Good morning everyone, It is strange but I have noticed that Bentley has been merging it various product lines into smaller groups.. i.e. GeoOutlook, Geographics, Geoexchange, Descartes, Reprographics --> V8 Geographics? Our company was reviewing our upgrade options last week and we were surprised that most of the products that we bought several years ago were no longer available individually...it is better for us now because we only have to buy 1 license (V8+Select EC) but my boss then realised that maybe there really is not much difference between the 4 products that we bought individually before. Somehow he felt that the company was duped into buying the 5 products individually (some with Select!!!). To make things worse, we were also not notified that the said products were being delisted. No upgrade option to V8 even if part of Select.... So after reviewing some of our other options based on purchased price, my boss opted to go with IntelliCAD 4 (only $100+!!). We will use the existing individual products until they drop dead from exhaustion... This post is just to let other companies out there who are still chained to the Bentley products to also review their options.
Jose Agree, generally; don't think Bentley deliberately set out to disadvantage or upset their customers. However, an example of this was the dropping of Modeler along with a promise that most of it would be inorporated in a future release of Microstation. That was several years ago & Modeler has not made it fully into Microstation yet; meantime subscribers have made 4-5 Select payments....but that's how it goes for most CAD vendors- look at the furore over Inventor Professional! Its often at this point that infatuation with one's favourite system begins to pall & you start looking at alternatives; I did a training course in SolidWorks which (almost) convinced me to buy it. 2 years later along comes Alibre at 10% the cost of SW & lots of the same functionality- then there's Rhino.......... How to choose- even if you could afford them all there's not enough time to train in all; but a lot of folks are waking up to the realisation that the old established mainstream CAD products are ridiculously expensive, especially allowing for their outdated interfaces & toolsets. This is where the subscription model falls down; essentially you are running the same 1980's car with facelifts & exorbitant maintenance costs. Better to ditch it & buy a new model to benefit from the latest technology?
