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A Tale of Two Platforms

This Post is by Jon Buerg.
It originally appeared on his new blog ALL CAPS. Check it out and follow Jon on both Tumblr and Twitter.

What goes around, comes around…

Folklore says that Bill Gates’s magnificent residence on Lake Washington may have been, ironically enough, designed on a Mac. As I’m sure you all know, Apple is currently building a super mega-Gigantor corporate campus in Cupertino, and knowing what I know about design software, I suspected an inversion of the events surrounding the design of these two structures occurred. So I did some digging through my memories (sounds like the name of a 70’s AM radio hit) and the interwebs…

First, I remember reading about the Gates house some time ago and I was actually able to find the article I remembered reading back then (by the way, love the HTML throwback look of that link). This article was researched by the awesome people over at Architosh, and I think that they’ve provided the most complete and thorough answer we’re going to get to this question; which is that some parts of the house were designed on the Mac, but most of the project was in fact drafted by hand. Given the time that the design work was taking place, perhaps some of this was going on too.

Then I remembered seeing the presentation drawings of the Apple campus that were posted to the City of Cupertino’s website several years back. I also remembered thinking at the time that some of them looked rather “Revit-y” to me, and we all know that Revit runs exclusively on Windows (well, unless you run the new cloud-certified version, but that’s probably still using Windows in some way too…anyway). Apparently I wasn’t the only one who assumed Revit when seeing those presentation drawings. But as it turns out, it was actually Microstation with some help from an assortment of what I refer to as “prettyfication” software. Since Bentley hasn’t produced a Mac version of Microstation since the Clinton administration, it’s quite safe to assume that Apple’s new campus was designed on a Windows machine (actually a small army of them, all run by weary drafting servants who are chained to them and have to sleep under their desks while Norman Foster is off on a yacht in the Bahamas or something…but I digress).A Tale of 2 PlatformsSo there you have it. Not as shocking or as juicy of a conclusion as I thought it would be. This sort of zinger just doesn’t carry the punch it once did. The world has changed. Technology has changed. While all the Gates house stuff was happening, Steve hit Bill up for a loan and used it to kickstart a revolution at Apple that saw them finally surpass their former nemesis. Today, Apple and Microsoft relations are as strong as they’ve ever been and people are more interested in their social media tools than the platform used to run those tools. Microsoft has a search engine and hardware like a video game console and a super-tablet, Apple has a watch and is trying to build a car. All this means that operating systems just don’t have the cachet that they once did.

Anyone else excited for a time with the raging BIM Wars subside like the OS Wars have?

By Jon

Again, follow Jon on Twitter and check out more posts on his new blog ALL CAPS. Jon promised he’d still share his thoughts here on Shoegnome, but he’s also going to be posting lots of great stuff on his own blog. Subscribe to the blog so that you don’t miss future posts from Jon Buerg: Shoegnome on FacebookTwitter, and the RSS feed.

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Comments

  • March 8, 2016
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    Another good one Jon. Love that Gates/Jobs “cartoon”.

    • March 8, 2016
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      Thanks, Steve! More fun stuff over at allcapsarcgblog.tumblr.com!

  • March 8, 2016
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    SPR8364

    As long as the BIM war being over does’t mean ArchiCAD users lose.

  • April 11, 2016
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    Paul TP

    LOL! You’ve created a few ‘hits’ down memory lane for me!
    Microstation Mac was painful! (MacII in the 1980s as a student working in a large office) crashed a LOT!
    I have a magazine clipping (Time?) showing Jobs with his feet up (wearing trainers) in the boardroom… around the time that Gates lent a hand… (people booed in the audience when Jobs announced it)…
    My own experience across four decades spans both sides of the iOS (MacOS) / Windows divide and while (like Foster office) I sit mainly on the ‘dark side’ it matters less what platform I run on. Archicad dongle works both sides so do I.
    Apple (shamefully!) is putting less focus into the desktop environment (story idea, Jared)… while the PC platform (for now) offers more power/$ for production machines. With SAAS etc. maybe this won’t matter as much, we will see.

    • April 15, 2016
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      I am eagerly waiting to see what Apple does with computers this year. Will the new MBP be incremental or will it offer something new? The slowdown in innovation with desktops and laptops is related to the new phase chip technology is reaching. The Economist wrote a great article on it in March 2016. Here’s a link. Definitely worth a read. It points to a shift in how computers will evolve and also how software will react. One example I’ve seen is the slowing down of hardware requirements for new versions of ARCHICAD. It used to be that the RAM requirements increased dramatically. But now it’s slowed (I make some bad predictions in this post). Since 2012, we’ve been plateaued at 16 GB…

      Anyways, that’s a HUGE tangent. But I think we’ll see some interesting conversations over the next couple of software versions as the developers have to squeeze more performance out of roughly the same hardware. Gone are the days (probably) when developers could assume the next version or two of a BIM software could do more because it would be run on vastly more powerful computers.

      It’s totally Skill vs Power. For years software developers could get by on power (Revit and Autodesk, I’m looking at your clunky ass!), but now it has to be all on skill. Which to bring it back to PC vs Mac… if Apple is smart, they’ll put some effort on the skill side of things and give us some great stuff. Also looking at things from utility/$ not power/$, maybe the cost of a Mac is more than justified? My 4+ year old macbook pro that I still use as a workhorse would support that!

  • June 11, 2016
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    Nice article indeed…..I’d love to see the “BIM wars” subside although, having test driven both Revit and ALLAN in a Windows 10 partition on my iMac, both those applications do a great job of camouflaging where real world objects are and how you get to define them and place them. ARCHICAD remains a stand-out as far as immediate usefulness. Sure I’m a bit biased but Windows 10 is a huge step forward and well beyond where Microsoft’s previous attempts at operating systems have been for 20 years.

    We definitely need to keep the speed and power pushing forward. Converting point cloud files amounting to half a terabyte into BIM models of surfaces and elements remains a fairly large gap and certainly ARCHICAD needs some extras in that arena in order to match what’s currently available within Microstation and Revit.

    Apple’s build quality, product longevity and speed still offer, for me, huge cost advantages over cheaper, plastic laptops or desktops.

    Let’s hope the folks at Graphisoft act on the insights that their growing population of advanced users are seeing as critical needs…..

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