Recently Apple has been taking a severe beating on Wall Street. But is that beating justly deserved? More importantly, is it truly deserved in reference to its new global foe–Samsung?
No doubt the Cupertino company has a large-scale hardware competitor in the Korean electronics giant. And there is little doubt that Samsung is capable of producing very decent and competitive Android-based devices and able to market them affectively. But we think it is time to separate some fact from fiction and bring back a more balanced view about these two competitors and their head-to-head match up. We’ll do this by looking at the giant global building industry.
Looking at Developer Dollars and Attention
Architosh has recently published an extensive series on in-depth guides to apps for architects on the iPad. You may have seen these. In the enormous global industry for building design and delivery (AECO) where architects, engineers, contractors and owners spend millions each year on software to streamline efficiencies into their complex, data-heavy workflows, one device has truly take off: the iPad.
This is not to say that Android tablets do not have apps in this market space as well. They do. But in our research and our discussions with several key developers what we literally see is a market where the lion’s share of developer dollars and attention is firmly focused on Apple’s iOS–with a particular emphasis on iPad.
The Leaders Speak
Take Bluebeam Software, one of the hottest and fastest growing software players in the AECO (architecture, engineering, construction, owners) industry. When it comes to mobile platforms they are not even on Android. Their mobile tools are on Apple iPad and Windows tablet PC. When users of their software asked about Android on their website forums last summer an official company response stated that “requests from our customers for an iOS-based solution have been outpacing Android by a very wide margin over the past two years, and this is before we even consider feedback from our largest customers in AEC. Many of whom plan to implement iPads on the job site.” (see forum posts here).
Just last month Architosh published an interview by one of the brightest software newcomers in AEC from Finland–a company called CadFaster, Inc. They have had stellar reception of their CadFaster | Collaborate product for AEC and SolidWorks users worldwide. Their innovative mobile and cloud-based software works with CAD and BIM leaders Autodesk Revit, Bentley Microstation and Nemetschek Vectorworks Architect.
Tuomas Holma, CadFaster’s VP of sales and marketing stated, “We think the iPad is the most exciting platform for design at the moment.” In further discussion Tuomas actually referred to Windows tablets as future competition for iPad in the AEC world–not Android.
When it comes to worldwide CAD industry software leader Autodesk the company does in fact have some key mobile apps on Android also. But the company has a massive and growing collection of tools for Apple’s iOS that greatly outpaces any other mobile platform. For the most part the numbers speak for themselves.
next page: Speaking of the Numbers
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