By Anthony Frausto-Robledo
Editor-in-Chief, Architosh
Special to AECnews
It has been almost a decade since the major players in CAD standardized on Microsoft Windows. Advances in hardware and improvements to Windows allowed them to move away from proprietary UNIX workstations. A few at the extreme high end of the MCAD and visualization market maintained their UNIX support, as did the few developers using the Apple Macintosh environment. When Apple bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT software company in 1996, and decided to base the future of the Mac OS on the NeXT UNIX-based OS, it encouraged many in the Macintosh community, giving them the hope that Apple would combined its legendary ease-of-use with a truly modern, industrial strength UNIX operating system to challenge Windows.
Apple has fulfilled this hope in its award-winning Mac OS X operating system. The company has rebounded from the depths with a slew of innovations in both hardware and software over the past six years. Yet the current resurgence of Apple is due largely to its software prowess in video, music and its wildly successful iPod music player. CAD is still primarily a Windows-dominated market.
The consolidation of the CAD industry on Windows is one trend among many. Today the typical Fortune 500 company is more multi-platform than at any time in its history. The rise of the Linux operating system (a UNIX derivative) has allowed enterprise computing—especially in the server room—to drift away from expensive server solutions toward open source software. Linux continues to gain momentum in the marketplace at the expense of both established UNIX platforms and Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, Apple’s own UNIX-based Mac OS X environment, buttressed by an open-source kernel called Darwin, has regained significant lost ground in higher education, sciences, medicine and the consumer market as a whole. Apple still skirts around the idea of becoming a threat in business computing, and it has only recently gotten serious about marketing itself to the CAD marketplace, focusing on the advantages of its hardware architecture and innovative operating system.
Headed to Boot Camp
Two weeks ago Apple announced Boot Camp, a clever name for a program that enables an Intel-based Macintosh to easily partition itself into both a Windows and Mac OS X computer. The user can boot into the operating system of choice at power-up.
Boot Camp both opens up new possibilities while at the same time posing longer term concerns for the company, its own UNIX-based OS X, and its loyal developers. Now CAD firms like Autodesk, Bentley, Dassault Systèmes, UGS and others have a legitimate way onto Apple hardware and into the pocketbooks of Apple’s generally more affluent and discriminating customer base.
In a strange and interesting turn of events, after nearly five years of trying to get Windows users to “switch” to Mac OS X, Apple has decided that perhaps the ultimate weapon against Microsoft Windows is Windows itself. Since many Windows users are drawn to Apple’s beautifully designed and well-engineered hardware, Apple appears to be confident that once Windows users purchase Macs to run Windows, they will begin to explore Mac OS X and Apple’s renowned media software.
Apple realizes that they don’t need these new Windows users to completely dump Windows in order to become Mac OS X users. Apple’s history with the iPod makes the case. Nearly 70% of Apple’s iPod customers use Windows running Apple’s iTunes music software, synchronizing with their Apple iPod. In a sense, these 35 million Windows iPod users are already dual-platform users. A key segment (music) of their digital lives is already tied to an Apple platform (the iTunes/iPod platform). By allowing users to run both OS X and Windows, Apple expects substantial growth in the number of users who “prefer” the Mac OS X environment.
Some have posed the question: “What if Mac users decided they prefer Windows better and stay on the Windows side more often? Will Mac developers continue to develop for the platform?" There is the chance that some Mac users might choose to use Windows more, especially because of its wider variety of software. A more likely danger is that dual platform developers might choose to just develop for Windows, instructing their Mac customers to reboot into Windows to use their software. We spoke to several multi-platform CAD developers about this possibility and the potential long-term threat that Boot Camp poses to OS X.
Tim Olson, President of CSI, and developer of the computer-aided industrial design (CAID) application Concepts Unlimited, a program that is targeted at both Windows and OS X users, said he didn’t believe Boot Camp was going to hurt Apple and its efforts to secure native Mac OS X developers. “The Mac is still going to have its unique features,” said Olson, despite the ability to run Windows. Mauritz Botha, Vice President of Development for IMSI, developers of TurboCAD, agreed. “The market segments [Mac and Windows] are, somewhat, mutually exclusive.” He cited the educational market as one that is historically heavily invested in the Mac. “You have schools out there with lots of Macs but run one computer lab of Windows PC’s just so they can run AutoCAD,” said Botha. “But Boot Camp will allow these schools to go all Mac now.”
Both Olson and Botha said that if anything, the danger is the other way around—that Windows PC’s will lose market share to Macs running Boot Camp. IMSI’s Botha confessed that when IMSI Precision Design Tools president, Bob Mayer, said the company was going to re-enter the Macintosh CAD market a few years ago, Botha wasn’t too thrilled about it. He admitted not having much recent experience with the Mac but once he got his first Mac OS X machine and began to work on it he quickly changed his mind.
