I have closed the three satisfaction rating polls I started a couple of months ago and will be reporting the results individually. The usual caveats about online polls apply.
This poll indicates that Autodesk customer satisfaction levels are perhaps not quite as elevated as they could be. The mean rating is 2.75, the median is 2 and the mode is 0. Yes, zero. Very dissatisfied customers outnumber very satisfied ones by nearly ten to one. That’s pretty emphatic.
If Autodesk had left its policies alone and tried to run a huge PR campaign to deliberately make itself as unpopular with its customers as possible, I doubt that it could have achieved anything like this poor a result. Congratulations, I guess.
Although this is an appalling result for Autodesk, it should come as no surprise to anyone. This reflects the sentiment I see pretty much everywhere, in a wide variety of online forums and when talking to all sorts of people in person.
Lesson for the day: there’s no point in spending a billion dollars a year on marketing if you’re going to do things that make you about as popular as a fart in an elevator.
Are “Cloud Rights” which are rental only (perpetual licenses on maintenance are excluded) likely to make customers more or less satisfied with Autodesk. Since this is Autodesk I think we all know the answer.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Subscription-Benefits-FAQ-Cloud-Rights.html
Let me get my head around this.
Autodesk removed certain important rendering capabilities in 2018 versions of its M & E software. Now it’s giving back an alternative, but excluding perpetual license owners from using that alternative. Even those who are paying maintenance.
Do I have this right?
What they give back Is not exactly the same what they give back to rental customers. They took away free LOCAL network rendering capabilities from their 2018 M&E products ( Max & Maya ). Now they give back some – what to me seems to be – bastardized cloud based virtual machines which run those headless* Max/Maya sessions, to render over the cloud. Technically, from the performance aspect this looks worse to me than having a dedicated cloud rendering service ( which would have to run the standalone renderer only )
*Headless means running the application without UI and without a license needed. This is still available with the 2018 versions, except that now the main renderers ( included Arnold, or – now 3rd party- Mental Ray) do require a paid license now per node
But might be a hint that this also enables to run heavy particle sims ( Bifrost etc ) in the cloud. How they or their cloud users handle the gazillion of gigabytes of data required to transfer up and down then, remains to be a miracle to me…
Steve
Basically that but with the added Autodesk twist of them still technically offering unlimited network rendering with the half baked and soon to be abandoned ART renderer.
Autodesk, technically correct but practically useless.
Like the points that Josef and Dave bring up, there will certainly be unwelcome, but totally expected, caveats when Autodesk makes the final announcement at the end of August. Probably something like the limited amount of A360 rendering credits that maintenance users got when they first offered that useless feature to Max subscribers a few years ago. Of course since Arnold is not exactly a fast renderer and calculating and caching a few hundred gigabytes of particle or dynamic simulations isn’t going to be speedy, the crystal ball says that this “benefit” will be restricted to the lowest specification VM that they offer and will make completing any of these tasks in a reasonable amount of time impossible without paying extra for a more powerful instances.
That poll just describes your audience 🙂
If you did such a poll at my company, the users would say “Does Autodesk make autocad?”
Its the narrow band of people like CAD Managers that see the loveliness going on, and visit sites like this. I’m sure adesk would twist that and say “Most users do not have bad feelings toward adesk.”
That is because they don’t know you, adesk.
Let Andrew bake that.
I don’t think my audience is dissatisfied with Autodesk because they read my blog. 🙂 However, there will definitely be a self-selecting bias because dissatisfied customers are more likely to come here.
Unfortunately for Autodesk, the narrow band of people like CAD Managers are purchasing influencers and decision makers. Yes, we’re dissatisfied. Very. And we’re taking positive action to reduce our exposure to the strong risk that Autodesk software represents.
“Now they give back some – what to me seems to be – bastardized cloud based virtual machines which run those headless* Max/Maya sessions, to render over the cloud.”
This falls into the category of future additional charges (benefits in Autodesk babblespeak) to play in the Autodesk sandbox. I figure they have fees for bandwidth usage and server farm usage coming up and these will be in addition to everything else. The whole model is based on squeezing more juice from the same lemon and so the move to the cloud. Eventually they will charge you to store the files they force you to save to the cloud. Fusion360 already makes every edit and file creation save to remote servers and you have to save them to use them later don’t you. They will force you to go there and then make you pay $$$$$ to stay there.