As I indicated in May, Autodesk will be increasing the cost of upgrades to 70% of the full retail cost of a new license. This renders it totally pointless upgrading Autodesk software at all, which is obviously Autodesk’s intention. This change probably won’t affect many people, as those who have chosen to stick with Autodesk despite everything have already been effectively forced onto Subscription. Anyway, here’s the confirmation from Autodesk:
In early 2013 Autodesk will simplify the current upgrade pricing model, which may affect pricing and/or eligibility for upgrades. Autodesk is providing advance notice to help ease the transition and ensure that customers have enough time to plan and budget for any impact to your organization.
As part of this change, Autodesk will be simplifying upgrades into a single offering available for licenses that are 1-6 versions old at a discount of 30% off new license SRP*. Under the new upgrade program, product versions 2007-2012 are eligible for upgrade pricing and product versions older than 2007 will no longer be eligible for upgrade pricing on our standard pricelists. Our records show you may have one or more licenses that may be impacted by these changes.
Autodesk is making this policy change to better align with the needs and buying behaviors of our customers. Many Autodesk customers choose to use Autodesk Subscription as their preferred method of maintaining their Autodesk Software.
That last paragraph is just embarrassing. It steps over the line that separates spin from total bullshit. The person who wrote it must have been either cringing (if they have any kind of ethical values) or laughing (if they don’t). The time of Autodesk being straight with its customers is now so far in the past that few customers will be able to remember those days. Those of us who do can only sadly shake our heads.
funny how they try to somehow connect the subscription buying habits of some with upgrade habits of others. It reads like a paper I might have written in 6th grade to satasfy some teacher giving an assignment I did not care about and just wanted to be done with.
So Autodesk quietly pulls the rig out from under a portion of its customers, so we quietly minimize Autodesk purchases to minimize future rug burn. Replacing Autodesk tools with ones we have control of has been the funnest, most rewarding activity I have ever done, and I am just getting started.
This statement by Autodesk would make a good example to use at a school for training spindoctors! What a load of bullshit.
Just another reason to leave Autocad for other alternatives such as Bricscad at a tenth of the price, or Draftsight which is free but without Lisp and some other commands. I have used Draftsight for a couple of years and have not found an Autocad drawing that it would not open – even opened one drawing that had been drawn in Autocad but Autocad wouldn’t even recover it.
30000 readers a month Steve looks like a good starting point for an Autodesk focused consumer group. A group who would support and speak as a collective for AutoCAD users in the areas of pricing, licencing and functionality etc.
As I said in another blog recently, there exist consumer groups for just about every conceivable sector, from small shop owners to mining companies – but NOT users of CAD. I sited there is even an Asparagus Council of Australia; for heavens sake if a vegetable (long thin vegetables sitting a round table discussing changes due to growth, competition from others, being cut in their prime and man-handled against their will etc.) has its own representative body maybe it’s overdue we users of CAD did like wise.
Or just another green idea sustainably lost in the cloud 😉
There would be no point in going through that exercise. Autodesk already has its own official user group. Why would it listen to some smaller unofficial group that tells it things it doesn’t want to hear?
Autodesk knows it is screwing over its customers. The customers know they are being screwed over. Autodesk knows the customers know they are being screwed over. Autodesk is not going to stop doing it, no matter what anyone says.
What to do? James and Michael are already doing it, and they are not alone.
The next step, at least for Civil Engineering, is to define schemas for typical objects we model like roads and pipelines. Then make editors and displayers for various cad programs and then we have BIM, if the schemas are done in a way that matches how design is done, and the editor (interface) is not so rocket science its not productive to use.
Then the engineering community says bye-bye to autodesk products except for things like visualizations, as autodesk’s Navisworks and Infrastructure Modeler do not have replacements that I have seen.
Since Autodesk has focused on its animation technologies so much, we will utilize the spillover into our industry, but its cad program has been prettymuch matched by Bricscad. I do wish it had a visual lisp editor though.
Autodesk – what a bunch of c#%ts