Yearly Archives: 2017

I didn’t expect to see any comment about the policy of denying bug fixes to some customers from any Autodesk high-ups, but I was mistaken.

Here’s a quote on just this subject from Autodesk Senior Vice President¹, Buzz Kross:

It’s just bad business. Why would you not want to take care of your customers? I would never do that. Come on, we all make mistakes. All software has bugs and as a developer, I have an obligation to provide fixes to all my paying customers, whether they are on subscription or not. Customers on subscription have the advantage of getting access to new stuff. That’s fine. But denying them access to bug fixes is just not right.

Buzz Kross, Senior Vice President, Autodesk¹
9 April 2010

Photo: Autodesk

It’s not often I so completely agree with an Autodesk executive¹, but I can find no fault in his logic. Thank you, Buzz.

1. Although Buzz is still listed as a SVP in some Autodesk online materials, he’s no longer with the company.

Autodesk confirms its own unconscionable conduct

40 Replies

It took several attempts over a period of months and was like pulling teeth, but Autodesk has now confirmed that it is deliberately withholding bug fixes from some of its customers.

Autodesk has taken customers’ money and in return has provided defective software (OK, that happens). It has fixed some of those defects (that happens too, sometimes). But it’s limiting distribution of those fixes to those prepared to pay Autodesk further (that has never happened before).

Just let that sink in. Autodesk broke stuff you paid for, could easily fix it, but won’t do so unless you pay more. If you thought ransomware only came from Russia, think again.

Here’s how the scam works.

Let’s say customer Fred paid thousands of dollars for his perpetual license of AutoBLOB and paid thousands more for upgrades and maintenance over several decades. Due to Autodesk no longer making significant improvements to AutoBLOB, he finally gave up hope and decided to drop off maintenance. Understandable, particularly as Autodesk has announced maintenance prices are getting jacked up.

Never mind. Thanks to his perpetual license, Fred can keep right on using AutoBLOB! Aren’t perpetual licenses just the best thing?

Let’s say Fred made the decision after discovering AutoBLOB 2017 was slower than, and really not significantly better than, AutoBLOB 2016, 2015 or even 2010. Fred’s maintenance period carried him through to beyond the release of AutoBLOB 2018, which he intended using for a few years until he transitioned to an alternative product. (Or until Autodesk Becomes Great Again, but Fred doesn’t consider that likely).

Meantime, Fred discovers that there’s a new bug in AutoBLOB 2018 that makes it useless for his needs. It’s not a crash, drawing corruption or security issue, but it is something that makes it difficult of impossible for him to produce the required output. Because he installed AutoBLOB 2018 before his maintenance expired, Autodesk won’t allow him to use 2017 or any earlier version.

Meanwhile, Autodesk has, miracles of miracles, developed a fix for that nasty bug. All Fred has to do is download and install the hotfix or Service Pack, right? Wrong. Because Autodesk has wrapped up the bug fix with AutoBLOB 2018.1, a mid-term update that includes not only bug fixes but also a few new minor feature improvements. Unlike the competition, Autodesk restricts such updates to continuously paying customers. AutoBLOB 2018.1 is therefore only available to subscription and maintenance customers. Fred’s bug has been “deemed non-critical” by Autodesk and therefore the fix won’t be distributed to him.

Fred is screwed by a combination of Autodesk’s worst aspects: chronic failure to improve the product, price-gouging business practices, incompetence in development and testing, and unreasonably restrictive licensing terms. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s then screwed again by one final, nasty, vindictive, petty piece of bastardry by a company desperate to strong-arm its reluctant customers into subscription slavery.

This is not OK.

This is no way to treat customers. It’s unethical. It’s unconscionable. It’s immoral. It’s disgusting. It’s evil.

In the EU at least, it could well be illegal. I certainly hope so; Autodesk being fined a few hundred million Euros might discourage other companies from following suit.

Although it’s tempting to think of Autodesk as a single edifice, it’s important to remember that it’s made up of many individuals. Many of them are great people who would never dream of stooping this low and who are probably quietly embarrassed to be associated with a company that does so. Those people have my sympathy and should stop reading now.

But if you’re that person at Autodesk who thought up this idea? Or one of those who thought it would be OK to do this? Or just sat silently during the meetings where this was discussed and didn’t pipe up, “This is just WRONG”? I have a message for you.

