Category Archives: Autodesk

How you feel about CAD in the Cloud

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In February 2010, I ran a poll to gauge your feelings about CAD in the Cloud and left it going until October 2010. Just over a month ago, I asked the same question again and ran an identical poll. I have closed that second poll, and here are the comparative results (new poll at the top, old poll at the bottom):

Cad in the Cloud 2010 and 2011 Polls

I’m not pretending this is a scientific survey. There is bound to be some self-selection and other sources of bias, as there must be with anybody’s survey processes (very much including Autodesk’s CIP). Looking at the logs, I haven’t detected any obvious attempts to interfere with the poll, although there’s nothing I can do to stop people voting multiple times if they have access to multiple IPs (e.g. a work and home account). There are fewer votes in the newer poll only because I didn’t let it run nearly as long; the rate of voting actually doubled this year.

Caveats aside, what can we say about the way in which poll respondents’ views have changed in the last 18 months or so? The most obvious change is a marked reduction in the proportion of people who now feel Hopeful. There is a small increase in the number of voters who are now Excited or Frightened, but a big leap in those who are Concerned.

Combining the two positive choices (Excited and Hopeful) to come up with a simple “Cloud approval rating”, in 2010 39% of voters were positive about CAD in the Cloud. In 2011 that number is down to 29%. In other words, people voting Cloud-positive are about a quarter down on last year.

Most poll respondents here are Autodesk customers, so I think it’s fair to say that this result reflects poorly on the effectiveness of Autodesk’s Cloud marketing. After a year of providing an increasing selection of Cloud products free of charge, and a big Autodesk Cloud launch and publicity immediately before the poll, one would expect a lot more people to be sold on the Cloud, rather than the reverse. I don’t see that Autodesk has done anything atypically bad with its Cloud marketing (certainly nothing like Dassault’s SolidWorks train wreck), so what’s going on? Is CAD on the Cloud really an unsellable prospect?

Autodesk Cloud-based structural engineering software review

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As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point.

OK, that sounds promising, but how does it pan out in real life? One problem dissuading me from finding out is that Autodesk is being very restrictive with access to many of its Autodesk Cloud products (I’d probably throw a few sample render jobs into the Cloud and compare the performance, but I’m not the right kind of Subscription customer so I’m not allowed). Another problem is that I’m not qualified to review things like structural engineering software where the greatest computational potential appears to lie. Fortunately, Alex Bausk is qualified, so it was interesting to read his review of Autodesk’s Project Storm software.

It’s important to point out here that anything Autodesk with ‘Project’ in the name is not a finished product. It’s an Autodesk Labs thing, designed to attract feedback rather than use in production. I very much approve of this process. It’s one area in which I’m happy to endorse the way Autodesk is approaching the whole Cloud thing, and has several benefits over the flawed private Beta process that Autodesk uses for its mainstream products such as AutoCAD.

The downside for Autodesk when it comes to doing pre-release things publicly is that the criticism can be public, too. For example, selected from Alex’s review:

…the product is, for reasons unknown, available only in selected countries…

…utterly meaningless popups…

Options for analysis settings are, to put it short, appalling.

Project Storm is nothing more than a web envelope for our good old ARSA package. It is basically the same “Robot link” that reviteers have already had for quite a long time…

But the software’s practical use is extremely tiny, to the point of no use at all. You may surely forfeit all hope to do anything with it that would even remotely be relevant to all the “cloud analysis” hype in videos, intros and announcements.

I was unable to make any use of Storm with the sample models that come packed with Revit Structure and Robot Structural Analysis. To feed these default, Autodesk-made models to Storm, some really disruptive editing had to be made that involved deleting whole parts of the model, rendering it practically useless, only able to demonstrate how the process is meant to work.

Ouch! OK, so far it’s mainly just pointing out how half-baked the product is at this stage. Given that it’s a Project and not a finished product, that’s not so bad. It’s shipping products and features that are half-baked that I object to, and Autodesk has certainly produced a few of those. Anyway, here’s the bit I found particularly interesting:

Analysis speed, to a surprise, isn’t looking any good compared to desktop. The Storm’s cloud web analysis is extremely slow, likely because the server would yield a tiny fraction of its resources to your particular task.

