Author Archives: Steve Johnson

About Steve Johnson

Steve is the owner of cad nauseam, has been a CAD specialist since 1985. His roles have included CAD management, development, consulting and technical writing. Steve has also been a contributing editor for Cadalyst magazine, President of the Western Australian AutoCAD User Group, and a Vice President of CADLock, Inc. He is also an international veteran fencing champion.

Autodesk customers are revolting

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I don’t know what kind of reception Autodesk thought it was going to get to its less-than-fully-frank announcement that it was hiking up the price of maintenance to push perpetual license owners onto subscription (rental).

I suppose some negative feedback was expected, but I’m not sure the marketing mavens would have anticipated such a degree of near-universal outright hostility. I suspect they may have overestimated their ability to pull the wool over the eyes of a community that is generally technically smart and, thanks to Autodesk’s history in recent years, somewhat lacking in trust.

The Autodesk Community forum moderators are busily vacuuming up threads from all over the place and moving them to the near-invisible new Moving to Subscription forum, which in due course will no doubt be made read-only and merged into semi-oblivion, just like the last one.

Despite the obscurity and the futility of it all, people are still finding that forum and posting on it (over 300 in a few days) and they’re not happy. Many other complaints can be found on CG Press, CG Talk, NewTek, with countless smaller moan sessions popping up all over the place, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, 3DVF (French), C4D Cafe, etc.

Then there’s the most powerful but least easily measured marketing communication medium of all; word of mouth. Out in the real world, Autodesk’s name is mud. Talk of abandoning the maintenance/subscription revenue stream altogether is common, as is switching from Autodesk to competitors’ products.

Why get so worked up? I mean, it’s only 5%, right? At first glance. Actually, the price will rise 38.6% by 2019, with worse undoubtedly to come. But for many complainers, while the excess cost and the nonsense used to justify it are condemned, those are not the main issues.

What is the main issue? Loyal Autodesk customers, people who have paid good money for perpetual licenses and kept them current with ongoing maintenance for many years, really don’t want to give them up. They resent being strong-armed into doing so and feel betrayed and deceived by Autodesk. “You can pry my perpetual license from my cold dead fingers. Screw you, Autodesk!” is a paraphrase of the views expressed. Generally it’s more polite than that, but sometimes less.

It has been quite educational for me to read the comments from customers of other Autodesk products who have experienced the same kind of product neglect familiar to AutoCAD customers. They feel they’ve been taken for a ride by a company that is happy to take their money but not that interested in spending it on improving the product they use. Attempting to gouge such customers to the extreme that has just been announced was never going to end well.

Given that Autodesk thinks very highly of its own image and spends literally a billion dollars every year on marketing and sales, I wonder how much this publicity is worth as a negative asset? Enough for me to retire on in ex-CEO-style comfort, I bet. As for the free marketing that Autodesk is providing for its competitors, I’m sure that is very much appreciated.

None of this will cause a change of path at Autodesk, of course. A few thousand dissatisfied customers with pitchforks and torches will not be considered noteworthy at board level. They might not even notice, and if they do they certainly won’t care.

Autodesk only listens to our dollars. We have them, Autodesk wants them. Only voting with our wallets will get the message across. Do it.

Autodesk license costs options 1 & 2 – stay on maintenance, subscription now

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Note: due to new information from Autodesk, an updated summary has been posted.

In this series of posts, I’ll examine various payment options for CAD software and compare them with the cost of staying on your Autodesk maintenance contract long-term. Once I’ve gone through all the options, I’ll do a summary post that compares everything, but there are so many variables that a single post that covers all the options in adequate detail would be very long and complex.

First, I need to describe what I’m using as the basis of my comparison. Prior to Autodesk’s recent announcement, the annual maintenence cost to keep one copy of AutoCAD up to date was US$540 and the equivalent subscription (rental) cost was US$1680. I’ll call this the 2016 cost.

Autodesk has announced that maintenance costs will rise by 5% in 2017, 10% in 2018 and 20% in 2019. The rises are compound, so the actual rises from the 2016 cost are 5%, 15.5% and 38.6%.

No announcements have been made regarding the cost of maintenance from 2020 onwards, but it’s safe to say that Autodesk won’t be making life easy for its maintenance customers. In order to compare costs beyond the short term, an assumption must be made about future maintenance price rises. I’ve made the assumption that these will be 20% a year, compound. That may be generous to Autodesk, but time will tell.

It would be remiss of me to mention an even lower baseline that could be used:

Option 0 – drop maintenance, keep using AutoCAD
Pros: zero costs, keep your perpetual license
Cons: don’t keep up to date, previous version & home use rights, reduced support

3 year cost $0 (average $0)
5 year cost $0 (average $0)
10 year cost $0 (average $0)

For some of you, that option will seem suddenly quite attractive. If it works for you, go ahead and you may as well stop reading now.

Others will want or need to keep their software up to date. Option 1 below is what I am using as my baseline for comparison. Assuming you’re a perpetual license holder who has been paying annual maintenance, just keep doing what you have been doing, as long as you can.

Option 1 – stay on maintenance
Assumptions: maintenance cost 20% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: keep your perpetual license, keep it up to date, retain previous version & home use rights
Cons: increasing costs, expect more unpleasant “persuasive” surprises from Autodesk

3 year cost $1957 (average $652)
5 year cost $3951 (average $790)
10 year cost $13665 (average $1366)

There’s always the possibility that Autodesk could get really nasty and bump up maintenance costs even more, say 30% a year from 2020. That looks like this:

Option 1a – stay on maintenance (30%)
Assumptions: 30% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: keep your perpetual license, keep it up to date, retain previous version & home use rights
Cons: increasing costs, expect more unpleasant “persuasive” surprises from Autodesk

3 year cost $1957 (average $652)
5 year cost $4216 (average $843)
10 year cost $19223 (average $1922)

A curious aspect of Autodesk’s announcement is that the offer associated with switching from maintenance to subscription doesn’t kick in until June. If your renewal date falls between now and then, and assuming no other special offers apply, the cost is huge. I’ve had to make assumptions here too. Again, being generous to Autodesk, I’ve assumed there will be no subscription price rises until 2020, at which point Autodesk will start bumping things up 10% a year. Here’s how that pans out.

