Anthony Frausto-Robledo, Publisher Architect

CAD has spent decades teaching us to speak its language: commands, shortcuts, rigid workflows, and tool specific habits that make switching painful and training slow. We want the reverse. We want design software to understand us. That’s where this conversation goes, fast: from the daily reality of producing architecture and publishing product coverage, to the next wave of AI in CAD that could turn plain English prompts into real geometry.

I’m joined by Anthony, an architect who also runs Architosh, and that dual perspective keeps the discussion grounded in real work. We talk about why CAD and BIM tools still feel hard, why moving between platforms like Vectorworks, Archicad, SketchUp, Rhino, AutoCAD, and Revit can be such a mental tax, and why “assistive AI” is more than a flashy feature. We dig into early examples of prompt driven drafting, what’s genuinely impressive about modern AI understanding messy text, and why the real payoff is generating many correct actions from one clear description, not drawing a single line faster.

From there we take on bigger forces shaping AEC software: why Mac support has lagged despite Apple’s hardware gains, how Autodesk became a center of gravity for the industry, and what cloud first development means for the future of desktop tools. We also get honest about the fear underneath the hype: if AI reduces the grunt work, what happens to entry level roles and the career ladder? If you care about CAD history, AI in engineering design, AEC software strategy, and where drafting workflows go next, you’ll want to hear this one. 

Transcript

Welcome To History Of CAD

Roopinder 0:08

Hello and welcome to the History of CAD podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara and I will be your host. On this podcast, we will explore the untold stories behind the tools that shape modern engineering and design. Each episode features conversations with the pioneers of computer-aided design, the innovators who built the software, and those who worked alongside them or observed or reviewed their work. Hi, Anthony. Hey, how are you? I'm doing good. Sorry, I'm running a little late.

Anthony 0:38

Not a problem at all.

Roopinder 0:39

You know why I'm late. You know why I'm late. I'm reading your article. I love the way it starts. A tumultuous relationship with uh Apple land architects. Great admiration of your dual life, as it were. Because you have done publishing now for 27 years.

Anthony 1:02

27 years. Yeah, 27 years. I know. I'm kind of surprised by it myself at times.

Roopinder 1:07

Yeah. And you managed to do that while you were also a practicing architect for almost all of it.

Anthony 1:13

Yeah, I am still a practicing architect. Yeah. Yep. I managed to do, I managed to do pull this off for um, it was easier when I was younger. I had more energy for sure. But then I had kids, and I don't have the kids are not in the home anymore. So that's I have more time now.

Roopinder 1:27

Yeah, more time. Yeah.

Anthony 1:29

More time, less energy.

Roopinder 1:30

So I I was a practicing engineer and then I gave it up for publishing. Bad choice. I looking back on it. Uh, but you managed to keep them both alive, both your profession and publishing.

Anthony 1:42

So I I I have to uh say that it's been I've been lucky because uh it isn't easy to do both by any stretch of the imagination. And there have been points when I I wanted to pick one and just stick with one. Um but the problem is I love practice, uh the practice of architecture so much. And then it's hard to sort of uh to um to get rid of something that you've created from the beginning, this baby, you know, this baby of mine, Architash. So uh I've just been very fortunate and blessed.

Roopinder 2:16

I couldn't do either of them well if I was doing them both, I'm

Building A Career In Two Worlds

Roopinder 2:20

sure. But uh you managed to pull it off. How do you split your time? Is it is it go is it like 50-50 rule?

Anthony 2:27

No, it's not like it in the very beginning. I was doing practice sort of uh 75% of my time. So maybe 32 hours a week. And uh and then I was doing all the rest of it on Architosh, but I I I clock in 50, 55 hour week. So it's you know it's a it's a bigger week than the average person's week, but it's just what I was used to. And uh yeah, I'm just used to it. But generally just in the way it works workflow-wise, if I've never really shared this in detail, but so I tend to get up early in the morning, um, early riser, and uh 5.30. And then I will that's not as early as like people like Tim Cook, who's getting up at four in the morning to start his day. But I I know that some of the most famous people in the world, everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Tim Cook have gotten up incredibly early. I don't know how they do that. Uh, but I can get up at 5 or 5.30 on a regular basis and I I'll start my day and I will um I'll come down to my my office studio and I will end up just reading emails, catching up with you know the communications with software vendors and the press releases and stuff like that. And then I'll start writing, you know, I'll get a news story out, maybe once every day or two. Um but there's a lot, yeah. As you know, as an editor, there's a lot of back and forth with all these software companies. So you're not always writing, you're doing a lot of other things too.

Roopinder 3:49

Yeah, yeah, true.

Anthony 3:50

Yeah, and then I then I, you know, go to work and uh and focus on just architecture and practice. Uh, and then I'll you know, I'll finish in the e in the evening. I do monitor my emails, uh, especially in the middle of the day during lunch break and uh kind of uh manage to kind of keep the connections going for the Architosh-related stuff in the

Why CAD Is Hard And AI Helps

Anthony 4:11

middle of the day. Here's my problem in the middle of the day.

Roopinder 4:13

Here's my problem with trying to be an engineer while I'm most of the time being a pub publisher and editor. It's uh if I come really rusty with my tools, I will not use CAD anymore. Uh certainly not for work, but uh certainly not for work. But I have what I have to do is like find projects that I could force myself to use CAD on. And I say force because I'm so rusty with it. It's really hard for me to pick up any CAD software now. I attribute that to being uh they're not easy to use, but maybe that's just my excuse. I'm I'm really bad at using them because I haven't done them for a living. Uh you know, use them for making a living for so long. But you manage to you you do that, right? You use what do you use by the way? You use do you use uh Graphisoft or VectorWorks? What is your tool tool?