In other words, the cloud speed and resource claim in case of Project Storm is no more than a standard cloud computing mantra.

…cloud calculations took around four minutes for this simple model, compared to fraction of a second using desktop…

What does this all mean? It could mean that Alex forgot to turn on the Ludicrous Speed toggle. It could mean that Autodesk is doing this experiment on the cheap and hasn’t paid for enough resources to make it work well. If so, that would be pretty short-sighted, and if Carl wants this Cloud thing to impress people he should sign off on a bunch more cash for Scott’s server farm budget. It could mean that this type of calculation is unsuited to parallel processing, in which case it’s probably not a great candidate for a Cloud product. Or it could mean that the calculation parts of this software haven’t been done properly yet, and everything will fly like the wind as soon as the developers get the hang of things.

Or maybe, just maybe, it means that the reality of Cloud computing isn’t quite as infinitely powerful as the hype makes out.

Cloud concerns – trust

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Using any software involves some degree of trust in the vendor. Using the Cloud requires a much higher level of trust.

Autodesk boss Carl Bass is a maker of carefully crafted things, so I’ll use that as an analogy. Using standalone software requires the sort of trust that a maker has in a tool manufacturer. Will the tools work properly and last a long time? Or will they break, potentially damaging the materials or even the user?

Using SaaS requires that same kind of trust, plus others. Will the tool manufacturer keep making that tool? If not, will spare parts continue to be available? Will the manufacturer change the tool design so it doesn’t suit your hand any more, or doesn’t work as well on the materials you use? Beyond that, there are some aspects of the relationship that stretch this analogy somewhat. For example, a SaaS vendor resembles a manufacturer that won’t allow you to buy tools, only lease them. Except the manufacturer can change the lease terms or end it any time it likes, and then come into your workshop and take all your tools away. Oh, and this take-your-tools-away right also applies to the company that delivers the tools to your door.

Using Cloud storage requires yet further levels of trust. It’s not tool manufacturer trust, it’s bank safety deposit trust. Will your carefully crafted creations be kept safe? Or will they be stolen or damaged? If they are, will you be compensated? If you can’t afford to pay the bank fees or want to use another banker because the teller was rude to you, will the bank politely return your valuables to your safe keeping or transfer them to the new bank? Or will they end up in the dumpster at the back of the bank?

Trust is vital. I’m convinced that a CAD on the Cloud takeover will live or die based on trust, more than any other factor. Potential Cloud customers must be able to trust that the vendor is going to do the right thing by them. Without trust, any vendor that expects to win its customers over to the Cloud has absolutely no hope. None. Forget it. Pack up and go home now, and save us all a lot of bother.

With that in mind, a few days ago I added a poll that asks Do you trust Autodesk to do the right thing by its customers?. I deliberately didn’t mention it, just to see what would happen. The initial results are interesting, with only 25% trust so far. If you haven’t already voted, I encourage you to do so.

I also encourage you to share your thoughts on the subject by commenting here. Although you’re welcome to comment as you see fit, it would be good to hear specific reasons you have for whatever level of trust you may have. Do you trust Autodesk? If so, exactly what has Autodesk done to deserve that trust? If not, just what has Autodesk done to deserve your distrust? I’m concentrating on Autodesk because that’s mostly what this blog’s about, but if you’re not an Autodesk customer, feel free to add your thoughts about any CAD vendor you like.