Option 2 – subscription now
Assumptions: 10% compound rise annually from 2020
Pros: keep it up to date, retain previous version & home use rights
Cons: lose your perpetual license, ridiculously high costs

3 year cost $5040 (average $1680)
5 year cost $8921 (average $1784)
10 year cost $22572 (average $2257)

At this stage, it’s easy to dismiss option 2. You would need rocks in your head to switch to subscription right now before the special offer kicks in. The options that will be available from June will be examined in the next post.

There are a number of ways these options can be compared graphically. For example, here’s a bar chart showing the cost incurred in each year:

Here’s a line graph showing the same thing. I think this is clearer.

Although this graph is useful in showing what budget you would need each year in each scenario, it’s not ideal when comparing the total expenditure. Here’s a line graph of the cumulative total expenditure for each of the options:

However, the graph type I find most useful in comparing options shows the average annual cost for each option, and how that average cost varies over time.

With this format, you can do a direct comparison between options at any point in time. You can say, “Option A has the lowest cost per year for the first 6 years, then option B gets cheaper. If we’re going to be using the software for 6 years or longer, we should choose option B.” I’m going to be using this graph format from now on.

Posts in this series:
1. Autodesk license costs options 1 & 2 – stay on maintenance, subscription now
2. Autodesk license costs options 3, 4 & 5 – bait and switch
3. Autodesk license costs options 6 to 10 – abandon maintenance or Autodesk
4. Autodesk license costs options – summary
5. Autodesk license costs options – summary 2

Welcome to the new bosses…

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…same as the old Bass.

If you’re hoping the change at the top of Autodesk is going to result in a change to the all-rental business model, abandon that hope now. In this nodding-heavy video, temporary co-CEOs Amar Hanspal (product guy) and Andrew “Baked Beans” Anagnost (marketing guy) confirm it’s full steam ahead. Not unexpected, really.

If either of these guys is selected as CEO (my money’s on Amar), the rental push will continue. Don’t expect to be saved by an incoming CEO, either. The Autodesk board won’t appoint a non-believer.

If you won’t abandon your perpetual licenses, you’ll need to abandon Autodesk.

Bullshit Returns – Autodesk maintenance price hike part 2

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In this post I continue skewering the welcome post to Autodesk’s Moving to Subscription forum. See here for part 1.

Access to new industry collections – Available only through subscription, you’ll realize significant savings when you need two or more Autodesk software products.

Bullshit. Industry collections are just rental-only engorged suites. Suites are those things with many more than two products; things that Autodesk has been pushing hard for years, before dropping them from the price list. If you already have a suite that contains the products you need (remember, Autodesk’s statements are aimed at existing perpetual license holders), switching to an industry collection will cost you vastly more. That’s the opposite of significant savings.

New and improved support – Enjoy faster response times and the option to receive help by scheduling a call with Autodesk technical support specialists.

It’s just possible this isn’t bullshit. Autodesk support can certainly be sub-optimal and it’s just possible that some of the massive slab of funds Autodesk expects to collect will be diverted to improving support for those who pay the most. Maybe. But I bet Autodesk’s very best high-cost efforts still look very weak compared with the free support provided by Bricsys.

Simplified administration – Access tools that streamline deployment and software management when you standardize all of your Autodesk products on subscription.

Bullshit. The user-based internet-reliant subscription licensing method is a CAD Manager’s nightmare. The device-based standalone licensing system for perpetual license products, while not perfect, is vastly superior from an administration viewpoint. And don’t get me started on the CF that is Autodesk desktop app.

Because managing two business models (subscription and maintenance plans) is costly, in order to continue supporting maintenance plans, beginning May 7, 2017, maintenance plan renewal prices will increase by 5% in 2017, 10% in 2018, and 20% in 2019.

Bullshit. The price is increasing to push customers into expensive rental arrangements and remove the Autodesk payment escape route provided by perpetual licenses, not to recoup costs. Even if there were substantial costs involved in managing an additional business model (rental), there is more than enough margin in the massive rental costs to cover that. And Autodesk, if the costs are substantial, then you’re doing it wrong. If your management is not competent enough to arrange its affairs efficiently and cost-effectively then I have no sympathy. Don’t come to me with your hand out, crying poor.

But I don’t believe for a second that any such costs really are significant enough to justify those increases. I have searched in vain in Autodesk’s financial reports for such a cost blowout. Maybe I’m missing something, but it would appear that Autodesk’s cost of non-subscription revenue actually fell 9% from 208.5m in FY2015 to 190.6m in FY2017.

Can we long-term customers have some of that saving, please? If not, how about a small slice of the billion dollars a year that Autodesk spends on marketing and sales? Cut the generation of bullshit by a fraction, reward your most loyal customers instead of screwing them over, and everybody will be happy.

Having disposed of the bovine ordure associated with Autodesk’s price hikes, we can next move on to the substance of them. How do the costs work out? Are you better off switching to rental, staying on maintenance or switching to a competing product from a less greedy, more trustworthy company? Look forward to an objective analysis. With no bullshit.

Bullshit Returns – Autodesk maintenance price hike part 1

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Just when you think it’s safe to walk across the cattle enclosure in your best shoes, Autodesk drops another steaming pile of spin for its customers to step into.

Here, I’m skewering the welcome post to Autodesk’s Moving to Subscription forum. However, I believe I should really acknowledge the unnamed author of the Important Updates on Maintenance Plans FAQ, which the welcome post has merely paraphrased for simplicity.

There’s so much bullshit in there that I’m going to split my exploration of it into two posts. Let’s put on some rubber gloves and start delving around in the muck, shall we?

