The Last Good Software

An ode to Robert McNeel & Associates' Rhinoceros 3D

Greater one-horned rhinoceros

If you’ve been designing anything as long as I have, you’ve noticed a steady decline of quality in digital software. The pattern follows the general explosion and slow degradation of the tech boom of the early aughts. Spaces like the internet were bastions of freedom and expression only to be slowly infiltrated by monied interests, dark actors, and unuseful idiots.

The most visceral example of this in my own experience is the arc of Adobe. What started as a revolutionary piece of software has come to exemplify all the issues of our overly digitized society.

Founded in 1982, the company was one of those scrappy garage-based groups to come out of Silicon Valley in the digital gold rush. It was built on all the values you’ve come to know and love: innovation, positive change, and above all freedom. As American as Apple (pie).

For a time, it lived up to these values. When I went to undergraduate school for architecture, we were required to procure what is called the Creative Suite. Somehow, we all found plentiful cheap and/or free copies, software that originated on an actual Compact Disc. This wasn’t even the craziest part; believe it or not, once installed on your computer, you had access to the software… forever. Sure, some of us wanted to the latest features of CS6 etc., but it was entirely possible to get through all our educations on one installation.

This all changed in 2013. By the time I returned to grad school, I was confronted by the horror of a new subscription model. Rather than installing the software and owning it once, I was now forced to make monthly payments, i.e. rent, to Adobe. To justify such a predatory model, Adobe started introducing updates in a feckless fashion, and by the time I was graduating it was impossible to keep up with all the sneaky changes that appeared overnight, even while working in studio.

Most of the software and tech platforms have followed this trajectory, what some refer to as the “enshittification” of everything. All of the platforms we once found fun or useful are now prisons we are struggling to escape. Others even argue that we’ve entered a whole new form of economy built on digital peonage. But one bit of software stands out from the rest: Robert McNeel’s Rhinoceros3D.

Rhino is as integral to many design practices as Adobe, but it has one key difference: it hasn’t converted to a subscription model. But why the difference from other predatory companies? In many ways the origin story is the same: founded in 1980 on the west coast, the company sought to bring physical modeling and form generation into the computer. It was equally as revolutionary as anything Adobe has done, and it eventually became one of the primary pieces of software in design education and practice.

The difference then is in something that is hidden behind many of the usual facts and stories about such companies: its ownership structure. Publicly traded companies such as Adobe will do anything to hide the fact that its outgoing CEO is one of the highest paid in the entire country, necessary for the low-paid designers and artists who are squeezed to generate such eye-popping numbers. In contrast, the “about” page on Rhino’s website leads with important information about its structure. Not only is Rhino private, but it is an employee-owned company. While it’s not cheap per se - $995 for a single license, $195 for students and faculty - one year of AutoCAD is twice the cost at $2,095 without any form of ownership.

I’m filling in some gaps here, but I have a strong hunch that the fact the Rhino is an employee-owned company has a lot to do with this. While it is most likely an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan), meaning workers have less say then in cooperative or union models, it does mean at the very least the profits aren’t being distributed to shareholders who have little more interested than turning a profit. Instead, the employees are incentivized to see that the company is successful because it directly benefits them, a form of self-interest I’m ok with. There’s also a sense of pride that can come out of this model because of a pseudo form of company ownership.

Today Rhino is such an effective piece of software, and continues to improve so much, that I’m currently working on an architecture project using it alone. I’d like to think that a lot of that is because the employees actually care about the product they are making and have pride in it. I would have traditionally used AutoCAD or Revit from Autodesk, but the subscription models have become so costly that I can’t afford to do the work with them. But Bob McNeel & Associates have got my back.

Sadly, Rhino appears to be more of a vestige of the past than a harbinger of the future. But at the very least it’s a reminder that we can still have good, affordable software, if we can just get rid of the greed.