Anthony 5:07

I have used a variety of tools over the years from ArchieCAD to VectorWorks to AutoCAD uh at different times of practice. The one that I know the most that I'm most skilled in from the most use is probably VectorWorks. Um I also am very skilled in SketchUp, and I know I know Rhino a tiny bit, but not uh I don't really work in Rhino. Uh I would love to work in Rhino, but I don't have a reason to work in Rhino with my practice. So but I agree with you. The CAD tools are hard, they've always been hard. They're hard for people to learn and they're hard to shift between. But I have a theory that AI is gonna make that much easier for us because I think the assistive AI technology that you can see in some of the tools now, like Aries Graebert, which is an AutoCAD competitor, has basically uh open AI's technology right in their own palette. And um, and you can just literally start from day one. If you didn't even know CAD at all, you can just ask it, how do I get started? How do I draw my first line? And it will guide you. And I I think that's just the beginning of a great sea change in making the learning curve to these tools not nearly as steep uh or as arduous in making it certainly faster. And there's repercussions for that because then people might be able to switch tools, firms may be able to move between tools with less pain points.

Roopinder 6:32

I've been uh impatiently waiting for that time where I could just talk in a natural language to my computer and have it do my bidding. And uh, you know, it's it's happening like great. Uh I keep waiting for the big guys to do that. And uh, I tell you, it's been agonizingly slow, and not just because I'm getting more impatient in my old age. It's like I want these things to happen in my lifetime. I want it to say, you know, hey, make me this bracket or make me this bicycle frame or something like that, right? Or all the way to like, you know, let's let's electrify this car, right? Uh I want AI to be helping me with that. And I don't want to learn all those, you know, cat commands. They're like that's like 300, it's like a fast food menu, right? You have to learn that language, it's two to two to three hundred words. You have to learn that language. Hell with that, I want to say. I want to say, you learn my language, right? Why don't you learn my language? Why don't you do what I want you to do? And by the way, you've been, you as an AI, you might have been observing what I'm doing, so you should know when I say, make me a bracket, this is what I'd like to use, or you know, like in your case, make me this this addition to a house, or make me this, you know, this new building. You should know that, hey, Anthony lives in the Boston area, right? And he he does this is the kind of standards that exist in in housing if you're doing it. Should know those things, right? It should know your location, it should know your habit, right? So that's what I wait for. And damn it, these companies are slow in doing that. I don't know what it is. I'd love to get your opinion. My my feeling is that they're just dragging their heels until AI goes away and people stop making demands of them. I don't think it's gonna go away, though. Not at all. It's definitely not going away. I don't know if you know this person, uh Fino. He goes by the name Fino, it's Michael Finocario. He put together a list of AI startups in in our, let's say in our extended world, which CAD, PLM, similiation, everything, right? Uh and a JSON technologies. There's two to 300 startups. I think he's got over 300 now that are AI startups, AI-related startups related to our extended world. Just amazing, right? Just amazing the number and the money that's going into these companies. So you're right, I don't think anybody can ignore them. So I just keep thinking, why are why are CAD companies so slow to make those interfaces, you know, those natural language interfaces? Because I don't want it to just tell me how to do it, right? I want it to actually work with me to do it, right? Have you been keeping up with like what's happening with AI developing like the MCP, the model control model context protocol?

Anthony 9:23

Yes. I have what you can do with Aries actually now is you can you can text prompt your way to it doing making a line for you, making a rectangle, making a series of lines and closing them. You know, so I actually did some of that in my recent review article, which I have just published. Um, not to promote that piece necessarily, but it it so this is the first tool, the first tool that I've actually tested that out in, or had the opportunity, I should say, to actually test that out. And I have to say, what's exciting about it is the ability to sort of then imagine if another AI can help you with the prompts better so that you can actually say, This is what I want to do, and then it will create the prompts that Aries Aries needs to use to generate the drawing very accurately. Um, but I've been stunned at how accurate it is at following prompts where the English isn't perfect and there's maybe a typo or grammatical grammatical error. You've probably seen this in just AI tools in general, working with Gemini or whatever. You can misspell a word and it will still understand what you're trying to say.

Roopinder 10:30

It's quite forgiving of my typos for sure. For sure. I do love that about it. Which and that's the very opposite of coding or or uh command line interfaces in in CAD programs, right? Very unforgiving, right? And uh yeah, I find that to be quite quite a detriment. So I'm just waiting for it to work with me. It sounded like it was fairly simple commands.

Anthony 10:54

It was initially I asked it just to draw a line, and then I asked it to draw another line connected to that line, and so then I decided to just ask in one single prompt to draw a whole series of lines that were interconnected. It's sort of like the outline of a building, right? If you wanted to do the floor plan of a building, you would probably start with its overall shape first. Or it could have been that could have been the outline of some other thing that you're gonna create. It could have been a mechanical part or a site survey or something like that. So it was very interesting. Um, certainly didn't, but it I handled it all in one prompt. That was what was impressive. Then I began to realize, well, how big of a prompt could I actually throw into this thing and would it follow it all out correctly? And the thing I'll say about what impressed me was when I started, I obviously the program did one line for me, then it did a second line. So I was able to cite those lines in the prompt by saying first line, second line, last line. Connect uh the end of the last line to the midpoint of the first line. And it understood that. Um and so that was impressive to me. And I mean, I didn't get super far in testing it out, but it begs the question of just uh where this may go and how accurate it could be and what time savings uh you could have. Because you could imagine then one AI just ingest a description of what you're trying to do. I want an apartment building that's one story duplex or something, and I want you describe what you want with some general parameters, and then that AI generates sort of the necessary prompts to give it to a CAD tool to just do it. That's a big time savings. It's not gonna save you any time if you're just drawing one line at a time. That's not you, it's faster just to draw one line at a time. But when you see that it can put together a very large prompt and do a bunch of things rather quickly, that's when your eyes open and go, wow, what this is interesting.