Autodesk believes that subscribing is the best way for our customers to get the greatest value from our tools and technologies

Bullshit. Autodesk believes the opposite, as does anyone else with more than two brain cells to rub together. The whole idea is to get us paying the most for the least (the worst value), not the least for the most (the greatest value). Paying treble for the same product really isn’t the greatest value, is it? Nobody, not even Autodesk, believes that it is.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Have a look at this 2013 Autodesk video in which the following truth is uttered by Autodesk Entertainment Industry Manager, Maurice Patel:

We actually see that for customers that have long-term production needs, where they need software day-in, day-out for multiple years, then the perpetual offering is the most cost-effective offering.

Ouch! When a company contradicts its own counterfactual crap, you know the bullshit meter is well into the red.

Next, have a look at this gem:

subscription will fundamentally change how we deliver extended capabilities and new functionalities through connected services

Bullshit. Subscription (rental) is a payment method, not a technology. It is not intricately linked with any particular software or solution. It need not affect how Autodesk delivers anything.

Only with subscription will you realize greater value through the following benefits: Latest and greatest product capabilities – Get access to Autodesk’s ongoing stream of innovation

Bullshit. For AutoCAD users, Autodesk’s stream of innovation dried to a tiny trickle years ago. Rental, where the whole idea is to pay for access to the software rather than in exchange for improvements to it, will only make things worse.

updates to core products…and additional capabilities as soon as they are available

Bullshit. Updates are also provided to customers on maintenance. Of course, that’s how it has to be; if they weren’t that would be an outrageous breach of trust (and contract). There is no need for the payment method to have any effect on how improvements are delivered.

cloud services for desktop products

Bullshit. Cloud services for desktop products are also available to customers on maintenance, and if Autodesk wants to continue pushing its cloudy vision it will have to keep it that way. Not that you really want to rely on Autodesk’s cloud services.

at no additional cost.

Bullshit. There is plenty of additional cost when compared with maintenance. Rental costs three times as much, and will still be twice the price even in a few years after the price increases.

Continued in the second installment.

Chat to Autodesk about being pushed onto rental

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I’ll post later about Autodesk’s oft–predicted–here but just-announced plan to use price increases to push you out of your perpetual licenses, and the execrable spin being used to sell it.

This post is just to let you know that Autodesk has kindly provided a forum in which you can discuss this issue. Why not wander over there and have your say? Autodesk is deaf and blind on this subject so it won’t make a difference, but at least you might feel better to have your say and let others know they’re not alone.

Here’s the link to the Moving to Subscription forum. Here’s the welcome message.

Hot tip: keep a text copy of what you have to say. If, as happened before, Autodesk gets heavy with the censorship scissors and slices through your statement, you can repost it here as a comment.

It’s worth noting that Autodesk did this talk-to-us-about-the-changes thing earlier with the Perpetual License Changes forum. Good luck discovering that forum now without that link; it was merged/hidden/made read-only/whatever. So if you want your view on this subject to stand a better chance of long-term visibility, you might want to repost it here anyway.

Here’s an early thread, This is crappy. Here’s another one, Autodesks new policy Forcing perpetual license holders to subscriptions stinks! There are other threads popping up in other forums, which I expect might get collected up and moved to the new forum.

The cloud broke
And teardrops fell
On the desks
Of those who fell
For the lure
Of a cloudy hell.


The landlord laughs
To see such fun
Collects his rent
From web he spun
He still gets paid
When things don’t run.


I said t’would be
It’s come to pass
Surprised? Not me
With or without Bass
Autodesk’s cloud
Can kiss this SaaS.

Carl cashing in his chips

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Here’s an interesting Carl Bass exit interview with Roopinder Tara at engineering.com. If you’re wondering just how much stock Carl offloaded in those planned sales, here are his reported sales of Autodesk stock in the weeks leading up to the resignation:

  • 11 Jan 2017 $7,894,150
  • 9 Jan 2017 $7,888,768
  • 5 Jan 2017 $7,694,038
  • 23 Dec 2016 $1,971,715
  • 22 Dec 2016 $1,968,935

That’s $27m, give or take. Carl’s reported as having sold over $49m of Autodesk stock over the last three years.

While Carl still has tens of millions of Autodesk stock, dumping that much of it before leaving doesn’t strike me as the actions of someone as supremely confident in the future of Autodesk’s ailing cloud push and rent-or-go-away business model as his words would suggest.

Here, have some fun by voting in these polls. Idea shamelessly stolen from Paul Munford on Twitter.

Who do you want to be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (18%, 32 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (12%, 21 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (7%, 13 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 4 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 8 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (28%, 50 Votes)
  • Other outsider (27%, 48 Votes)

Total Voters: 176

Loading ... Loading ...

Who do you think will be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (41%, 53 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (8%, 11 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 2 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 7 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Other outsider (22%, 29 Votes)

Total Voters: 130

Loading ... Loading ...

Carl Bass resigns

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I only met Carl Bass once, and that was when I gatecrashed his party in 2006. Seemed like a nice guy. Didn’t kick me out.

So now one of the worst-kept secrets in the CAD industry, Carl Bass’s impending departure from Autodesk, has now come to pass.


At the Bricsys Conference in Munich last October, industry observers and Carl’s former colleagues were all aware Carl’s departure was looming. They were pondering only the timing of the announcement and the identity of his replacement; we now know one of those things. The wisdom (not the accuracy) of this sort of Trump-baiting by a major public company’s CEO was questioned, but I guess if you know you’re on the way out you can say what the heck you like:


Carl has worked hard in this industry for decades and set himself up very nicely for his retirement with a large bucketload of cash and his own little hobby factory. Good luck to him; I wish him many happy years tinkering and making things.

What happens next is vitally important to Autodesk and its customers. More on that later.

Why Autodesk’s rental won’t make big money from pirates

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One argument I’ve seen in support of the all-rental software model is that it will rake in lots of cash from those users who aren’t currently customers, i.e. pirates. Here’s an example (Carl Bass, November 2016):

We believe some of these people were previously pirating the software and now have a much more affordable option with product subscriptions. This is consistent with the fact that emerging countries are some of the fastest growing areas for product subscriptions. In other cases, these new users have been using an alternative design tool and could now afford software from Autodesk.

