Category Archives: AutoCAD 2019

Explaining the four tiers of AutoCAD license

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Yesterday’s tiers

Once upon a time, long long ago, you could buy AutoCAD with or without sets of features  called Advanced Drafting Extensions (ADE) containing optional extras such as dimensioning. At one stage you could buy four tiers of AutoCAD license at different prices:

  1. AutoCAD
  2. AutoCAD + ADE1
  3. AutoCAD + ADE2 (incorporating ADE1)
  4. AutoCAD + ADE3 (incorporating ADE1 and ADE2)

(Interestingly, the above situation is similar to the current arrangement with BricsCAD, where BricsCAD Classic, Pro and Platinum are available with incrementing prices and feature sets, with BricsCAD BIM and Sheet Metal available on top of Platinum).

As almost everybody bought AutoCAD + ADE3 anyway, the ADEs were eventually absorbed into the main product and AutoCAD became just AutoCAD again. Later, the AutoCAD line would split again into AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD, and various AutoCAD-based vertical products such as AutoCAD Mechanical and Civil 3D.

Today’s tiers

Fast forward thirty-odd years and AutoCAD licenses are again available in four tiers (even if we ignore AutoCAD LT and Civil 3D). For an AutoCAD 2019 user, these are:

  1. A perpetual license holder who allowed maintenance to lapse after activating AutoCAD 2019.
  2. A perpetual license holder still under maintenance.
  3. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer prior to the release of AutoCAD 2019.
  4. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer after the release of AutoCAD 2019 or who started a new full-price subscription at any time.

Note that Tier 1, etc. is my description of the category and not Autodesk’s.

What the tiers mean

This table shows what is available to customers in each of the above tiers:

Tier Perpetual Usage Updates Support Cloud Shared Views Web/Mobile Toolsets
1
2
3
4

Here’s what the table headings mean:

  • Perpetual – a perpetual license that allows continued use into the future without requiring further payment.
  • Usage – rights to use the license at home, use of previous versions and internationally.
  • Updates – formerly known as Service Packs, these bug fixes and minor feature enhancements are withheld from customers who are not actively paying Autodesk.
  • Support – the ability to log a service request that will be addressed by a technician. There are actually multiple levels depending on how much you pay: Basic, Advanced and, for subscription users, the ability to schedule a call to talk to somebody.
  • Cloud – online services such as storage and rendering.
  • Shared Views – formerly available to all AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 users, this feature was renamed, updated and made subscription-only in AutoCAD 2019.
  • Web/Mobile – the AutoCAD Web and AutoCAD Mobile App viewer/markup tools.
  • Toolsets – the ‘Only One AutoCAD’ set of AutoCAD-based verticals now called Specialized Toolsets (excluding Civil 3D). Note that if you’re a customer in Tier 3 who originally had a vertical product (e.g. AutoCAD Mechanical), you will still have access to that toolset and plain AutoCAD, but not the others.

Moving to three tiers

Felice at Autodesk has explained that Autodesk plans to move everybody in Tier 3 to Tier 4 at some point in the future (subject to legal disclaimers). But for now, if you took up the Move to Subscription offer at the wrong time, you don’t yet have access to Specialized Toolsets.

Thanks are due to Felice for patiently answering my questions to clarify the situation and explain the detail.

What’s new in AutoCAD 2019 for maintenance customers?

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So you’re a long-term customer who has used AutoCAD since it ran on an abacus. You paid for upgrades when you could and switched to maintenance (then called Subscription) when that became the only cost-effective option for keeping current. You’re not about to fall for the subscription (rental) trick; they can prise your perpetual license from your cold, dead fingers.

It’s no secret that the value for your maintenance dollar has been poor for years. Autodesk is jacking up maintenance prices in leaps and bounds; is the maintenance being performed at a rate that matches the amount being charged?

In short, is AutoCAD 2019 enough of an advance over its predecessor to make it worth the maintenance money you paid in advance for it? This post seeks to answer that question.

What you’re not getting

As a maintenance customer, you’re being denied the big item that would make the answer to that question a definite ‘yes’ – Specialized Toolsets. Despite the name and the There Can Be Only One hype, if you’re a renter you’re not getting one AutoCAD that has the extra bits available. You’re getting the availability of a bunch of seven different AutoCAD variants and one add-on (Raster Design), each of which needs to be downloaded, installed and run individually. This initiative has been unkindly referred to as ‘shovelware’, and it’s highly likely that throwing in all of these verticals for ‘free’ means that we’ve seen the end of their meaningful lives. Expect no significant future enhancements and you may avoid disappointment. However you look at it, it’s subscription-only and therefore need not concern us further.

Similarly, as a maintenance customer you’re not getting AutoCAD Web and Mobile. Despite the names, these aren’t AutoCAD. They’re simple online viewing tools with some editing and markup functionality.

