean for Bentley Users?
He is candid:
Some observers have speculated that Autodesk's support of DGN in AutoCAD will be a net negative for Bentley -- allowing organizations that currently use MicroStation to create DGN files to instead use AutoCAD for that purpose. Of course there may well be some of that, and I suspect that prospect is a motivating factor for Autodesk in this agreement (again, I don't speak for Autodesk.)
And informative:
For example, we have already begun several projects to better integrate the Bentley Building applications with the various flavors of Revit.
As well as this indication of vigorous competition:
Do not get me wrong -- this agreement does NOT make DGN and DWG equivalent, nor does it make MicroStation and AutoCAD interchangeable. We won't concede for a minute that anyone working in a DGN-based workflow should use AutoCAD, even though they technically could use AutoCAD. The Bentley Marketing department is salivating at the prospect of educating all of those newly-DGN-aware AutoCAD users all over the world of the advantages of the Bentley product suite.
Read it all.
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