Roopinder 12:58

I always find though, if I look at it too closely, I have this happens to other people too. I saw one of these guys, uh very popular SketchUp expert, and he decided to use the uh AI just to check it out, see how how well they've implemented AI. And he was also, I think, stunned. It looked like he was stunned by how well it made a was it a house? I'll find it and dig it up and show it in the background. A whole house, or no, just a roof, just a roof. Like I said, it's a 20 by 20 room with this window, this door, and it was bam, there it was, right? It wasn't SketchUp. And and he was like, Well, that is pretty cool that it can do that. But if you look at it closely, the corners of the room didn't weren't quite matching. He had to fill them in, right? Uh the window wasn't the standard window, it was the right dimensions, but it wasn't where you would have put it, right? Those kind of things.

Anthony 13:59

I explored early too with uh with the writing, and I decided it doesn't I don't will never use it for writing articles. It's just um it's a good tool for checking your writing uh or offering suggestions or to use it for use it for editing, copy editing. Yeah, editing and and and uh and ideation perhaps too. Some of my better articles have um that I think read really well, have uh benefited from just interactions that I've had with AI about um just sort of I call it Architosh style, editorial style, which is just uh I've had a very simple, well, not maybe simple to everyone, but simple method for me of writing feature stories where I kind of almost create a diagram of the article first. And you could talk to AI about these kinds of things and and it and it and it helps you to kind of provide the hooks that keep an article flowing, like the article that we were gonna talk about, Apple at 50. So because I think that article, I think that article flows very well.

Roopinder 14:58

Didn't A AI hijacked our conversation just like it hijacks all the time.

Anthony 15:02

Oh yes, it's gonna hijack our whole lives.

Roopinder 15:06

Promise I'll get back to the article because I do want to talk about it. There's a lot to that, and uh not to the whole concept of uh of Apple ignoring us, right? Um but yeah, but so but just to finish that off, the AI things, if we ever could, it's just yeah, the the promise is there. I feel like there's a lot more that can be done. You know, the conversation usually I have with people on this is job related. You as an accomplished architect, you know what you want to make and it can help you with ideation, but it's not quite you, right? But I wonder if younger architects are more fearful of their whole profession, right? That they may not be called on then to do like what maybe the grunt work, right? Like making drawings or architectural firms and things like that. Are they are they uh are our jobs in trouble? That's what I always find people talking about with AI, even to the experts.

Anthony 16:07

Yeah, I find that too. Young people in general, even my kids that are not in architecture, but the ones in film, for example, and that's been affected by AI, the film industry. Yeah, I I I think we've always relied on the kids in the industry to kind of do the grunt work, whether it's on Wall Street or it's in an architecture office, the the youngins are always kind of doing the you know, lift the heavy lifting and the grunt work. And a lot of this information technology-centric uh worlds can be automated, I see, with you know, AI in the future. So I don't know. I I don't I understand why they would be concerned. That makes a lot of sense why they'd be concerned.

Roopinder 16:42

I think, oh no, I'm an experienced engineer, they can't possibly replace me, right? But then, you know, when I talk to other engineers or writers, it's like I find a lot of them like and have trouble finding jobs, and a lot of them are uh some of the writers, I uh quite a few writers have have been their positions have been eliminated. Um you heard about Oracle getting rid of 30,000 jobs all at once.

Anthony 17:09

Yeah, yeah.

Roopinder 17:11

One of the people that spoke about it publicly was a content writer, content writer instructor, and uh yeah, their job vanished after 29 or 30 years in doing it, right? Yeah, so it's definitely eating jobs. All right, wait, gotta get back to Apple.

Why Mac CAD Still Lags

Roopinder 17:31

So I gotta say, okay, I still use a laptop. I use a ThinkPad for my work, right? That's a ThinkPad workstation, but everything else is Apple, right? I got my phone, I got my iPad, I got two iPads. I'm seriously, I'm competing with Martin Day for the number of devices I carry with me. He brags about seven. I think I may have a B. I'm not sure. But uh I would I don't know, fanboy may not be the right term, but I'm definitely a fan. But I really don't think they've done companies have been slow walking this, any kind of porting to the uh to the Mac. And I don't understand it. I I don't understand it. They now have a better chip, better processing than Windows machines, right?

Anthony 18:19

Right.

Roopinder 18:19

Yeah. So what how do you what why do you think that is? They've resisted for so long.

Anthony 19:43

Well, I I think I think when there are new entrants in the AC market, when I should say when there were new entrants in the AC market, let's take SketchUp for example, when they came 20 plus years ago, I think now, they they said uh we we'd like to move to the Mac, but we're a startup, so we're gonna focus on where most of the users are, that's Windows. And so they focus on Windows first. But in today's world, development is mobile and clouds uh first oriented, you know. So very few software companies are thinking about you know, the desktop solution is like an afterthought. So that's that's the big one of the bigger changes. But I think historically um you know, the reason why the Mac has suffered a little bit in AEC, maybe not just a little bit but a lot, is because the center of gravity in the industry around tools and there always is in the AEC a real powerful center of gravity, almost like a sun that sucks everyone to it, uh, was on Autodesk. You know, first it was AutoCAD and then and then it was uh became Revit. And they uh those two solutions when they started started on Windows. And um so that's uh I think it's uh it's not so much about creating that there there's critical mass out there for Mac users. And it's not the attraction of like do we want to do something for the Mac? Sometimes it's economic and you just want to start with the biggest user base.