You’re an asshole.

Yet more Autodesk software falls off the perch

3 Replies

Just when I thought I was having a nice vacation from tending the Autodesk Graveyard (see also Autodesk products are falling like parrots), another bunch of former best-thing-ever products have bitten the dust.

This time, it’s Autodesk’s Gameware middleware products that have been read the Last Rites. Scaleform, Beast, HumanIK and Navigation can no longer be purchased or maintained. If you used these products, support will cease as soon as your existing maintenance agreement expires. More details on cgchannel.com.

That leaves Stingray as the only surviving middleware product (for now). That’s probably only still alive because Autodesk wants the halo effect associated with currently-fashionable-again Virtual Reality. But how long that remains enough for survival is anybody’s guess.

My brief experience with Stingray at an Autodesk event left me with the impression that it’s a fair way short of being a finished product. I have been much more impressed with Autodesk’s competition in this area. Autodesk’s currently in Product Grim Reaper mode, which is understandable given Autodesk’s ridiculously large product portfolio. However, that does mean that potential Stingray users should be very wary of investing time and resources in a bleeding-edge product that might not be around for long.

Anybody care to have a guess at which Autodesk product(s) will be killed off next?

Image of war graves by Arne Hückelheim.
No disrespect intended to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Lest we forget.

Can’t comment? Working on it.

5 Replies

Despite most things being fixed, some blog nauseam maintenance issues are still happening. Although some people can comment, others can’t. It’s being looked into, along with a couple of other issues.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

What’s changed at blog nauseam and why

8 Replies

Last week, blog nauseam died. This post explains the background to that. You’re probably not that interested, so feel free to skip to the dot points that list the changes that have resulted.

The problem was a faulty WordPress installation was using excessive resources. This caused severe performance issues and resulted in the server software stepping in to throttle the site to prevent more widespread problems. The trigger for the WordPress fault has not been determined and may never be. This is somewhat akin to an old AutoCAD drawing suddenly going bad for unknown reasons. The problem may date back years but only recently became critical.

In discussions with my completely blameless web host, Saratoga Hosting, we determined the best course of action was to create a new, clean WordPress site and transfer over as much as possible from the mortally wounded old installation. This is similar to copying and pasting or inserting valid entities from a bad drawing to a clean one, and this is what we did.

I say ‘we’ because Dave from the most excellent Saratoga did a huge amount of work for me to ensure things went as smoothly as possible and with the best result. This is not the first time I have received quite outstanding above-and-beyond customer service from Saratoga in return for the few measly bucks a month I pay for hosting. Thank you, Dave!

Doing things this way provided opportunities for several improvements to both blog nauseam and its parent site, cadnauseam.com. These include:

Improving performance. A clean install that’s not generating many errors per second will load much faster than one that isn’t, just like a small clean program like BricsCAD will perform much better than an old bloated mess like AutoCAD that’s attempting to do hundreds of things a second even when sitting there doing nothing.
Upgrading site security. In addition to various unseen improvements including upgraded protection against hackers and better backups, the site now uses https SSL security, which is the way things are going to have to be in coming years. You may have noticed that the URL now starts with https:// and displays a little closed padlock, indicating this is a secure site.
Integrating cad nauseam with blog nauseam. My old cad nauseam site was a bunch of hand-coded HTML pages that were real cool in the 90s but which have been neglected for years. It’s now part of the same WordPress installation as the blog, which avoids duplication of various things and is much easier to maintain. It also makes sense for me from a business point of view to have my business site more closely associated with a successful blog.
Modern full-screen interface. The integration of cad nauseam and blog nauseam didn’t work well with the old Tempera site template, so I took the opportunity to switch to a cleaner, more modern looking template, Fluida. In addition to being very configurable, this template does all sorts of fancy hover-over stuff that some of you will undoubtedly hate, but in my tests it performed well and didn’t get in my way. The best thing about it is that it’s now full-width: Tempera was not. Some of you won’t like that change either, but I always dislike using a web site that confines itself to a narrow stripe in the middle of a high resolution CAD screen. Now I don’t have to dislike my own site.
I’ve redesigned the favicon to reflect the dual cad nauseam / blog nauseam nature of the site.

