So what is Project Vasari and why waste time on it?

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There are many bloggers out there getting very excited because Autodesk have released a technology preview called Project Vasari, I'm not one of them!

What is Project Vasari?

Take a look at David Lights Revit Blog, Steve Staffords Revit OpEd, and The Revit Kid

David Light “ Absolutely loves it! I had heard through the grapevine that Autodesk where working on something special, a kind or LT version of Revit.” David also says “There are some which will not get that excited, because if you use full Revit then you already have access to this functionality so Vasari may not offer anything new.”

David has it right there, for Structural and MEP Engineers that already have Revit, the fact that Autodesk are spending valuable time money and resources cutting back the code from Revit to create a kind of Lite version that will be superior to Sketch up seem to us to be complete and utter waste.

Autodesk still has so much that does not work properly in the full version of Revit, that we pay big bucks for, and that we keep on subscription in the constant hope that they will provide or fix the basic tools that have been moaned about by users over the last few years.

Will Autodesk be giving a version of Vasari or Revit LT when finally released away free like Sketch up?

Will there then be a Vasari or Revit LT professional version, that you will have to pay for like Sketchup Professional?

Normally Autodesk buys off the competition, buying the user base then if the product is any good it replaces what they are currently selling. Cast your mind back to Generic CADD which was bought and sold as an AutoCAD Lite before they killed and then replaced it with a true cut down version of AutoCAD LiTe within a month of an upgrade.

ADT got dropped in favour of Revit, It seem to me that if they can’t buy Sketchup to get its user base and then kill it, then they are going to try and compete with it.

Why call it Vasari?

David Light has his own ideas about why the name Vasari has been used, however according to the historian Richard Goldthwaite, Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the word "competition" (or "concorrenza") in Italian in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, but perhaps most notably while explaining the reasons for Florentine preeminence, in the introduction to his life of Pietro Perugino.

Autodesk spend some of our money and fix the darn Basics in Revit like the Text Editor, so that it give at least the functionality that AutoCAD has enjoyed for many years .i.e. Subscript, Superscript fractions etc etc.

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As I've not been invited to Beta Test RST2012 and thus not bound by any NDA, I'm speculating that there is very little in the way of advancement on the Structures front for Revit2012 and I'm likely to be disappointed next year like I was with the SAP for RST2011 this year.

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