The most excellent Heidi Hewett was, bafflingly, one of the big-name casualties in Autodesk’s latest experience cull. What was already a big loss to Autodesk has been compounded by her arrival at Autodesk’s most significant AutoCAD competitor, Bricsys.

Heidi has accepted a position as User Success Manager with the Belgian company. I don’t blame her. Bricsys is where the action is. Here’s her opening salvo:

For well over a decade, the world was told that the .dwg file format is not suitable for advanced design workflows. It can’t be used for mechanical design, and it certainly can’t be used for BIM. Bricsys has shown that this old belief is simply not true. The .dwg file format is alive and well and kicking serious butt. I am looking forward to helping Bricsys take .dwg to new, previously unimagined levels, and I’m excited to be part of the team that is doing this for our users.

Is it just me, or does Heidi look more relaxed in her Bricsys photo than she ever did in her Autodesk ones?

Photo credit: Bricsys

Here’s Heidi’s first Bricsys blog post. Can you feel her genuine excitement? Maybe she’s just happy that she’s going to have masses of real improvements to write about, rather than having to stretch out an ever-shrinking set of new AutoCAD features each year.

Given Heidi’s outstanding contribution to assisting CAD users over many years, I’m very happy that she is now going to be able to continue that work. I suspect she’s going to be very busy!

Autodesk loses, Bricsys gains. Big time. What on earth was Autodesk thinking?