I have now restored the polls and image galleries. The automated redirection of old URLs to the new location should now be working. The downloads page is still a work in progress and will remain hidden for a while, but that’s mostly of historical interest anyway.

Again, my apologies for the breakdown and the inconvenience of change, but I’m glad that there have been quite a few positives arising from a bad situation.

If there are things about the site you don’t like now, feel free to let me know.

Link

My apologies for the inconvenience, but please adjust your bookmarks! The home page URL for blog nauseam is now:

https://www.cadnauseam.com/blogs/

The old URL of http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/ is now permanently inoperative, along with all URLs based on it. The cad nauseam URL of www.cadnauseam.com is unchanged.

The content from the old blog has been carried across and can be found at related URLs. For example, one of the most popular posts is AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal”. The URL for this was:

www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2016/07/19/autocad-2017-putting-things-back-to-normal

The new URL is now:

www.cadnauseam.com/2016/07/19/autocad-2017-putting-things-back-to-normal

So all you need to do to is remove “.blog” from the old URL and it will work. I will automate this process if possible but there are complications preventing that in the short term.

Also missing in the short term are polls and image galleries. I’m working on those. If you have any other problems with the site, please let me know by commenting on this post. If you have trouble commenting, please hit me up on Twitter.

I’ll explain some of the other changes around here in a later post.

Automated .NET 4.7 update kills AutoCAD pre 2017

7 Replies

Thanks to Robert Green for pointing this out:

Microsoft is installing .NET 4.7 as part of their auto updates and it is causing many legacy Autodesk applications to crash on any ribbon interaction. Touch the ribbon, away goes your software.

If you can keep from installing the 4.7 framework do so. If the damage is already done then uninstall .NET 4.7 and install .NET 4.6.2 using this download link. Note that the uninstall of the offending version must be done first!

AutoCAD 2013 to 2016 and Inventor are affected, and possibly other products. BricsCAD users are unaffected.

It is also reported that you can work around the problem by hacking the registry to identify an earlier .NET version as being installed (the usual caveats apply). That’s described in this Autodesk Knowledgebase article that works around a related but slightly different issue.

Don’t you just love the way continuous automated updates enhance and enrich the user experience?

blog nauseam maintenance issues

3 Replies

For as yet unknown reasons, this blog went down a couple of days ago. The basics are back but it’s not all there yet. There may be performance issues for a while. Please be patient while I work with some people to get things back how they should be.

I would like to thank all of those people who informed me of this issue using various means. I appreciate it!

I continue to snigger at your pronouncements of technological inevitability

2 Replies

Back in January, I declared my amusement at people proclaiming impending technology trend takeovers as inevitable and irresistible. Among other things, I had this to say (it’s a familiar phrase in Britain):

What a load of bollocks.

Today I was provided with another example (thanks Ralph):

What falling e-book sales tell us about technology in 2017

I encourage you to read that post, which seems to me to be right on the money. E-books, yesterday’s Next Big Thing, are now in sharp decline. The inevitable technology takeover turned out to be not quite so inevitable after all. Who could have guessed?

Here’s another quote from my January post:

Next time somebody tries to tell you something like, “The whole software industry is moving to the rental model, all software will be sold that way soon, there will be no avoiding it,” please refer them to paragraph two above.

Autodesk has bet the farm on not just one apparently inevitable technology trend, but two. If either rental-only software and cloud-based CAD/BIM/M&E fail to live up to expectations, Autodesk will be in a world of pain.

That’s quite a gamble, and Autodesk has already blown a billion bucks on what it probably thought was a sure thing. Anybody who thinks there’s such a thing as a sure thing in technology hasn’t been paying attention.

Autodesk now has only one CEO

9 Replies

The speculation is over. Autodesk no longer has Schrödinger’s CEO. Elon Musk has missed out, the winner is…

Andrew “Baked Beans” Anagnost!

Here’s the press release and here’s a letter from Andrew.

The other obvious internal candidate, Amar Hanspal, has decided to leave the company. Resigned on the spot, so I’m told. As the financial rewards for winning the CEO race are akin to winning the lottery, coming second must have been a major disappointment to product guy Amar, who I first met when he was helping to drive the hugely successful Release 14 program. Best wishes to Amar for the future and congratulations to Andrew.

