10th Anniversary of Posting IntelliCAD Source Code

Today is the tenth anniversary of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium web site going  live with source code for IntelliCAD 2000 freely available to constortium members. The ITC's executive director from back then, Ronald Prepchuk, provides us with a slice of history:

One thing I discovered was that it was the intention to roll IntelliCAD into Visio to make one product. Feeling that would be a disaster I set out in December of 1998 to write a white paper on fixing IntelliCAD...

On April 15, 1999 I delivered it to Jeremy Jaech, President of Visio... A couple of weeks prior to the public announcement in July of 1999 I was approached and told that Visio would be creating a new organization called the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium and that if I wanted a job there one would be available.

You can read the rest at www.autodsys.com/press/PR-092909.htm, as well as get the link for downloading his 10-page PDF document written ten years ago.

Comments

[Norm C.]

Thanks for the link Ralph.

I've read the pdf. It sure would be interesting to know Mr. Prepchuk's views on IntelliCAD's status 10 years later. I couldn't help but notice that he didn't follow on his pricing proposals with Autodsys' products (10 years later, they are priced somewhat lower than what he recommended in his white paper). Although he has to contend with all the other IntelliCAD resellers.

[Ron Prepchuk]

My advice on pricing was applicable to Visio IntelliCAD at that place in time. Now that IntelliCAD is distributed by a number of different companies which are all competing it tends to drive the price down. In 1999 there were no alternatives so Visio could have easily priced their software at $699 and made just as many sales. That would have given Visio the funds to develop the product like it should have been.

[Ralph Grabowski]

I think the pricing problem stemmed from Visio wanting to price IntelliCAD at 10% of the price of AutoCAD. I agree that the ITC should have upped the price and then put the additional revenues towards more development.