Putting aside the correlation-does-not-imply-causation thing, rental simply isn’t a much more affordable option than perpetual licenses. On the contrary, it’s much more expensive (except for short term use). Repeating an #AlternativeFact doesn’t make it any more true.

The idea that people who had been using non-Autodesk software have switched over to Autodesk in bulk because of rental is silly for that very reason; it’s much more expensive now than before. The fact that Autodesk’s previous attempts at rental both failed miserably will tell you all you need to know about its effectiveness at attracting new customers from the competition.

There’s an unspoken assumption that Autodesk software is the best available, therefore everybody would be paying for it if they could. Having spent some time examining AutoCAD-competing products recently, I can assure Carl that such an assumption is not remotely justified.

Back to the anti-piracy theme. The idea that rental will win significant amounts of business from pirates is unlikely for the following reasons:

  1. Pirates are largely cheapskates. They want to pay nothing at all; only a minority will be attracted by software with any  cost associated with it.
  2. The cost of Autodesk’s rental is way too high to attract pirates. It’s too high for most of us who were used to paying Autodesk’s already-high maintenance fees, let alone those who are accustomed to paying nothing at all. Adobe’s rental prices may be low enough to tempt some pirates; Autodesk’s aren’t.
  3. There’s another unspoken assumption here: that rental software won’t/can’t be pirated. The best that can be said about that is that it is charmingly optimistic. Try a Google search on, say, Adobe Cloud Cracked  for a reality check on that score.

Even if it’s impossible to pirate Autodesk’s rental software (it won’t be), it still doesn’t follow that pirates will rush cash-in-hand to Autodesk. Here’s what they would be much more likely to do:

  1. Pirate non-rental releases of Autodesk software.
  2. Pirate non-Autodesk software.
  3. Use free non-Autodesk software.
  4. Pay for low-cost non-Autodesk software.

There might be a small trickle of ex-pirates among Autodesk’s new renters. More than that? Dreaming.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 5 – summary

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In this final post of the series, I’ll examine the patterns that have emerged from the upgrade history I rated in parts 1 to 4. Bear in mind I’m only assessing the DOS (up to R13) and Windows (from R12 on) versions of the full version of AutoCAD. Of course, this only represents my opinion of those releases and is bound to be biased by the uses I and my users have for the software. Your experiences and opinions will almost certainly vary.

What can I say? My assessment is based on a third of a century of experience, and I’ve tried to be as objective as I can. I’m not unique in perceiving the decline of the AutoCAD upgrade; you’ll see the same said by long-standing customers and experienced independents all over the place. Ralph Grabowski, for example:

The new feature list for AutoCAD’s annual “big-R” release has become so short that I stopped producing my annual “What’s Inside? AutoCAD” ebook series in 2013.

 
Back to my own assessment, here’s a graph that shows how I rated the releases:

One thing’s obvious and that’s the permanent drop in the rate of improvement that set in with the onset of the annual release cycle. My average rating for AutoCAD Version 2.0 to 2000 is 7.7. For 2000i to 2017, it’s 3.4. Autodesk switched to doing half as much worthwhile development between releases, but charged the same upgrade fee. Value for money halved.

We entered the era of an endless stream of annual releases with fewer genuinely useful new features. Worse, the abbreviated cycle meant most of those features went into production half-baked in design, implementation or both. Some of those undercooked features (the lucky ones) got some attention in the next release. Many more of them never got fixed, or got quietly removed later, or eventually got patched up years after the user base had ignored them to death.

Have a look at the decline from 2010 downwards. The average for the last five releases is 2.0. The rate of improvement per release, starting from a low point, took a nose dive. Value for money, which was poor, is now dire.

Conclusion? AutoCAD is in maintenance mode. Autodesk’s attention (and investment) is elsewhere and it is just going through the motions of updating the software. Progress has stalled. Inspiration is AWOL.

Nevertheless, through all this, we have still paid for new releases in various ways, and in huge numbers. No wonder Autodesk is convinced we’ll be silly enough to pay over the odds to rent software; there’s a precedent.

The more Autodesk has moved away from the optional upgrade model, through optional maintenance*, then effectively compulsory maintenance**, then finally to the compulsory rental model***, the weaker the upgrades have become. Autodesk no longer feels compelled to put in the development effort that will convince customers to shell out for the advantages provided by a new release.

Autodesk wants an endless revenue stream in return for merely providing access to the software, rather than as a reward for improving it: money for nothing. That’s Autodesk’s dream, and an understandable one. For customers, it’s a nightmare: nothing for money.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

* Maintenance was previously called VIP and then Subscription.
** Autodesk restricted the availability of upgrades, priced it out of the market, and in some cases only sold perpetual licenses bundled with maintenance, before finally eliminating upgrades altogether.
*** Autodesk’s third attempt at rental (there were failed attempts in 2001 and 2013) was first called Desktop Subscription and then just subscription. I generally call it rental to avoid confusion with The Maintenance Formerly Known as Subscription.

Another series of Autodesk statements

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Having established what happens when Autodesk claims to have no plans to do nasty anti-customer things, (it goes ahead and does them), let’s examine another nasty anti-customer thing it hasn’t got around to doing. Yet.

Will Autodesk discontinue the maintenance program that allows customers to keep their perpetual licenses up to date? Let’s see what Autodesk has been prepared to put in writing so far:

There are no announced plans to end maintenance subscriptions.

Matt DiMichele, August 2015, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

Hmm, we all know what “no plans” means, don’t we, children?

I assure you we have no plan to discontinue maintenance subscription plans for existing perpetual license owners.

Andrew Anagnost, September 2015, Cadalyst interview with Robert Green

“We have no plan” again, eh? That’s a concern.