In this welcome video, Andrew talks a lot about products; he seems to be trying to shake off the “marketing guy” image.

Unsurprisingly, he makes it clear that he’s still very keen on the troubled cloud and subscription strategies he has been instrumental in pushing within Autodesk. Expect no respite there, then.

Andrew wants to hear from you, though:

And to our partners and our customers, I’m looking forward to listening to all of you as well, and understanding what you love and what you would like to improve about Autodesk.

I know Andrew reads this blog, so go ahead and let him know what you love and what you would like to improve.

Further Autodesk subscription inflexibility

5 Replies

Autodesk’s claim that its all-rental business model adds flexibility for customers has always been bullshit.

That’s a self-evident truth. Nobody believes that removing customers’ purchasing options amounts to anything but inflexibility. Particularly when the purchasing option removed is that preferred by the vast majority of customers.

But wait! There’s more! I recently discovered that it’s even more inflexible than I originally thought!

If you sign up for single-user (standalone) subscription licenses you’re stuck with them for the duration of your agreement. You can’t upgrade them to multi-user (network) licenses. Doesn’t matter how much cash you wave in Autodesk’s face, or how much you point out that single-user subscription licensing is a crock, it will be a case of “computer says no”.

Astonishing.

Bentley marketers love Autodesk

5 Replies

Bentley Systems marketers are currently taking advantage of Autodesk customers’ distaste for the Big A’s rent-or-GTFO business model.

For any Autodesk competitor, this is a fairly smart move. Autodesk has offered a free kick to its competitors and is betting on them all kicking the ball wide of the net. How accurate is Bentley’s shooting?

In this case, AutoCAD customers are being encouraged to take up MicroStation. Via the Cadalyst Direct opt-in advertising list, I received an email entitled AutoCAD Users, you need options. We listened:

Talk about feeling trapped (which has many Autodesk customers angry), options and flexibility (which Autodesk has removed) and listening (which Autodesk really sucks at) are clearly taking advantage of Autodesk’s self-inflicted subscription predicament.

“Work the way you want to” is only partly true. If you want to work with a pool of network licenses and not get unpleasant surprises in the way of excess-use invoices every so often, the Bentley Select licensing system may not be for you. Bentley has fixed some of the worst aspects of that system but it’s still controversial and unpopular.

It’s also stretching things to describe DWG as a natively supported format with no data conversions necessary. It’s true that MicroStation has supported open and save of DWG for some years, but as a secondary format. It’s not like BricsCAD, where DWG is the primary format and files can generally be seamlessly shared with AutoCAD users. I know from personal experience that DWG files originating in MicroStation cause a bunch of problems for AutoCAD users. I’ve had to write code to work around some of the issues.

Back to the marketing. The email, complete with imagery of a man cramped up in a cardboard box, pointed me to this page with a similarly confined woman:

With the cardboard box theme, it’s a good thing that Bentley isn’t marketing to cats. They would probably make ideal Autodesk customers.

So what’s the substance of the offer here?

If you own AutoCAD perpetual licenses, you can receive credit for the current value of your AutoCAD license toward the purchase of a MicroStation perpetual license.

That’s as specific as it gets: “credit for the current value of your AutoCAD license” could mean anything. Autodesk doesn’t sell software any more, so what’s the value of a license that has no current list price? You could have bought your AutoCAD 30 years ago for $2000 and spend $15000 keeping it up to date. How much credit do you get based on that value? 100%? 1%?

It’s an unknown discount off an unknown amount. What are the terms and conditions? Which AutoCAD releases and variants qualify? Do you get to keep your AutoCAD license? (Of course you do, Bentley can’t take it away from you, but they could have said so).

To fill in the gaps you’re expected to fill in a form and presumably get a quote. I bet most people will stop right there and close the browser window. I don’t know about you, but my interest in offers falls off dramatically when I can’t see what’s being offered.

I think Bentley has kicked the ball the wrong side of the post here.

Autodesk subscription offer begins today

ADSK celebrates two full years of losses

8 Replies

Autodesk Reports Strong First Quarter Results, says the press release.