Roopinder 21:13

I remember when AudiCAD decided it was going to be single platform and uh gave up its Mac Mac codes or everything else just turned its back on different Mac, and that was that was way before the chips got really capable. Uh I thought maybe it's because of that, because the chips were the hardware wasn't ready for that kind of work. But uh nowadays there's no excuse. I mean, really, they could go back to Mac and uh oh, maybe they're right, maybe they're just embracing the cloud architecture now and not concentrating at all on desktop tools. I do definitely get that impression. There's a lot of pissed off Rabbit users because everything they're doing is cloud based. Uh you probably have visited Graphisoft Park in the interesting story there. That's you saw the statue?

Anthony 22:05

Yeah, yeah, Steve Jobs actually. Steve Jobs.

Roopinder 22:08

Yeah, yeah. So wow, what a what a story. He was uh an integral part of their well, you probably can tell the story better than me. Yeah, what happened there?

Anthony 22:19

He was at the he he he met the Grafisoft uh folks early on at in Hanover, Germany, I believe, at the big computer show and was so impressed by what they were doing, which was the very first earliest version of ArchieCAD. It may have been called something different than ArchieCAD at that time, but it was eventually become become Archicad. And he uh I guess just embraced them and offered to help them and so forth. I think even he helped supply getting in Macintosh computers over the curtain or over the iron wall, the Soviet wall. Because at that time Hungary was a part of the Soviet Union. So yeah, and they ended up I think uh he was so central to the formation of their company's existence that they really he's sort of a father figure on some level. Uh and so they really respected him by putting I think putting that statue on their campus. Plus they think a lot like uh Apple. They're Vanguard, they're They're like the pirates that Apple used to fly a pirate flag. They're they are true innovators and um and plot their own course. And so uh that rebel spirit that's very much part of the old Apple, not so much today. It's I'm before Apple had um the iPod and then eventually the iPhone, there was the Apple ecosystem ecosystem was very different. It felt like a rebels, uh felt like the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, you know, small little ragtag band trying to defeat the empire. But yes, I think um that's the gist of the story. Yeah, and that's why they have that statue there.

Roopinder 23:56

Yeah, yeah, it came rather late. It looked it looks like it's uh jobs in his later years. Yes. Uh and uh so I think it was a tribute maybe after his after his after he died.

Anthony 24:08

Yes, that's exactly right.

Roopinder 24:09

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh yeah, so yeah, what it's a good story there. Where was I going with this? Oh, so okay, so our Graphis Graphisoft and ArchCAD would were used on the Apple. So I kept waiting for engineering tools, cat MCAD tools to come onto the Apple. And I thought there was a really good chance of that happening. Back in oh, when was it? It was six years ago or so. Uh I saw Shaper 3D. Uh, you're familiar with them? Yes.

Anthony 24:41

Yes.

Roopinder 24:42

Well, it's MCAD, right? But still, because it's Apple, you you probably get covered Ishman.

Anthony 24:47

Yeah, no, yeah, I'm familiar with them.

Roopinder 24:49

Okay, yeah. So I saw them, I was like, wow, this is so cool. I first saw it demonstrated. Uh Ishtman came up to first time he came to the US, and he's he says he's gonna show us CAD demo, and I'm thinking he's just standing in front of us with an iPad. How's he how's he gonna do that? And he proceeded to sketch out a part using a parasolid engine, right? Uh on an iPad with you know, with an iPad. Here's here's in a pencil. Uh and I was just blown away because all the time archite our uh engineers and architects don't what do they start with? Paper and pencil, right? It just was a natural sketching for me, very natural to draw a lot. And here he was doing it with the that electronic equivalent of paper and pencil. I thought this is gonna change the world. I saw that it didn't, right? I've been wrong many times, right? But again, I'm wrong. Like, okay, nobody picked up on it. I said I'm I was the only guy I felt like who had an Apple pencil and and pad, and I was trying to use it. And I thought,

Shapr3D And The Pencil Moment

Roopinder 25:58

but damn, why did why didn't that happen? Again, a bit of a betrayal by the uh CAD companies, right? Not to seize upon that as a space, right? Yeah.

Anthony 26:10

Well, we have a we we have an industry that's filled with a lot of older companies that are very entrenched, and you know, older companies are not fast movers, generally generally speaking. Right. Uh not like the new startup, so like his i company. I think there's a difference between the way people use a pencil on paper versus an iPad to I think Do you use an iPad by the way when you when you sketch? Oh yeah, I've no, I use a remarkable tablet because I I just want to sketch. I don't want it to be cat, I don't want it to be a cat object, or I don't want a model with a pencil and an eye. I know people do think about that, but that's not I think the sketching product as an architect, the sketching process is one that is quite fluid and fast with just trace paper. And um and if you don't want trace paper, then you could use something like a remarkable tablet or an iPad and just sketch on different layers. So Morfolio Trace is a good example. That's the kind of digital equivalent of trace paper. And uh and Vectorworks has bought that company, by the way. And um, that's how I work, and I think a lot of Arctics work that way because of speed. And I think they're working like that because they're where you're working out ideas, it's not so much that you need to get them into 3D or have a high level of precision at that point. That's sort of the next step in the process. Uh it's just conceptual, it's just shapes, it's not shapes and a lot of ideas, a lot of ideas that end up in your head that you have to carry forward to the next level of the process.

Roopinder 27:45

Yeah. Engineers aren't quite as creative, I think, as architects, but definitely that's how ideas get first put down is on is on paper. And uh yeah, it just seems like I don't know. I I use it, I use by the way, I use the iPad and pen when I'm at a conference and I look around and no one else is. It's like I I shouldn't be, I'm writing in it long hand uh on on my iPad, and it just works for me. I had to learn, I had to learn a few things like how to actually write differently, but after I got through that, I do that all the time now, to the exclusion of regular paper, but still it hasn't really caught on. It's quite handy, by the way. Have you noticed that it uh I don't know how much you use notes ever, but uh you can add and subtract. Uh you can do simple, you can do actually pretty complicated math problems on it. Uh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I I speaking of a slow engineering software is I had a conversation with the MathCat people. You know, are you familiar with MathCat? Yes. Okay, all right. So MathCat, I I always belabor the point that, oh, it's really hard to use. You know, I don't want to memorize all those key commands because they always tell me if it's hard to use. Oh, you should learn the key commands, they're very fast. And I say, oh, I don't want to do that. Again, learn my language. Why should I have to learn yours? Kind of arrogance. So and and and they all and I and I so I went up to them one time after after I discovered how Apple could do math, right? I went up to them and very, you know, very again, I'm very arrogant too, right? I said, Hey, look, Apple can do this. Yeah, how come you can't do this, right? And and they were oh, okay, they fought back, they clawed back their credibility or trying to said, well, we can't make those kind of mistakes. So what if it interprets a three for a four, right? And you know, planes go down, words to that effect.

Anthony 29:51

Yeah.

Roopinder 29:52

I guess so. What shouldn't you shouldn't you try? Right? Shouldn't you try to do that?

Anthony 29:58

Yeah, the mechanical world is different.

Roopinder 30:00

Um I think uh I still think nobody listens to us journalists, you know that? I think people get a feeling like one time, one time, Trimble. I'm at a Trimble conference, and the panelists are all journalists. They didn't they didn't ask me to be one of those panelists, which I resent, but but but they have journalists up there. But the point is, and they actually stated this you guys have seen everything. Yeah, you have seen everything. You should be on book panels because you guys have seen everything, and you have a worldview, which even experts at companies lack, right? They are really good at knowing their own products, but they have a marginal interest or knowledge, or let's say superficial interest and uh knowledge of other products, right? We don't we see everything, we can judge everything against the other. I think journalists are oftentimes at fault for not judging, you know, because they don't want to lose advertisers, but yeah, that's a whole different subject. But we we see it all, right? We have a front row seat on all this technology. Yeah, really, I swear they should listen to us more. I'm getting more adamant about that model.

Anthony 31:11

Well, I think I think they I think it's a great point that you're making because it's true that we see everything. Um and for the most part with a lot of neutrality uh because we're journalists, but also

Journalism, Reviews, And Vendor Pressure

Anthony 31:25

because we're if we're journalists, we're not really using, we're not we're not there's no we don't have any dog in the fight with a particular vendor because we're journalists. That isn't quite my story exactly because I actually practice too, but for the most part, I am completely in agreement with you that they should listen to us more because even like you said, the biggest companies with the top guy in the company, they don't have the breadth of knowledge we have. They haven't seen it all, they're biased towards the things that they already use, and they only have sort of a superficial interest, as you say, you know, and a lot of the other stuff that's out there. Right. But you're right, I think they should definitely listen to us more.

Roopinder 32:03

Well, it used to be they they would uh you'd see the executives from these companies and at the trade shows, and they'd be going by different booths and seeing, oh, whoa, they can they can do that, can they? Oh, interesting. We you know, they would get a sort of a knowledge of other products through that way. And nowadays I think they have uh they what do they call them? Competitive product departments where they do their own uh I don't know, breakdowns or espionage, you know, a picture when they take down parts of a product and look at their labs. I'm sure they're doing that. Uh but still I don't think they can do it as well as as we can. So yeah, so but you know, I don't know. They don't listen to me anyway. I don't know. Have you ever had a have you ever written a review and pointed out the issues and then by the next revision they've they've said thank you, Anthony.

Anthony 32:59

I have written reviews. Ironically, I think the company that uh has listened to me the most is the company where I if I have a slight bias, I like to believe that I don't write with any bias, but if if I uh you can imply that I did because uh I use it, that that would be back to works. They I have been most critical of them at times about many things, and they have listened to me. I don't think it's because I'm a user, uh I think it's because of my position in Archintosh uh as a editor. And I I I think so I do think that companies do look like you have a big megaphone, right?

Roopinder 33:39

They have to listen.

Anthony 33:39

I have a big megaphone, exactly. But also, yeah, I think I I used to preach for years. Start working with all of the different interactive renderers, as many as you can, uh, you know, get get integrated with Lumion, get integrated with um NSC, get it integrated with all these things. Uh, because you know, they had their own rendering engine, render works, and it was based on cinema 4D and stuff like that. But that was one area where I thought they they took those. I I list them cons in a review, pros and cons, and uh and seemed to really embrace that and do that thing. Now they may have been already thinking that they needed to do that, and it just parallel lined up with what I was saying, and it's just a coincidence, coincidence, but yeah, I'll never know exactly. But I do think that that sometimes they do listen to us.

Roopinder 34:27

Yeah, okay. Yeah, you're probably better at expressing your your uh criticism than I was. I told this story the other day. Um so you you favor Vectorworks. Uh the old days. I was at Cains Magazine and we were a sort of a one-trick pony. We were covering auto cat autodesk products. Uh that's all we would do until the publisher decided that we've got too many eggs in that basket. We're going to uh get more eggs, we get more baskets, I should say. I don't know, whatever. Uh and and they decided, oh, we're gonna cover the then the emerging company was SolidWorks. So, me as an intrepid journalist, we would uh, oh, I'm let's do a comparison between uh a mechanical desktop that day was the MCAT program of Autodesk and SolidWorks and another company, Trispectives. And so I did it, did it the best way I thought possible with an eye on the audience. The audience was uh imbued already, right? They were going, yeah. So I said, Oh, if you're an autodesk, auto user of autodesk software, you're gonna like mechanical desktop. It's built on it, you know, you'll be comfortable with it. It's pretty mature and robust where the other companies startups. Again, I was wrong because Solidworks was a better program and killed mechanical desktop, right? Another example of me like not knowing what I'm talking about or predicting the future, I should say, right? So, where was I going? Everybody hated me after that. Autodesk hated me for covering anything, this any company at all that was competing with them, right? And our advertising was all Autodesk, right? Percent of our advertising revenue was from Autodesk, hated the fact that it's covering another product, even if I gave them a better review, right? SOLIDWORKS hated us because who is this idiot that doesn't know anything about SOLIDWORKS saying we're not we're not a good company? We're like we're Windows, we're all Windows, right? We're modern, right? Yeah, and another company that faded out completely, so we're not even mentioning them. It was trispectives, right? But yeah, so where's I going with this? That the yeah, advertising, it's tough to write for advertising-based media, right?