Our lawyers frown on me using words like “never.” Do we have any plans to end maintenance? No we don’t, and our current intent is to keep the program running as long as our customers use it. Just like we don’t have plans to force customers to adopt subscription. If a customer wants to keep using their perpetual license, then they can continue to do so. If they want that perpetual software to be upgraded with the latest and greatest from Autodesk, then I encourage them to take advantage of maintenance. Keeping maintenance for our most loyal customers is the right thing to do.

Andrew Anagnost, 11 September 2015 in a comment following the Cadalyst interview

Another “don’t have plans” and an “our current intent”, eh? Now I’m really getting worried.

…let me get straight to the point. Maintenance is not going away. Autodesk customers can continue to renew their maintenance for as long as they want. And as stated before, we will not force customers to subscription. If you want to keep using your perpetual license, you can do so, or you can get on maintenance to stay current. You are right, maintaining two different business models is costly, but retaining loyal customers is worth it to us.

Andrew Anagnost, 24 September 2015 in a further comment following the Cadalyst interview

Ah, that’s better. Totally unambiguous. Anybody else?

…any perpetual license that you currently own, can continue to be used for as long as you like. Additionally, if that perpetual license is on Maintenance Subscription, then you will continue to receive support and product updates as long as the Maintenance Subscription is active.. We are not ending the Maintenance Subscription program… you can continue to renew your Maintenance Subscription contracts for as long as you wish.

Felice S, November 2015, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

Maintenance customers can remain on maintenance for as long as they like and continue to receive the software updates to their product/suites as they become available.

Jeff Wright, VP, Customer Engagement, May 2016, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

And if you’re on a software maintenance plan, you can continue to receive all of the benefits of software updates and technical support for as long as you’d like.

Carl White, July 2016, In The Fold blog post

…customers of Autodesk, for one, can continue to renew their maintenance contracts for as long as they want.

Andrew Anagnost, October 2016, Redshift blog post

Well, that all seems very definite, and from so many different sources. How about what Autodesk’s web site says right now in January 2017?

If you currently have a maintenance plan, you will continue enjoying the benefits of maintenance as long as you continue to renew. Autodesk has no plans to stop offering the option to renew maintenance plans; you can renew for as long as you want.

Perpetual Licensing Changes FAQ, Autodesk Knowledge Network

Customers who have a perpetual license on a maintenance plan after July 31, 2016 will have the option to renew their maintenance plan for as long as they wish.

Autodesk Maintenance Plans, Autodesk Knowledge Network

If you currently have a maintenance plan, you will continue enjoying the benefits of maintenance as long as you continue to renew.

Perpetual License Changes Information, Autodesk Knowledge Network

So that’s three “no plans” non-statements but eight totally unequivocal and unambiguous promises, in writing, that Autodesk will not discontinue maintenance plans. If only Carl Bass hadn’t let the cat out of the bag a couple of months ago, there might have been a chance that the more trusting among us would have believed it.

I think you can probably work out what’s likely to happen next. Autodesk will price maintenance out of the market over the next two or three years and then discontinue it, disingenuously claiming that it’s in response to a drop in customer demand. None of the above statements will prevent that from happening. Somebody tell me I’m wrong.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 4

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 4, I rate AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.

  • AutoCAD 2011 (March 2010): 5 – Object transparency was a very important enhancement for some. The X-Ray and other visual styles made 3D editing more efficient. Object visibility (independent of layers) was handy but has confused some DWG recipients ever since. Selection Cycling, Add selected and Select Similar (which had been in AutoCAD-based verticals for a while) were true productivity enhancers. Geometric constraints were improved but still confined to 2D, as they are to this day. Finally, Autodesk’s first of several failed attempts at an online Help system meant this wasn’t such a good release as it could have been.
  • AutoCAD 2012 (March 2011): 4 – Array enhancements were a good idea, reverting to the 80s for their user interface was less smart. Content Explorer was woeful in just about every way, but provided some otherwise unavailable searching features. I found the in-canvas controls of benefit. Support for ECW files was important to my users. The Auto-command entry was a good idea that worked well enough in this release (but performs increasingly poorly with each new release, to the point where I can’t tolerate it these days). There were a few 3D enhancements. Yet another (the 12th?) 3D to 2D method was added, Model Documentation, which as usual for a major new feature wasn’t nearly finished. Don’t get me started on the nudge feature. Moving CAD vector objects around by effectively random amounts based on pixel sizes was as dumb an idea as I can remember. Help still sucked.
  • AutoCAD 2013 (March 2012): 3 – This release ushered in a new API and DWG format as expected. Less expected was this DWG format lasting 5 releases, which was a bonus out here in user land. There were a bunch of Cloud features destined to be ignored by most but very useful to some. Model Documentation improved almost to the point of production usability, but has stayed stuck at the almost-there stage ever since. Help got even worse and has never recovered. Property preview and lots of minor tinkering with various features were worthwhile but didn’t add up to enough to make this a must-have release; needing compatibility with the new DWG format was more likely to do that.
  • AutoCAD 2014 (March 2013): 2 – A basic free file tabs utility was pulled into the core without improvement, a disappointment to those of us used to much better functionality from 3rd party developers. There were some security enhancements that got in the way for many people, but without addressing the main security problem (automatic loading of code from implicit paths at startup). The command line grew in functionality and got slower (again), and there was a bit more minor tinkering here and there. Creating clockwise arcs would have been impressive in the mid 80s, but here only showed how slow Autodesk had become at fixing long-standing functionality issues.
  • AutoCAD 2015 (March 2014): 2 – Lasso was a useful change, as were improved dragging and selection. Unless you’re into point clouds, there’s not much else here of practical use, though. Application Manager was the first step down the dark path leading us to the attempted automatic update doom that lay ahead, and gets no points from me. Darkening the default appearance of the interface to resemble Paint Shop Pro from 2007 was no substitute for substance. At least it was optional. The removal of the option to use textual status bar toggles wasn’t optional. It represented a particularly petty piece of Autodesk interface arrogance and a classic example of Autodesk breaking the unbroken while leaving the broken broken. The New Tab (later called Start) was terribly slow and best bypassed. It’s unfortunate that Autodesk made an API change here, breaking from the established pattern of changing both DWG and API every three years.
  • AutoCAD 2016 (March 2015): 2 – Those people who found a use for the execrable Content Explorer would have been upset by its removal. I wasn’t. Geometric osnap, improved revision clouds, dimension command changes, PDF and point cloud improvements, ability to attach Navisworks files, not much else. No API or DWG change, which was good, but nothing much to see here, move along please.
  • AutoCAD 2017 (March 2016): 1 – Graphics performance, which to Autodesk’s credit has been quietly but significantly improved in recent years, got another boost. Performance in other areas has continued to get worse. Just starting up an older AutoCAD release or a competitor’s product is like a breath of fresh air and shows how bloated, slow and inefficient AutoCAD has become. Share Design View was useful to some, within its limitations. PDF import was sometimes useful and a nice-to-have; done to a higher standard than we have come to expect, it was improved further in 2017.1. Dialog box size enhancements were welcome but at least 10 years overdue. Autodesk desktop app is notable only for its awfulness. Terrible idea, dreadful implementation. Migration was finally looked at 11 years after it was broken, and about 8 years after I permanently gave up on it. I didn’t even bother testing the new version because I’ve arranged things so I can do very nicely without it, thanks. Associative centerlines and marks were a potentially good idea but the implementation was atrocious. Deliberately removing 192,192,192 transparency from button icons was an act of sheer bastardry that was worth at least -1 just on its own. Another API change after only 2 years was an inconvenience but at least 2017 kept the 2013 DWG format for the 5th release in a row, probably the best thing Autodesk has done for AutoCAD customers in recent years. Long may that continue.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

