The battle lines in the war for CAD dominance are just beginning to form Initially almost unnoticed in its rapid rise to success by the ``high-end'' vendors, Autodesk is just now beginning to skirmish with full-function, turnkey-vendors such as Intergraph. Short-sightedness (or more properly, blinding stupidity) on the part of Intergraph management has led them to believe that we have been isolated in the ``low-end'' category of CAD/CAM, and to design an attack on us there.
The guns they are bringing to bear on us are aboard their MicroStation product, their desktop solution which they offer in direct competition to AutoCAD, while their flagship product aims its cannons at more `sophisticated'' competition.
What Intergraph fails to realize, of course, is that by combining more and more functionality with greater and greater openness and adaptability, we at Autodesk will soon have the ability to create whatever we need to provide the customer useful products at all levels, from high to low and everything in between, eventually to include a battleship that will blow them out of the water.
The thought of breaking through the barricades, confronting the enemy on his own ground and defeating him with superior weapons is almost poetic in its justice and simplicity.