What you’re getting taken away from you

You may recall me describing (and praising) the AutoCAD 2017 feature, Share Design View. This was slightly improved in AutoCAD 2018. In AutoCAD 2019 it has been revised again and renamed to Shared Views. Presumably, the Views you’re Sharing are no longer of Designs. Whatever the reason for the rename, it has a sinister connotation. Share Design View is considered obsolete and has been removed. Shared Views has been provided only to subscription customers. The upshot is that this is a feature removal. Yes, you’re getting negative value for your maintenance dollars. This is one of the more petty, vindictive attempts to convince you to go rental. Whoever put their hand up at the product meeting to suggest this particular piece of anti-customer nastiness probably got a gold star from Andrew Anagnost, but I don’t approve and I think it is likely to prove counterproductive.

Another feature that has been removed from AutoCAD in 2019 is the ability to export to FBX files. If you didn’t use this feature, you won’t care. If you used it as the basis of a Virtual Reality workflow to allow you to get your DWG 3D models into, say, Unity to create a virtual environment, then you will probably care a great deal. Similarly, FBX import has also gone. Autodesk’s suggestion that you use the DWG import and export feature in their other products instead is no use at all to you if you don’t use those products in your workflow.

Because Autodesk A360 has been deprecated, a bunch of related commands have also gone AWOL. The lesson here is to not get too used to any Autodesk cloud-based workflows; they could vanish on a whim at any moment.

What you’re getting

What’s left? What are you getting for your hard-earned? Here are some enhancements:

  • Some of the icons have been slightly modified. This includes the status bar icons. Unfortunately, Autodesk remains deaf to the many requests for the return of text to this area.
  • 2D graphics performance is supposedly improved.
  • The Graphics Performance dialog box now has a 2D section.

OK, these are minor tweaks. Some are welcome (performance), others (icon tampering) are just tinkering that nobody will care about. How about worthwhile new functionality?

Well, there’s one feature that many will find useful: Drawing Compare. But wait! Isn’t that new? Well, no. Let’s put aside the fact that this is just playing catch-up to a core BricsCAD feature. Purely within the AutoCAD world, it’s still not new. Drawing Compare has been available as an Autodesk-supplied free app since 26 April 2012. It’s still available now for AutoCAD 2016 and later, even though the one for 2013 to 2015 has been ‘unpublished’.

I’ll examine the differences between the AutoCAD 2019 core feature, the AutoCAD add-on and the BricsCAD core feature in a future post. I can tell you that Edwin Prakaso thinks the old add-in is better than the core feature, but I’ll compare the compares for myself and you can make up your own mind.

Summary

For Autodesk giveth (a bit) and taketh away (a bit more). Overall, maintenance customers are down on the deal. Customers are paying ever-increasing amounts for tiny or even negative benefits. Why do they bother?

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

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Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on.  That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

Still can’t download AutoCAD 2019? Read this

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Timeline of AutoCAD 2019 events to date

    • 20 March 2018 – Somebody (a reseller?) posts a video on YouTube with a collection of Autodesk video materials describing AutoCAD 2019; this is quickly removed
    • 22 March 2018 – AutoCAD 2019 Released
    • 22 March 2018 – Reports surface of AutoCAD 2019 activation acting as a killswitch for AutoCAD 2018
    • 23 March 2018 – Attempts by myself and others to download AutocAD 2019 are thwarted by the non-availability of links and other issues
    • 24 March 2018 – AVA, Autodesk Account and Autodesk desktop app all know nothing about AutoCAD 2019
    • 24 March 2018 – I report on the various problems including the killswitch issue and lack of download availability
    • 25 March 2018 – subscription customers report up to 2.5 days of AutoCAD 2018 downtime
    • 27 March 2018 – Andrew Anagnost’s apology assures customers the issue is resolved (which of the issues he means is not specified but the context might imply it’s the killswitch one)
    • 29 March 2018 – The Autodesk forums still contain the warning that disruptions to managing users, assigning permissions and downloading software are ongoing
    • 3 April 2018 – Autodesk Account still fails to report availability of AutoCAD 2019 for multiple customers under active maintenance, subscription and enterprise agreement contracts


What to do if you want to get hold of AutoCAD 2019? Well, you can download the free trial version here. I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because that forces you to install and use the nasty Autodesk/Akamai download manager. Kill it with fire. This unpleasant fact now applies to all of Autodesk’s trial downloads, cutting off that formerly useful workaround for Autodesk’s download issues.

To get a straightforward malware-free browser download, you’re going to have to say hello to AVA (Autodesk Virtual Assistant). Yes, AVA is utterly useless at answering support questions and until very recently had no clue about the existence of AutoCAD 2019, but the latter issue is now resolved and you can use AVA as your workaround.

Steps to downloading with AVA

  1. Click this link to get to AVA.
  2. Log on with your Autodesk sign-in if you’re not already signed in.
  3. Type AutoCAD 2019 download [Enter].
  4. Pick Yes.
  5. On the right, pick Next.
  6. Select your operating system and language, then pick Next.
  7. Pick the link under Browser Download.

The download should then start. The AutoCAD 2019 Windows 64 download is 1.7 GB but this will expand to more than another 5 GB before the installation proper takes place, after which the installed software will take up about another 2 GB. If you’re using a low-capacity SSD as your primary drive you might want to check you have enough space before you start.