Another one bites the dust – Autodesk sheds Seek

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Following on from Autodesk’s announcement of the impending demise of 123D, the shedding of Cloudy applications and services continues. This time, it’s BIM content service Autodesk Seek. Here’s what Autodesk has to say about the reason for this change:

Autodesk… does not consider the Autodesk Seek service to be strategic to our core business at this time.

 
The timeline went something like this:

  • 16 January 2017 – Autodesk transferred the operations and customer support obligations related to the Autodesk Seek business to Swedish digital content company BIMobject.
  • 18 January 2017 – Autodesk posts a notice to that effect on its Knowledge Network.
  • 18 January 2017 – BIMobject posts a notice to that effect on its own site.
  • ~23 January 2017 – Autodesk customers attempting to use Autodesk Seek find out about the change when they are automatically redirected to the BIMobject site.
     
  • ~23 January 2017 – A well-known Autodesk personality also finds out about the change, unfortunately while presenting Autodesk Seek to a crowd. I’m sure the consummate professional in question would have handled this situation well, but it’s an uncomfortable position to be placed in.

It may well be that former Autodesk Seek users are not unduly inconvenienced by this change. This transition may be less stressful for customers than, say, Autodesk deciding to get out of the Facilities Management software business. Time will tell.

Autodesk can and will dump products and parts of its business as and when it sees fit, as it always has. Look back over Autodesk’s history and you’ll observe a long trail of corpses and weeping orphans. The difference with Cloud software and services is that very negative changes can take immediate effect. The vendor has total control; the customer has none.

Even if your Cloudy product is Autodesk’s Next Big Thing, that’s no protection. If Autodesk loses interest, the rug can be pulled at any instant, with unknown consequences. If you’re not uncomfortable with that, you should be.

When Autodesk dumped FMDesktop, customers could at least continue to use the software they had for as long as they liked. From the customer’s viewpoint, that’s the huge advantage of the desktop software perpetual license model; an advantage I can’t see customers giving up willingly.

A series of Autodesk statements

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Here are some statements from Autodesk about not having any plans to do some things. Things that the more paranoid among us suspected were always in the pipeline. Things that seemed to be just joining the dots along a predictable path Autodesk appeared to be taking. Things that later ended up happening. But nevertheless things that were, apparently, unplanned.

Simplified Upgrade Pricing FAQ, July 2009:

Autodesk does not currently have any plans to eliminate upgrades or cross-grades or make Autodesk Subscription* mandatory.

 
Callan Carpenter, May 2010:

…we are still perpetual, plus Subscription* or maintenance. I don’t see that changing. It’s hard to predict 50 years into the future, but we have no plans for that.

 
Carl Bass, August 2013:

Because we’re starting in a different place than Adobe, we don’t feel the need to force people, as they did, to go to these new license models and end perpetual licenses.

 
It is a matter of record that Autodesk subsequently eliminated upgrades and cross-grades, went to the new license model (rental only) and ended the sale of perpetual licenses.

It’s refreshing to see that Autodesk isn’t too big into that old-fashioned planning thing. It fills me with joy to see that there is still room for such spontaneity in executive decision-making.

* Subscription was the name then used for what is currently called maintenance.

BricsCAD’s LISP kicks sand in the face of AutoCAD’s

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If you’re a power user or CAD Manager transitioning from AutoCAD to BricsCAD, one of the things you’ll like is that almost all of your LISP routines will just work. That’s not an statement that can be made about various Autodesk products that bear the AutoCAD name, such as AutoCAD 360, AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD for Mac.

It’s not just simple old AutoLISP code that runs in BricsCAD, but complex dialog routines that use DCL, and Visual LISP stuff that uses ActiveX. Yes, even on the Mac and Linux platforms. Some DOSLib functions are built in and the rest can be loaded, as with AutoCAD. Even OpenDCL is supported. It’s a quite astonishingly high level of compatibility.

But it’s not 100%. There are minor incompatibilities, system variable and command-line differences that cause problems in a handful of cases. It’s often possible to work around these and still retain the same code that works in both AutoCAD and BricsCAD. Reporting LISP bugs and incompatibilities to Bricsys generally gets them fixed super-quick.

Also super-quick is the speed at which your code will run. It’s immediately noticeable when running any LISP code that needs to do a bit of processing that it just gets done faster in BricsCAD than AutoCAD. Fast enough to extract the following comment from one of my AutoCAD users trying out a linework cleanup routine in BricsCAD:

Wow.