Autodesk co-CEO Amar Hanspal:

Broad-based strength across all subscription types and geographies led to another record quarter for total subscription additions and a fantastic start of the new fiscal year. Customers continue to embrace the subscription model, and we’re expanding our market opportunity with continued momentum of our cloud-based offerings, such as BIM 360 and Fusion 360.

Autodesk co-CEO Andrew Anagnost:

We’re executing well and making significant progress on our business model transition as evidenced by our first quarter results. We’re starting the year from a position of strength and are excited to kick off the next phase of our transition when we offer our maintenance customers a simple, cost effective path to product subscription starting next month.

Thanks to this fantastic progress into the exciting new customer-embraced rental-only business model, Autodesk has now recorded eight successive strong quarters of losses totalling $969 million. Another strong quarter like this one will see those losses exceed a billion dollars, and then it will really be time to crack open the champagne.

Here’s how those results look. Green shows profit; red shows loss. The black lines are trend lines. The thick one is linear, the thin one is a 4-quarter moving average.

Here’s an Adobe graph for comparison; it covers a wider date range. The linear trend line is not directly comparable because the Adobe graph includes a recovery phase which Autodesk has yet to enter.

Both graphs represent GAAP results that do not reflect deferred revenue (money that is received but not counted immediately). Autodesk is still making a loss in non-GAAP terms, but a smaller one than shown in the graph. Full details of Autodesk’s financials are available here. Make your own financial decisions based on your own interpretations and/or using the advice of parties better qualified than myself.

The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?

2 Replies

This is the final post in a series covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. If you’ve made it through to the end of this series, congratulations! I hope you found it illuminating.

In this post, R.K. McSwain asks a question about a possible BricsCAD-based DWG viewer, which turns into a brainstorming session!

R.K.: Do you guys have a viewer? A read-only viewer? Is it something you’re looking to do?

Erik: No. BricsCAD classic costs, you know, $400.

Steve: Autodesk is giving one away anyway.

R.K.: They give it away, but you know what it is. It’s almost a 1 GB download, I was thinking as maybe a way to get people interested in BricsCAD? Here’s a viewer, I wonder what else it can do…

Mark: What? (disbelieving) The viewer is almost one gig?

Steve: It’s about 800 MB.

Erik: It’s a matter of choices and priorities.

Steve: It is a marketing opportunity. A viewer that’s easier to use, because you can download and install it within five minutes. And you could be providing them with basically BricsCAD with stuff disabled. You could even have a Buy Me button that un-disables that stuff.

Erik: Yeah, yeah!

Steve: This isn’t an interview now, it’s a product brainstorming session!

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

Mark: Let’s continue! Let’s continue! As you know, you can download our software and evaluate it for 30 days (and you can ask for an extension) but one of the options we’ve discussed is that after the 30 days it turns into a viewer.

Erik: Maybe we’ll do that.

R.K.: That gives them the 30 day window up front, even if they’re just looking for the viewer.

Erik: Yeah.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 10 – platforms

The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers

5 Replies

This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. Erik explains that Bricsys won’t trample over its application partners in Autodesk-like fashion, except…

Steve: Autodesk is known for treading on its third-party developers and replacing their market. Can you tell us about your attitude to doing that?

Erik: We have always said that we are not stepping into any application market. We will not do it.

There’s only one exception, that’s where there is no [other] possibility. There was no sheet metal. There is no viable [third-party] DWG sheet metal product in the market today for sheet metal. Then we do it, of course.

For BIM, there are. There is a German product. We have talked to those guys, but the problem is, for BIM the way we do it, it’s so deep in the core, the direct modeling engine that we have build… there’s no way that we could expect, of all the partners that are working on AEC, that one would have the strength and the force to bring the product where it is today. We have worked with maybe 30, 40 people for three, four years to do that. I don’t know of any application partner that has more than ten employees. And then those ten employees do everything.

Mark: Except for Intergraph, of course!

Erik: Except Intergraph! Except Intergraph! In the AEC space, I mean. When it comes to making an architectural modeler, there was no other possibility but to do it ourselves. Then we do it. But what we do then is provide all the APIs so the rest of the AEC community can profit off it. Otherwise, I think we would have lost the AEC space. If we didn’t do that, with what we have shown you today on BIM, we would lose the AEC space completely. That could not happen.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM