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Great BIM solution just keeps getting better.
Like fine wine and close friendships, some things just get better with age. Graphisoft's ArchiCAD, which has been around for 25 years, falls into that category for me. Back in the mid-1990s, it was one of the first software products I reviewed, and that first review was a revelation. ArchiCAD was far ahead of its competition at the time - almost anyone who wanted a PC- or Mac-based modeling, drafting, and visualization solution specific to architecture would have otherwise had to buy and integrate two, three, or more programs to accomplish all that ArchiCAD could provide by itself. The product has improved consistently ever since.
Down Memory Lane
Although ArchiCAD was a top contender for many U.S.based architects in the mid-1990s, the product had a few limitations back then - limitations that for some prospective purchasers tipped the scales in favor of one or another competing product and kept ArchiCAD from becoming more dominant. For example, early versions of ArchiCAD lacked sophisticated means of sharing the work among project team members, a problem long since solved by ArchiCAD's TeamWork function - still, in my opinion, among the market's most robust and flexible solutions for project workload sharing. The ArchiCAD of yore lacked true reference-file capability, an oversight long since fixed by its HotLink capability, something that has been even further enhanced in ArchiCAD 12. Users of older versions had to access a separate, albeit bundled, program - PlotMaker - to generate printed output, an inconvenience long since solved by integrating PlotMaker's functions directly into ArchiCAD itself. These and other perceived shortcomings of the past were corrected well before the current release of ArchiCAD 12, thereby keeping the product more than competitive as a top contender for architectural design and documentation.
As a historical footnote, Graphisoft used the label "virtual building" long before I popularized an old academic/ research term - building information modeling (BIM) - to describe this new generation of technologies. In many ways, I thought and still think virtual building is a better descriptor, but Graphisoft asserts proprietary trademark rights to that name, so a multivendor consensus wouldn't have been possible. Hence, virtual building is Graphisoft's preferred term for its BIM approach, and ArchiCAD deserves...