 
User impressions are one thing, but how about measurements? Today, I had a support job to do that involved running one of my LISP routines. I ran it on both AutoCAD 2017 and BricsCAD V17 on the same PC. AutoCAD took 2970 seconds (about 49 minutes), BricsCAD 1030 seconds (about 17 minutes). Over half an hour saved on one operation. That’s 2.88 times faster, which is consistent with my previous observations with a variety of routines.

Upshot: if you’re doing work where there’s a lot of LISP processing going on, switching to BricsCAD is going to save you a shedload of time.

There is a downside to BricsCAD’s LISP, and it’s a big one; no VLIDE. No equivalent, either. There are various programming editors around that can help with editing code, but no substitute for integrated debugging. It means if you’re a power user, CAD Manager, developer or support person, you’re probably going to have to keep one working copy of AutoCAD around even after you’ve completed the transition to BricsCAD.

Because VLIDE has been in maintenance mode for over 15 years it remains virtually unchanged year after year (including ancient bugs). So it doesn’t matter that much which AutoCAD release you have hanging around. Assuming you’re a perpetual license holder, when you drop the maintenance contract on one of your AutoCAD licenses, you’re entitled to keep using the software as long as you wish, albeit only the current release at the time the contract ends. How long the software will keep working is another matter, depending as it does on factors not entirely within your control.

This is an imperfect solution. Even keeping a copy of AutoCAD around won’t help much if you’re debugging a problem caused by something specific to BricsCAD. Filling the VLIDE hole is something Bricsys needs to work on.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 3

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 3, I rate AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.

  • AutoCAD 2004 (March 2003): 5 -The return of Express tools was a good start. Better still, Autodesk’s abortive attempt to sell Express Tools as an extra meant some effort had been put into improving them and they were much bigger and better in 2004 than they were in 2000. The death of the annoying UI stuff didn’t come a moment too soon. This upgrade had a few other useful additions and the new DWG format was more efficient, but overall nothing to get too excited about.
  • AutoCAD 2005 (March 2004): 4 – Autodesk introduced the Sheet Set Manager with this release; I guess one day they’ll get around to finishing it. Likewise, tables were useful but still imperfect today. Improved hatching. Fields. No DWG or API change. Mediocre.
  • AutoCAD 2006 (March 2005): 5 – Dynamic blocks (2D only) and in-place block editing came along with a bunch of extra palettes to make this a decent release in terms of new functionality. No DWG or API change. Big changes to customization, though, with the CUI command and format. CAD Managers had some serious rethinking to do. Migrating settings never worked properly for me in a custom environment from this release on. Losing the ability to easily customize toolbars directly on-screen was a pain; despite some advantages the CUI interface was excruciatingly slow, with a poor UI and bugs that remain to this day. No DWG or API change. This is the release where I really started to notice AutoCAD performance start to decline as a result of bloat and/or poor development, a trend that was to continue long-term and affects the value (and my rating) of each upgrade.
  • AutoCAD 2007 (March 2006): 6 – The Dashboard (later to become the Ribbon), visual styles, many 3D improvements, better rendering and new 3D to 2D methods make this a decent upgrade that 3D users in particular wouldn’t want to do without. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient, but by now an expected part of the cycle.
  • AutoCAD 2008 (March 2007): 2 – Table enhancements were very handy for people using huge tables in their drawings, and most of the text enhancements were welcome. Annotative scaling was the big drawcard in this release, but Autodesk released it unfinished and therefore got it very wrong. The _XREF _XREF _XREF bug infested drawings and led to all kinds of apparently unrelated problems that persisted for years. Multileaders were another one of those good ideas that Autodesk insists on implementing badly, in this case by splitting off the styles from dimension styles and causing backward compatibility issues. The unreconciled layer warnings proved annoying for most and harder to turn off than they should have been. Overall, AutoCAD 2008 was a release to skip, even if you had paid for it.
  • AutoCAD 2009 (March 2008): 6 – The Ribbon release, and arrival of the Big Red A. The Ribbon was horribly slow and some people thought Autodesk should have dealt more with substance than appearance, but there were many other changes (mainly UI) that provided a genuine practical benefit. I think the ViewCube is awesome; the steering wheel, not so much. On the negative side was the mass of “idiot box” dialogs that kept popping up to interrupt your flow. You could turn them off, but not pre-emptively. The massive tooltips that repeatedly rose up to obscure everything were beyond annoying. The layer palette would have been good had it not been such a performance drag. Autodesk put a lot of effort into Action Recorder but failure to listen to what people wanted in a macro recorder meant that effort was wasted on a flop.
  • AutoCAD 2010 (March 2009): 6 – Lots of effort was put into 3D, particularly some clever work with surfaces. Geometric constraints were big news, but not as big as they could have been had they not been restricted to 2D. A downside to this release was that it removed the do-it-yourself inter-PC license transfer mechanism and introduced a web-based method that requires Autodesk’s ongoing cooperation (and existence). Better PDF support and non-rectangular viewports and xref clipping were welcome. Less welcome was Initial Setup, another of Autodesk’s many reviled attempts to get in your face at startup rather than letting you draw. This Ribbon was better than its predecessor, but still a Ribbon so most users ignored it. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient but expected. Deserves some credit for being the last AutoCAD release with a decent Help system.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

Top 20 posts of 2016

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According to Jetpack site statistics, these were the most viewed posts on this blog of 2016. Many of them are from previous years. Note that these stats began being collected in May when the blog became active again so the list doesn’t cover the entire year.

