The final frontier
This week was the BricsCAD V23 launch event, during which new ceo Rahul Kejriwal announced his plan to go after the construction industry with his software, even though 80% has no interest in it.
Listening to the several keynote addresses, Bricsys made it clear that it is definitely going after the construction market, as another CAD vendor, Autodesk, has. Bricsys displayed a slide showing that 95% of data in construction and engineering goes unused. Clearly, that needs to have a solution!
The "why" behind the dis-use of reuse of data in construction was not explained by Bricsys, even though the "why" is easy to understand: for the most part, construction involves one-of projects, so data re-use doesn't make sense as it is not useful for the next project. After a house is built, the homeowner has no use nor interest in PLM.
My analogy is this one: think of building a series of Boeing 747s in a muddy field, far away from any services, each plane completely different from the last. That's the difference between MCAD/CNC and construction.
I can understand the desire to land a even a small chunk of the digitization of construction industry -- revenues for CAD vendors would be huge! But many have tried and VC money lost on failed startups, yet no one talks about the one-of problem.
Another problem I see in the Konstruction Klondike Kraze is that no one looks at it in reverse. At $10.7 trillion, it is the biggest industry in the world, we are told. Or maybe it's $12.7 trillion, depending on who is making the estimate. Either amount, CAD vendors see it as a problem, because they don't have even a very share of a very large market. Given the saturation of CAD in general design, mechanical, architectural, and a few other disciplines, to CAD vendors it is inconceivable that the largest market in the world has resisted them so successfully for so long.
So let's look at it in reverse: construction is the largest industry in world despite it being inefficient compared to MCAD/CAM. This isn't a problem, this is a sign of success.
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