What Potential Mac Marketshare for CAD?

Interviews over at Develop3D give a pair of data points useful for the likes of Bricscad, Graebert, and Autodesk, who will be entering the Mac market with their CAD software over the next year or two.

Siemens PLM Systems (nee UGS) is the only big CAD vendor with Mac experience. They found that Mac types tend to be creative types, which is why Siemens has not ported their engineering analysis software to Mac. 

Autodesk makes a similar statement:

But based on our data, and talking to a lot of customers over the years, we believe roughly 30% of creative professionals prefer the Mac platform over Windows.

The key word is "creative." 

So, the key to marketing CAD to Macheads is to position it as creative-aided design software. 

Source.

Comments

[matt]

Aaaarrrgghh!!! I wish people would stop abusing the word "creative". I consider myself a creative professional. Engineers "create" stuff. We have original ideas, and design stuff in our heads. We creatively solve problems that less concretely-minded people create.

Maybe the word you're looking for is "artistic". I wish people would use the word "artistic" when they are tempted to say "creative". To imply that other people aren't creative is a little insulting.

[Debankan Chattopadhyay]

People involved in graphic design of any kind do prefer Mac over Windows. My own team of graphic & web designers have been crying out loud for us to switch over to Mac for a while now (and may I add unsuccessfully!). Does it mean that only graphic design folks are creative? Of course not! I have to take Matt's side when he talks of engineers being creative. Having said that, I believe Autodesk's viewpoint ("creative professionals") was based largely on users of their Media & Entertainment software suite (Alias, Maya, 3ds Max). But that does make users of Inventor, AutoCAD less creative?

[Doug Dingus]

Another great positioner happens to be the ability to free ones self from the drudgery often associated with a computer running Microsoft Windows.

I'm not making a statement pro or con regarding Windows software.

What I am saying is that other people clearly are, and that they want to run serious MCAD software, and articulate their reasons clearly.