  1. AutoCAD 2012 – Putting things back to “normal” (April 2011)
  2. AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal” (March 2010)
  3. Disaster in progress – Autodesk’s all-rental plans are failing (June 2016)
  4. Why AutoCAD for Mac is a bad idea (May 2009)
  5. AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal” (July 2016)
  6. What is loaded at AutoCAD startup, and when? (September 2008)
  7. Olympic Fencing – Mythbusting the Shin v Heidemann Controversy (August 2012)
  8. Autodesk perpetual license owners to get screwed big-time (December 2016)
  9. Autodesk desktop app. Worst. Name. Ever. Is the product better than the name? (May 2016)
  10. AutoCAD 2010 – Putting things back to “normal” (June 2009)
  11. AutoCAD 2013 – Download the trial without Akamai (March 2012)
  12. Battle of the Bullshit part 1 – Bentley’s terminological inexactitudes (August 2016)
  13. Battle of the Bullshit part 2 – Autodesk’s sophistry (August 2016)
  14. Restoring Hatch double-click in AutoCAD 2011 (May 2010)
  15. Any Autodesk/Akamai people care to explain this? (March 2011)
  16. AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to “normal” (March 2008)
  17. Disaster in progress – Autodesk continues to lose heavily (September 2016)
  18. AutoCAD 2017 Service Pack 1 is out but you probably don’t want to install it (July 2016)
  19. Battle of the Bullshit part 4 – Bentley tells the truth (October 2016)
  20. BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years? (November 2016)

I can understand why most of the items on this list are relatively popular, but I am struggling to understand why my 2009 thoughts on a then-possible future AutoCAD for Mac remain such a reader magnet. It’s not a measurement aberration; I often see the same thing in daily traffic reports and my domain-level statistics that use a different measurement method. Lots of people really do keep reading that post.

If you’re a Mac user, don’t bother; download the software and try it instead. Draw your own conclusions rather than relying on my speculation (even though it turned out to be largely correct, with a couple of exceptions). You’ll probably fall into one of these camps.

  • It’s on a Mac, therefore it’s wonderful.
  • It may not be great, but it’s on a Mac so we shouldn’t complain. Be grateful for what we have.
  • OK, it’s way short of the functionality Windows users have, but Autodesk will get round to fixing it up any year now.
  • It’s a half-baked rip-off and Autodesk is playing us for suckers.
  • I’m using BricsCAD for Mac, it’s way better than this, more fully compatible with real AutoCAD than Autodesk’s effort, yet a fraction of the cost.

Similar story with the post about downloading AutoCAD 2013 without Akamai. Given that we’re talking about software 5 releases old, downloading without Autodesk’s awful Akamai-infested download manager is obviously still really important to quite a few people. Several thousand every year, in fact. For downloading more recent software without having to battle against a mechanism that sucks donkey balls, those people should refer to this post instead.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 2

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 2, I rate AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.

  • AutoCAD Release 12 (June 1992): 9 – Big, big changes. A mass of UI and other improvements. Lots of new dialog boxes. The first release that retained its predecessor’s DWG format, which was very handy. DCL gave LISP and C programmers the ability to create dialog box commands. The first usable Windows version (the R11 extension version was a shocker). Came with a Bonus CD full of extra stuff; a big deal in those days of limited connectivity. Autodesk’s upgrade amnesty (upgrade from any earlier release for $500 in the USA) made this extremely strong value for money, too.

    • AutoCAD Release 13 (November 1994): 6 – Many of you will remember this most infamous of all AutoCAD releases. Too ambitious, long overdue yet released too early, full of bugs, terribly unreliable, markedly slower than its predecessor. Why have I still given it 6? Because of all the many highly useful UI improvements and drafting features it introduced; there were such a huge mass of them I won’t even attempt a summary. Because when running on NT and decent hardware it wasn’t actually that unreliable; running on 16-bit Windows was to blame for a lot of crashes. Because by the time of the final version (R13c4a – the twelfth!), it was not that bad at all, and because Autodesk provided excellent customer service by sending R13c4 out on CD to every registered customer. Because it introduced ARX, allowing C++ developers to do things with AutoCAD that had been impossible before. Because it came with a huge slab of printed documentation (sorry, rainforests). With lots to like as well as dislike, Release 13 was the ultimate curate’s egg release.
    • AutoCAD Release 14 (February 1997): 9 – A big performance effort, masses of bug fixes and many other practical improvements (e.g. hatching, draw order, fully functional object properties toolbar) mark this out as the sort of release that people remember for all the right reasons. The new stuff in this release was added because it would be useful to customers, not because it looked good in an advertisement. Bonus (later Express) Tools gave us a lot of handy stuff, even if it wasn’t officially supported. R14 was an upgrade done right.
    • AutoCAD 2000 (March 1999): 8 – A CAD application being able to open more than one drawing at a time might seem an obvious requirement, but it took until this release for us to get it, and very glad of it we were too. The property palette, layer dialog and lots of right-click options represented worthwhile UI improvements. The integration of Visual LISP (acquired during the R14 cycle as Vital LISP) and access to ActiveX functionality represented a revolution for LISP programmers. Very good upgrade.
    • AutoCAD 2000i (July 2000): -2 – What a difference a year makes! Yes, a that’s minus two for this initial attempt at an annual release (Autodesk didn’t make the timing work for another couple of releases). An emphasis on largely irrelevant-to-users Internet features intended to make Autodesk look all hip and now (anyone tried to access the Point A site lately?), a tie-in to Internet Explorer, annoyingly intrusive UI changes and the removal of the Express Tools, together with a dearth of genuinely useful new features (double-click editing being a noble exception) made this an upgrade only in name. The new Autodesk logo failed to wow customers, who stayed away in droves (at the time we still had that option, and exercised it when we failed to see value for money in an upgrade). A joke at the time was that the ‘i’ stood for ‘ignore’. Worst. Upgrade. Ever.
    • AutoCAD 2002 (June 2001): 3 – The bad things in 2000i were still there in 2002, so that’s a net 0. At least it retained the AutoCAD 2000/2000i DWG format in what was to become a regular 3-year DWG/API cycle, useful for customers and developers. The handful of useful additions (e.g. more associative dimension stuff) didn’t add up to much of an upgrade. At least it was an upgrade, in contrast to the downgrade its immediate predecessor represented.

    Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
    Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
    Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
    Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
    Part 5 – Summary.

    Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.