Why One AutoCAD is smart strategy

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OK, so Autodesk may have blown the AutoCAD 2019 rollout, triggering an apology from CEO Andrew Anagnost.

OK, AutoCAD 2019 may have the smallest set of significant advances in the history of AutoCAD releases. If you’re wondering, I give it 1/10. The “there can be only one” hype could easily refer to meaningful improvements to the product per year. This year’s improvement is… drawing compare!

Still, AutoCAD 2019 is a significant release for reasons beyond the content of the core product. An examination of the One AutoCAD strategy reveals a collective corporate mind that’s smarter than it’s being given credit for.

In case you’ve missed it, the idea behind One AutoCAD is that if you subscribe to AutoCAD, you can now also get a bunch of vertical variants of AutoCAD thrown in, renamed as “Toolsets”. You need to ask for it, and it’s for renters only, no perpetual license owners need apply. Oh, and Civil 3D isn’t part of the deal.

This concept has been received less than enthusiastically among respected independent observers such as Ralph Grabowski and Robert Green. I’m going to go against the trend a little and point out several ways in which this is a smart move for Autodesk.

  • It represents the first time Autodesk has had anything of substance to positively differentiate between maintenance and subscription. Until now, it’s all been negative: give away your perpetual licenses to avoid forthcoming maintenance price increases.
  • It provides some substance to Dr Anagnost’s “give us a year to show the value of subscription” request to customers. OK, it may have taken a lot more than a year, but at least it’s now possible to point to something that customers can gain by subscribing, rather than having the embarrassment of an empty promise hanging around.
  • It acts as an effective distraction from yet another price rise (7% on top of Autodesk’s already sky-high subscription costs). Yes, this new price still applies even if you don’t use the toolsets. Yes, it still applies even if you’re a Mac user who doesn’t have these toolsets available.
  • It will almost certainly be used as justification for future subscription price rises. How can you complain about a few more dollars when you get all those products included in the price?
  • This stuff has already been developed to a point that Autodesk considers mature (web apps excluded), and it isn’t costing Autodesk anything to “give it away”.
  • It means that the glacial or non-existent rate of improvement of AutoCAD and its variants suddenly appears less important. How can you complain that nothing worthwhile has been added to your AutoCAD variant this year when you now have access to hundreds more commands than you used to have? This line has already been tried with me on Twitter.
  • It provides a marketing counter-argument against competitors who sell DWG-based AutoCAD-compatible products that provide above-AutoCAD standards of functionality (e.g. BricsCAD).
  • If an increased number of users start using the vertical variants, there will be increased pressure on those competitors to handle the custom objects created using those variants. This will act as a distraction and reduce the ability of those competitors to out-develop Autodesk at the rate that has been occurring for the past few years.

There are a couple of flies in Autodesk’s One AutoCAD ointment:

  • Critical mass – it has yet to be seen how many customers are so won over by this concept that they sign up for it. Remember that it’s only available to a minority of customers anyway, and if the bulk of customers remain reluctant to give up their perpetual licenses then all this is moot. If the move-to-rental numbers are small, then the anti-competitive nature of this move is negated. The marketing gains still apply, though.
  • Interoperability – traditionally, the AutoCAD-based verticals add custom objects to the core AutoCAD objects, which when opened in vanilla AutoCAD or another vertical, appear as proxy objects that either don’t appear or will provide very limited access. Improved but still limited access can be provided if Object Enablers are installed. Object Enablers are not always available for the AutoCAD variant you want to use. LT? Mac? Old releases? Forget it.This has always been a highly unsatisfactory arrangement. I have worked for a company that explicitly prohibits drawings containing proxy objects and rejects any it receives, and that has proven to be a smart policy. Also, the vertical variants of AutoCAD have always had hidden DWG incompatibilities built in. AutoCAD 2015 user? Try to use a DWG file that has been created in a 2017 vertical variant. Good luck with that, even though all those releases supposedly use 2013 format DWG. Paradoxically, you can expect to experience much better DWG interoperability with non-Autodesk products and their add-ons than you will with AutoCAD and its verticals, because the non-Autodesk products are forced to work with AutoCAD native objects. It remains to be seen how, when, or even if Autodesk addresses these issues.

In summary, this strategy has potential to significantly benefit Autodesk. Will it work? That will largely depend on how many customers are prepared to put aside their mistrust enough to hand over their perpetual licenses to Autodesk. That mistrust is mighty large (Autodesk’s been working hard for years on building it up) and recent sorry-we-broke-your-rental-software events have reiterated just how valuable those perpetual licenses are.

Autodesk has produced what it considers to be a very attractive carrot. Is it big and juicy enough to attract you?

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has sent an email to customers affected by the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster that acted as a remote kill-switch for users of earlier releases of subscription software. The email’s subject is We Missed the Mark:

Image credit: R.K. McSwain

Readers of this blog will be aware that Andrew and I have fundamental disagreements on where he has taken the company, but credit where credit is due. An apology was appropriate in this case, and Andrew stepped up and made one.

He has also stated on Twitter that it won’t happen again. I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?