Architosh Staff ([email protected])

17 Nov 00

Microstation for Mac OS X, the future is open

Continued from page one.

Although we are currently focusing development on Wintel, this is not an indication that this will always be the case. From a business perspective, Windows has a large mindshare right now in the engineering and design market (and contributes to almost all of our product revenue at the moment), but we certainly do not consider it be *permanent* by any means. Computer technology has always been a dynamic -- and we expect it to always be that way. Since it is reasonable to expect that operating systems will come and go over time, when platforms are forecasted to become widely used throughout engineering and design organizations worldwide and the effort involved in porting products to other operating systems becomes more justifiable based on various, very dynamic market and business case variables -- all without impairing complete forward and backward compatibility of data and applications -- there is very good chance that we will again expand MicroStation's platform offering.

Interesting! Phil is saying that Bentley doesn't see the "mindshare" being focused on Windows "permanently". Might Linux or even OS X be up for chat in Bentley boardroom discussion regarding this lack of permanence?

Mac OS is Technically Challenging to Bentley?

Continuing...Phil adds:

Technical issues impacting next generation development on MacOS (or its derivatives) aside, the telling influence on our current position to move forward with next generation development is primarily a business-related one. Although Apple may have new *iron* and a *new* yet very Apple-specific OS, both still give us significantly more technical challenges than any other OS we've ever worked with (and we have worked on a number of them).

Hang on to us? OR Hang on to the Mac?

We will continue to support Microstation SE and other existing products on MacOS as long as there are necessary and sufficient reasons to do so. And SELECT subscribers may choose to take advantage of the free platform swap under SELECT. In the mean time, Microstation SE is still a very productive edition of Microstation and will serve its users well.

This is very important... we are not *dropping* or stopping development or support on anything else, we are only *suspending* development of next generation products until business/marketing conditions can justify the significant amount of effort that it would take to port Microstation to other platforms. 15 years ago, Microstation was on 1 platform, eventually being ported to 13 (note that we ported Microstation to Windows NT before anyone else -- in fact, Bill Gates himself was showing Microstation running on Windows NT in Baltimore when the OS was introduced).

Will the OS Cycle Repeat Itself?

Phil seems to think it will. He continues:

We anticipate that various intangible conditions will prevail in the future and the cycle will again repeat itself. We are absolutely not closed to that.