Anthony 36:52

Yes, yes, because you can get there's a certain uh feeling of being beholden to your advertisers. Um but I think maybe this is a difference between the AEC space and the mechanical space a little bit, but uh I feel like uh my advertisers for the most part have accepted, you know, uh the way you write and the way the criticisms. I I I yeah, I I to I think first of all, like at Architect, we don't write comp we don't do direct comparisons in our reviews. If we do like a product in depth or a news story, we might or a special feature where we might do some direct comparisons. But for the most part, our like the way I do write reviews from the very beginning was like I'm just gonna stick to this product and write about it. I might mention the competition in broad terms, uh that the competition can't do X or Y or Z, but I try to just stick to the to the company. Right. Yeah, I think that's worked.

Roopinder 37:52

Yeah, it's yeah, so you will get into trouble like I did.

Anthony 37:56

Yeah, I didn't realize you were getting in all that trouble.

Roopinder 37:58

Oh man, I got in so much trouble. Uh also, you know who else did everybody did. Everybody that chose to uh write about it was it was David Cohn. I don't mind telling about him because he talked about it on our show. He said he lost his job because he uh was critical of AutoCAD. I think it was release 13, which was a uh mind-numbing uh that was a horrible release, right?

Anthony 38:27

Yeah, horrible.

Roopinder 38:29

And he and he said that. And uh later on, Autodesk admitted it was a horrible release, but he lost his job because it was it's criticizing. He's free and open says openly says that now. That's that's how bad it was. We used to call it the Autodesk Mafia, the way they would jump.

Anthony 38:47

Well, it that kind of critic that kind of thing reminds me of um, not to get into politics, but our current administration and its current leader, who will, if you ask a certain tough question, he will simply say, You're a horrible journalist. Or he'll say, You're a horrible person. And I think, to be honest, it's that illustration is so vivid and so horrendous looking. I'm hopeful that in other press domains like our industry, that the software companies can see that that's you're not a bad person or bad journalist because you're asking a tough question. You're you're you're doing your job. That's what you're doing.

Roopinder 39:27

All right. So your your companies have been well behaved and they haven't come down hard on you. You haven't had to look in your rear view mirror for no.

Anthony 39:36

I had to look in my rear view mirror.

Roopinder 39:39

What about from Apple? Have you have you been have you been ever had Apple folks come down on you for well that that's a great question?

Anthony 39:46

So um, because Architosh, as the name suggests, was about Apple in the very beginning, right? Um Architosh, Macintosh, right? It's about Mac architects for the most part. But in 2008, we changed the mission statement to in focus to include everyone. Um a lot of people like you and our our colleague friends like Martin Day and others have suggested to me last week, for example, uh suggested no, you should focus on the whole industry, it'd be better for Architosh's future. And so I actually heeded people's advice and did that. And part of the reason why I did that is because Apple actually was helpful to Architosh in the for a few years in the first decade with some advertising and stuff and some support. And but then they kind of walked away from the professional markets and they weren't so helpful anymore. And I'm like, why uh I don't know it'd be better for me to just broaden up and that's and it and it turned out to be the case. It much it was a good wisdom to to do that. So when I did that, I thought maybe I'm gonna get blowback from Apple by not just focusing on the Mac. And I didn't. The uh I think Apple's a very well-behaved company, they've always been supportive of them. I was actually on the phone with them earlier this morning for another thing. So um, no, I think my relationship with Apple has been good for a long, long time.

Roopinder 41:08

Uh did you read the book

Architosh, Apple, And Trademarks

Roopinder 41:10

Jobs by Walter Isaacson?

Anthony 41:13

I did. I did read it. It changed my opinion of him to some degree.

Roopinder 41:18

Um in what way?

Anthony 41:20

You were able to see all his faults in a way that you couldn't really see in any other format. I think you know, a lot of people who had really bad working experiences with him, that can kind of came out in the book. Um I never met him personally or worked with him, so I can't say that. But I have met lots of wonderful people who did who were at Apple who knew him well and worked with him. So for me, I thought the book was great. It was another great Isaacson uh bio.

Roopinder 41:49

And it was did you meet him, Anthony?

Anthony 41:52

No, no, did you?

Roopinder 41:54

I met the Waz. I had uh I met uh Waz sat next to him at dinner. Well, it was a press event, so it didn't have a one-on-one, but yeah, but yeah, yeah, met the Waz, so that's all I can claim.

Anthony 42:07

I would like to meet Waz. I have exchanged emails with Waz in the very beginning of Architosh a long, long time ago. I don't even think I have those emails anymore because this was before long before Yahoo and and uh and uh Gmail. Um but no, I I haven't I I haven't met either of them.

Roopinder 42:28

I feel like we have opportunity going, like I feel that way about like John Walker of Autodesk. Like, oh no, I never get to be here. He passed away.

Anthony 42:37

And I thought, you know, I s I wish I could meet the person responsible for the for yeah, I had the chance to actually walk up to jobs and meet him. He was probably about 20 feet from me at at Macworld. Oh, oh, yeah.

Roopinder 42:55

Okay.

