Let’s make no bones about it. It seems everyone is out for Revit.
The latest attack doesn’t even have visible product demos yet but is already garnering excitement for a couple of key reasons. Motif has been co-founded by Amar Hanspal, once co-CEO of Autodesk and the primary champion behind Autodesk’s Project Quantum. Brian Mathews, a former CTO of Autodesk is also a key co-founder. This pairing would automatically garner attention and respect in any new AEC startup but their sizeable USD 46 million total funding is also a reason to take serious notice. Out of all the BIM 2.0 darlings out there (Qonic, Snaptrude, Arcol, et cetera) none of them match this combination of experience heft and cash.
A screenshot of Motif’s website. Hanspal’s new startup aims to deliver first solutions in 2025.
Matt Jezyk and Lira Nikolovska also joined Motif’s founding team. Architosh has spent much time with Matt Jezyk at Autodesk in Boston in the past and he has always impressed with his industry insights and technological acumen. As Martyn Day reports over at AEC Magazine, the team is sizable at close to 40 people, most of them software engineers. I recall my early visits to the OnShape offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the group there was smaller and yet they shook up the market in a big way. In the end, OnShape was acquired by one of the behemoths in the MCAD industry it was designed to disrupt. So too may ultimately become the destiny of Motif.
Motif Sounds Like Quantum
Based on the available information being written thus far, Motif’s ambitions seem extremely familiar to what Hanspal was wishing to do with Project Quantum at Autodesk last decade. At Autodesk University in the fall of 2016, Amar Hanspal touted Project Quantum onstage as the future of AEC for Autodesk. (see, Architosh, “Autodesk Shows Its Future—Democratizes Data & Tools, Obliterates Reliance on Windows,” 17 Nov 2016.)
Amar Hanspal of Autodesk showing the audience Project Quantum at Autodesk University 2016. Motif largely appears aimed at delivering Quantum-like possibilities but no specific applications have been detailed just yet. Motif will be a cloud-era platform for AEC/O and has a war chest worth USD 46 million.
Back then Quantum was less about being a Revit-like killer and more about a new “platform” for the future of AEC in the era of cloud and mobile. And yet, it would eventually terminate Revit’s central role in AEC in a long slide similar to how Revit and BIM terminated AutoCAD and 2D CAD in the era of BIM. Yet, unlike those transformations where one file format became a de-facto data transmission standard for AEC, what was once Project Quantum, and what is Motif, are cloud era platforms rather than file formats and applications.
MORE: Autodesk Explains Project Quantum—And Why It Matters in AEC
What was special about the Project Quantum vision was the idea of data granularity, data openness, anywhere, anytime, any device access, and, its unique vision of “workspaces” for each discipline in the AEC/O industries. Motif appears to be focused on a similar vision now because ultimately neither Autodesk or any of its chief rivals has delivered on the intrinsic benefits of such a vision. Nor has any of the exciting BIM 2.0 upstarts including Arcol which Hanspal himself was an early investor.
Dooming BIM 1.0
Just because the clarity exist of what BIM 2.0 is about doesn’t mean that BIM 1.0 tools and practices are doomed tomorrow. Motif spells out what it is aiming for on this blog post message here. There is really nothing stopping Autodesk, Nemetschek, Trimble or Bentley from pushing forth on similar strategies and, in fact, most of them are.
On the flipside, the advantages the cloud era BIM 2.0 upstarts have is the agility to move faster with their far younger and far smaller code bases. Their disadvantages include their small customer bases, profitability, and cash burn rates. Some issues lurking inside Revit’s dominance in the BIM world aren’t entirely shared amongst all BIM 1.0 era rivals. Perhaps the biggest new worry is the possible collapse of Intel and the X86 architecture in computing, in general. When Nvidia and AMD introduce new ARM-based SoCs later this year, as rumors suggest they will, a pressing question will become what is to happen ultimately to legacy applications with dozens of millions of lines of code now needing full conversion to an entirely new chip architecture?
Nemetschek BIM solutions are already on ARM for Mac and soon ARM for Windows. Their desktop BIMs will not run aground if Intel X86 continues to get crushed by ARM. Cloud apps run on servers and are delivered via web browsers across an array of platforms, devices and chip architectures. This frees the end user at the device and operating system level. And it means more agility for the software developer as well—Motif included.
Then there is the business model question. Day brings this up in his exclusive interview. Is subscription now looking doomed as well? The issue with subscription is the position it places the user in. Such a model is fine with lighter less expensive tools that the customer can easily switch out of and move to a rival solution. But for major systems with less equal options, users feel trapped and taken advantage of. Some developers are still offering perpetual licenses alongside subscription in smart and fair ways. Graebert of Germany is a standout example. Hanspal appears to recognize this issue in the industry and this issue is one of Autodesk’s weakest points in its armor.
Is Motif really aiming at Revit? Indirectly it is. Everything is, even those new tools like Snaptrude which are crafted to augment Revit workflows. They are all taking on pieces of the puzzle that either Revit is miserable at doing or simply does not focus on.