“The Macintosh grew on me,” admitted Botha. “Now video editing is one of my hobbies.” Botha said that he found himself “falling for Apple’s superb media software. As VP of Development at IMSI I carry two laptops all the time,” said Botha. He uses a Windows notebook and a portable Mac to show both Mac and Windows versions of TurboCAD. “Now I can just carry a new MacBook Pro, and that makes a huge difference to me.”
Sean Flaherty, CEO of Nemetschek North America, also agreed that Boot Camp and the Mac’s newfound ability to run Windows at native speeds does not change their development direction on VectorWorks for either Mac or Windows users. “The two operating systems still have very different user experiences and we need to continue to aggressively support both,” said Flaherty. “VectorWorks has a heavy base of Macintosh customers who have chosen Macintosh at their primary business platform and I don’t think Boot Camp will change how we plan future development.”
Tom Lazear of Archway Systems, developers of VersaCAD, said the arrival of Boot Camp will probably have very little impact on them and their customers. “We think hard-core Mac users still want their Mac software,” said Lazear, who added that the company already ordered a new MacBook Pro to enable him to carry just one computer laptop for trade shows and business travel, allowing him to demo both the Windows and Mac version of VersaCAD on the same machine.
“Other software suppliers who support both platforms may do the same,” said Lazear. “That will have a miniscule impact on Dell—who we would normally buy our Windows [laptops] from—and offsetting positively on Apple.”
Apple’s Growing Hardware Market Share
Regardless of what operating system (Windows XP or OS X) Apple users choose, one thing appears to be clear. Apple is going to be gaining hardware market share because of the ability to run both operating systems. Mike Lazear of Archway Systems, (Tom’s brother) said that “in the long term it [Boot Camp] would give us a larger potential user base for our Mac product if this technology increases the Mac hardware market share.”
Mike Lazear’s suggestion is interesting. What happens when you have users in love with software programs on two different operating systems running on the same computer? Will users continue to run both operating systems, or will they gravitate to just one of them over time? In what direction will they push software vendors? Flaherty at Nemetschek North America said that “having to reboot between platform changes is a big hurdle to run any single Windows app on a Mactel machine.” However, he also admitted that we are probably not very far off from software ‘virtualization’ in the Intel-Mac environment. “Opening a Mac application on your Windows machine or a Windows application on your Mac machine within the normal work environment,” said Flaherty, “could have a big effect on the market overall.”
Boot Camp may be just the ticket for companies that want to reach Macintosh users but have been unsure if the move was economically justifiable. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, in a report to C/net recently said something very interesting. Acknowledging that Boot Camp doesn’t change any of Adobe’s plans for developing native Intel versions of their Mac software, he stated that programs that they previously stopped developing for the Mac—like FrameMaker—can now return to the Mac via Boot Camp or future virtualization solutions.
Nemetschek’s Flaherty noted that he felt there might be “fewer apps ported to the Mac, especially among the larger enterprise players.” But he also said that companies like his, which serve both Mac and Windows users, may now see “some of the Windows users ... choose to switch [as several of ours already are].”
Flaherty’s comments, coupled with reports of Apple hardware sales growth, suggest a contradiction. Why would software companies stop porting to the Mac environment if it clearly appears that Apple’s hardware market share is going to rise due to Boot Camp?
Software vendors want their customers to subsidize Mac ports. Boot Camp now enables them to step back and evaluate the situation more fully before committing the resources. The arrival of Boot Camp means companies can now wait to see if the Apple hardware market does indeed take off. They can also watch to see what kind of users are becoming Apple customers. Software vendors may watch to see if these new post-Boot Camp Apple users start requesting native Mac versions of Windows-only software
CAD Vendors in the Middle
Boot Camp gives CAD vendors something to say to the “would-be” customer on the Mac. They can tell them to buy Boot Camp and run their software on the Windows side. The bigger question comes down the road. When Apple’s hardware market share has doubled (this is a real possibility) the big question becomes, “When do I, a Windows CAD vendor, decide to support the Mac natively? Do I wait until my chief competitor does it first or do I beat him to the punch?”
Things will change as Windows CAD users also become Apple hardware users. Remember, Apple is a first-class, top-shelf computer engineering company. Unlike Gateway and most other vanilla-box PC providers, Apple is one of just a few PC manufacturers (others include HP, IBM and Dell) to have produced a supercomputer server machine ranked in the top 5 of the Supercomputer 500 list. Apple is an aggressive hardware innovator more than capable of stirring up the market. So who better than Apple to produce the next great “workstation” for CAD?
Apple can now run OS X, Windows XP, Linux and Solaris all on the same box. Why not target the high-end workstation market? If any company can come up with an “easy-to-use” (Virtualization for the Rest of Us) computer it would be Apple. You can bet the major CAD users will notice, putting pressure on CAD vendors.
AECnews Editor-in-Chief Randall S. Newton contributed to this article.
Technorati Tags: Apple Intel Boot Camp OS X Windows virtualization CAD MCAD VectorWorks Nemetschek IMSI TurboCAD Graphisoft ArchiCAD Archway Systems VersaCAD Adobe Macintosh Mac Darwin Open Source NeXT