Anthony 42:56

Yeah, just he was hanging out in the booth area, you know, the Apple booth after the key after his keynote. I didn't, and uh so the the reason why was I wasn't sure how he'd react to me. And and I it was it coincidentally timed when I was trying to get a registered mark for Arkitosh, and I was going through the patent office and so forth. And they rejected me. The patent US patent office rejected uh getting a registered arc for Arkitosh uh on the grounds that they believed that trademark Arkitosh would be something that Apple might want or it would be confusing or be missed, like people in the market would think it was a product of some kind of product from Apple. So they denied me. And so I was a little worried. I I wasn't sure if Jobs thought the same thing. So I didn't really want to get a bad reaction from him. Um but uh later on I had uh Apple people tell me some very nice things that he was aware of Architosh and what was happening on on the platform and on the website, I should say. And uh and I even Luxology, for example, when they came up with uh what was it, Mono or whatever, I forget that. It was such a good 3D model. I think it's still out there. I did a feature for that tool and they sent it to Jobs to read and they replied back that he read it, he loved it. Uh that was a fantastic tool. It was all native on the Mac. Uh still is, I believe. And um and so yeah, so I I was I've had a lot of good feedback uh from other people that lead me to believe that I probably should have gone up to jobs and just and introduced myself. I didn't need to worry.

Roopinder 44:37

Um I had a feeling that wherever he is, that he's probably thinking, I wish I had met Anthony, honey.

Anthony 44:43

Well, I I do wish I had met him. That would be nice. I don't know. He worked at uh was it Atari? He had he had you know, he didn't do a lot of things before Apple. Um he was so young when he started it.

Roopinder 44:58

Yeah, no, it wasn't in that book. He talks about those days. He was uh I didn't know find I didn't know a lot of things about him before, but boy, I feel like I know as a person after Isaac did a uh a study on him, followed him around for years and years, I think, and uh talked to everybody new. He talked about how he Was he even the moment bare feet and smelled bad?

Anthony 45:22

Yes, yes. He used to go bare feet in the office.

Roopinder 45:26

Yeah. Oh, okay. So I'm a big fan of his now, Isaacson, and actually Jobs to some extent. You should read. Have you read Musk yet? His other book?

Anthony 45:37

I want to, because I I'm a big fan of Isaacson too. He's fantastic.

Roopinder 45:42

Isn't he good? He also wrote um a book on Einstein. And I'll get to them all eventually. But yeah, Musk thing. Okay, I don't know your feelings on Musk. I feel like I do after what you said about our president. But he's he's also like, I felt like I got to know a different side of him altogether. I'm not saying I like him. I do like his engineering mind and his products, but uh the person is just uh horrendous. Uh and but I got to feel I got to feel like I got to get to know I sorry, not saying it right. Yeah, I got to know him better after that book. Understood. You always always say understand your enemy, right? Right. I feel like I I have that. So definitely, I definitely recommend it. Even if you even despise him.

Anthony 46:34

Read the book. Oh, yeah, I don't despise him at all. I actually really admire uh Elon a great deal. Uh he's done some questionable things, but I'm actually still very much a fan of Elon. Um yeah, no, I'm a fan of Elon. I think he's uh he's a he's a he's an Edison, he's a real groundbreaker. So I yeah, I'm a big fan of him.

Roopinder 46:56

You probably have seen his have you seen his all glass, he's supposed to have built an all-glass house after saying he would never have a house ever in his life, he's built an all-glass structure.

Anthony 47:07

I know. People say a lot of things when they don't have all that money, and then when they have all that money. You have to understand when people have a lot of money, they they need to do something with it, and it's actually good because it puts people to work. So I I don't my uh I'm in the industry, the high end high-end net worth industry in my practice, and we do single family estates and stuff like that. And uh I actually on my projects when I walk around, I see so many people employed doing things and using their craftsmanship that they've acquired over the years. And so I actually I don't mind all the billionaire homes. I know they don't need them and they don't it's a lot of it is just ego and look at me, whatever, but but it does keep people working and get money out of wherever it's stored into the economy, and and and I I love that it actually keeps the craftsmanship, the ability to make really special things in this country still here in this country, so that we can make special things.

Roopinder 48:09

Yeah. Okay. I'll tell you, I'll tell you my I have a job story, I'll tell you as I had even though I never met him. You know, his his influence is pervasive, and his stories are awesome. This one's not a great story, but it's all I got. So I'm in I'm on a limo ride and I've been taken to on a press junket, for lack of a better word, to a dream work studio. And on there is not my usual crowd at all. Because we're there to look at Lenovo's uh, I think Lenovo workstations, no, HP workstations, sorry, HP Workstations. And uh the crowd is a movie crowd, and it's an Apple crowd, right? And it's not don't know anybody, but across the limousine for me, some of these stretch limos, uh, is a guy telling his job story, which to this day gave me a my first impression of Steve Jobs, right? He's he says, Oh, he had uh so here's uh him telling the story, and I'll paraphrasing don't know who the gentleman is, uh younger journalist Asian descent, and he was he said, I had iPhone.com, right? He had the he had a domain, yeah, and he was like very proud of that. He was gonna do things with it, but I don't know what, trying to develop it as a because iPhone was just starting to come out at that time. He had iPhone.com, and he said Steve Jobs came up to him at one of one of these um meetings. He was at this luncheon meet or session or something, some session that something jobs was throwing precedent, and he was there, and jobs actually came up to him. Jobs comes up right up to him. He's like hopping himself to the shrimp buffet or whatever, right? Jobs comes up to him and says, Hey, are you the guy with i iPhone.com? And he goes, Yeah. And uh and he jobs goes, can I have? And right, so he gave it to him, just gave it to him. And I think, oh my god, what an idiot. He gave it to him because he loved to be invited to these events, and he loved the fact that Jobs knew him, right? And Jobs didn't Jobs could have given him a million bucks easy, right? Uh out of his practically out of his pocket, right? And he and he just was so enamored of being in his presence that he just lost lost it. Yeah.com.

