In creation of construction documents, AutoCad and Microstation have few serious competitors. Drafts, especially architectural construction or planning documents are routinely 2d, since often there is simply not enough information at early stages to work with 3d. Autodesk also provides BIM (building information modeling) in Architectural Desktop and more fully in Revit, but most architect still stick to 2d cad, for speed and accuracy.
One thing that sets Autocad apart from the competition is its text-driven interface. It's been tricked out with icons and menus in the last decade or so, but drawing in AutoCad is essentially issuing commands. This makes it unbelievably fast for the practiced user. I recently switched to mac, but only because Parallels allows me to run AutoCad on it. Earlier, that had been the deal breaker.
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In creation of construction documents, AutoCad and Microstation have few serious competitors. Drafts, especially architectural construction or planning documents are routinely 2d, since often there is simply not enough information at early stages to work with 3d. Autodesk also provides BIM (building information modeling) in Architectural Desktop and more fully in Revit, but most architect still stick to 2d cad, for speed and accuracy.
One thing that sets Autocad apart from the competition is its text-driven interface. It's been tricked out with icons and menus in the last decade or so, but drawing in AutoCad is essentially issuing commands. This makes it unbelievably fast for the practiced user. I recently switched to mac, but only because Parallels allows me to run AutoCad on it. Earlier, that had been the deal breaker.
AutoCad, for all its flaws, is hardly irrelevant.