Bricscad for alternate operating systems delayed 6-9 months

Just 9 months ago, I recorded Bricsys's earlier schedule for rolling out its CAD software on operating systems other than Windows:

Q4 09 -- native Linux 
Q1 10 -- native Mac

In a press release that came out earlier this week, the schedule has been adjusted by 6-9 months:

Bricscad LINUX is in Alpha now; a commercial release is expected early Q2. A native Mac OSX version is planned for end of 2010.

So a half year later for Linux and 3/4 year later for Mac.

I think the problem is that wrenching a software program away from the insanely tight grasp of Windows is much tougher than we realize. To take a simple example, how does OLE work on Linux'n Mac?

We see the same with SolidWorks. After three years of work, they were able to this week briefly show us an untethered version, sort of -- still not good enough to run it in detail to the media eager for more information. 

Comments

[Norm C.]

From reading blog posts from Matt and Deelip, I was under the impression that the "running on a Mac" version was actually run from the cloud over a Windows server...

All this hype on cloud computing is vague, confusing and disturbing... I can't see the advantage for the customer.

[Ralph Grabowski]

Indeed, SolidWorks "in the cloud" is still just SolidWorks running on Windows, and then piped to a viewer running on multiple OSes -- or just two, based on the keynote demo (Windows and Mac).