Anthony 50:43

Yeah, that's well, that's kind of that was like uh like a little bit of my fear and just walking at the jobs and and saying the Architosh guy. See, the other thing about the trademark and uh issue was that in the first year I started Arkintosh, a company that was a software software company did approach me and say, You're you're trespassing on my trademark. And so they had software called Arkitosh. And it was for I think landscape design or something like that. And I said, I basically wrote back saying, I'm not a software company, I'm a web, I'm a publication. So we're not in the same, we're not in the same industry.

Roopinder 51:26

And you're a market confusion.

Anthony 51:27

There's no yeah, there's no market confusion, and you you don't have a registered mark. So I think I'm fine. And I just I left it at that. Uh he didn't come after me, didn't do try to do anything. So, but it always dawned on me that um that person could come around and say, Hey, we're growing, you have Architosh.com, that's the name of our software. And I so I've always I was a little leery in the early years of just uh Architosh seemed like a really great name. I didn't want to lose it. I didn't think Apple would ever take it from me personally. I that's not why I didn't go up to jobs uh exactly. But I always had that in the back of my mind that what would he say to me about the name?

Roopinder 52:07

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, wonderful to talk to you again. We don't get to see each other anymore. I think the last time I remember we were in the same place. Was it Japan?

Anthony 52:17

Was it no? We were probably in no, some probably some Autodesk event, Autodesk University.

Roopinder 52:24

Yeah, probably. Okay. Yeah.

Anthony 52:26

I know you didn't go, you didn't go last year to Tennessee, right? You didn't go to Nashville.

Roopinder 52:30

No, I didn't go to Nashville. I think I missed the last SOLIDWORKS thing. Me too, I guess my wife got uh injured. I had to take care of her. Yeah, but I don't think I don't think what is your feeling on this? Do you think the cat CAD companies I'm finding that maybe it's just personally they don't want me to attend, but I'm thinking they're pretty much going with a new way of doing business with media. I don't think they're I find this other people too, like aren't aren't invited to their events anymore.

Anthony 52:58

But so well, I think there's been a pairing back. Uh some of the companies have been pairing back. So they used to invite maybe 13 people and now they're inviting nine or 10 or something. So some people are getting dropped. There's definitely less media invited at Autodesk University, I believe, from my experience in the past. Uh, I'm just thankful that I'm still getting invited. Uh and uh so yeah, um, I don't know what it is. I I think they are doing things differently. I think it's just, you know, the inflationary years post the pandemic, I have been challenging for the country and for a lot of companies. So I think it's just kind of a tightening the belt. The big Japan trip that we were on in what 2014. Did you go to the 2017 one? That was that was a graphic. I was never invited back. Oh, you didn't go to 20.

Influencers Versus Tacit Knowledge

Anthony 53:50

Okay, that was in Kyoto.

Roopinder 53:52

I only I went once. Yeah, no, I didn't know. You went once.

Anthony 53:54

Yeah, you went one. Kyoto. They had a great uh event. I think they realized I was I didn't know what I was talking about. Architecture. You're a mechanical guy. Yeah. That's why I don't write about mechanical design anymore. I start we stopped that a while back. Companies still reach out to me with press releases, and I say, I'm sorry, we're just AEC now. So I should probably make that more abundant and be clear.

Roopinder 54:17

But really, Anthony, how how long before they I think they're realizing, I think the world might be realizing we're not the influencers now, right? We don't, we're not the ones with TikTok accounts.

Anthony 54:29

Here's my answer to that. I think I'll counter that because I I agree on some level. You can go to YouTube and you can find people with zillions of followers and they could be talking about a lot of the same stuff we're talking about. The difference is that we're respected voices. They're not. Difference is we have tacit knowledge because we're older and have years of experience. They don't really have experience, so therefore they have no tacit knowledge. Um, they have no know-how because they that's what tacit knowledge really is. That's what I mean. And for me, uh Architosh is critically about tacit knowledge, getting my tacit knowledge as a practitioner, as an architect, doing a variety of things over my career at different scales, getting that into what I write about on some level. So there's a distinguishing factor about the things that I'm writing about that, say Martin Day, who's brilliant at what he does, can't exactly say because he's just a he is just an AEC industry journalist and not a practitioner. Right. So that's that's how I I that's my pitch for why they should keep inviting me.

Roopinder 55:37

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I I'm buying it. Honestly, I believe it. Yeah, I think it's right. I think it's considered myself an old pro. I just get worried, but uh absolutely and I find myself doing it too. Like if I want information, am I gonna read a tutorial by a pre an expert, or am I gonna find the answer on how I want to do this on YouTube? Like if I want to if I have trouble with uh a sketchup command, right? I'm gonna say, Oh, I'll ask, I'll get it on YouTube, and it only takes me a minute, right?

Anthony 56:10

Yep, it does. It only takes me a minute, okay. And there's a zillion people offering that help. Yeah, but no one dominates that market at all. No one dominates, exactly. Right, it's uh it's why it's a blue ocean for domination. It's a blue ocean there. The only one who's really benefiting is YouTube.

Roopinder 56:28

Yeah, oh, you're not kidding. That could be a whole subject of discussion, but YouTube is coming, right? Oh my god. All right, I bet I'll let you go. Anthony, it's been wonderful.

Anthony 56:38

Thanks so much for likewise. Thank you so much for the invite. Great conversation. All right, take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Roopinder 56:45

This concludes this episode of the History of CAD podcast. Please join me at our next episode as we add to the rich history of design software. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or know someone who has stories to share, please let me know via email at roopinder at edgetechnica.com. Update and sponsored episode of the History of CAD. Get the details on our website, engtechnica dot com slash sponsorship.