Poll of evil

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I have closed the Which of these is most evil? poll, which had been running from 20 February 2009. It attracted 2,351 voters, each of whom could distribute up to three votes among thirteen (yes, that number was deliberate) candidates. Here are the ranked results:

  1. Satan (36%, 846 Votes)
  2. Microsoft (31%, 721 Votes)
  3. Apple (26%, 614 Votes)
  4. RIAA/IFPI/MPAA (26%, 601 Votes)
  5. Miley Cyrus (23%, 546 Votes)
  6. Autodesk (23%, 536 Votes)
  7. Disney (16%, 382 Votes)
  8. Google (10%, 230 Votes)
  9. Dell (7%, 172 Votes)
  10. The Pirate Bay (6%, 147 Votes)
  11. Sony (6%, 140 Votes)
  12. Steve Johnson (4%, 89 Votes)
  13. Gaahl (3%, 82 Votes)

That top three is not going to shock anyone (except perhaps some fanbois), but are some surprises in the list. For example, more than a quarter of voters were aware enough of the evils of Big Content to be able to decipher the alphabet soup RIAA/IFPI/MPAA choice and select it. More than four times as many people think this litigious pack of demons is voteworthy than think the same about arch enemies The Pirate Bay. That’s not so shocking for those of us with our fingers on the pulse of popular opinion, but I was surprised to see so few people choose Big Content arch-villain Sony. Rootkit, anyone?

For Autodesk, this poll is something of a triumph, with less than a quarter of voters putting the company in the top three. Mind you, Autodesk was faced with some very stiff competition, being very narrowly edged out of fifth place by Miley Cyrus.

Only one in ten of you thought Google was worthy of selection. This is Google, a company that knows more about you than you do. Google, which passes out your information whenever it feels it might gain some strategic advantage from doing so, and really doesn’t care when it violates your privacy. Google, which insists on knowing my phone number before it lets me sign up for its Facebook-copy thing, because it obviously feels it doesn’t already have enough information about me. Google is apparently “do no evil” enough to attract far fewer votes than more sinister recipients such as, say, Disney.

Dell has been on my personal brown list for some years now, since repeatedly sending out fax spam to me and many other Australian businesses. It forced me to deal with its abysmal “customer service” [sic] Indian call centre in order to try to get it stopped. After making me wait for ridiculously long times while passing me round between various clueless, indecipherable people, a manager finally lied to me to get me off the phone. He assured me I would be taken off the list. The Dell fax spam continued until I finally gave up and threw the machine away; rather that than attempt to deal with Dell again.

Prior to this, I had no dealings with Dell and had just assumed it was a reasonably respectable company. It was only after this episode that I learned that Dell is utterly without ethics; my experience was perfectly normal. Indeed, victims of its shonkier practices (illegal bait-and-switch marketing, lying about stock and deliveries, repeatedly sending out “repaired” units that are totally non-functional, etc.) will probably think that I got off very lightly indeed. Dell has never seen a cent from me and never will. I’ve been very happy to pass on my feelings about the company to everyone who has ever asked for my hardware advice, as happens from time to time. 7% or not, Dell can go to Hell.

Finally, it’s official, I am more evil than Gaahl. Who? Gaahl is a Satanic death-grunt vocalist from black metal band Gorgoroth. He has performed in corpse paint on a stage decorated with sheep’s heads on spikes, and blood-splattered naked women hung up on crosses. Gaahl has been convicted of viscious violent assault multiple times, including one occasion where he was alleged to have threatened to drink his victim’s blood. I’m sure my metal friends will be very impressed by me being considered more evil than that. \m/

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 3

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Steve: Another issue I have with Cloud-based environments is the lack of customisation. One of the things that makes AutoCAD so efficient for people is that they can get it exactly the way they want it. With a browser-based environment, we’re pretty much stuck with what you guys decide to give us. Can you see any solution to that in the longer term?

Tal: From a pure technical point of view, there’s not a lot of difference in terms of the way you can customise an application on the desktop versus customising it on the web. I think AutoCAD, having a very mature application has a lot of functionality which has built up over the years to provide customisation capabilities to the nth degree. So I think it has less to do with the platform of your choice and more to do with the maturity of the solution and how much customisation the people who designed the product wanted to put in there.

Steve: I guess you have the issue of where does that customisation live? Does it live on the PC or on the Cloud?

Tal: A good thing about moving it to the Cloud would be that if you moved to another computer, the app would still be customised to your needs.

Guri: I was going to say the same. It’s actually an advantage to store it in the Cloud because regardless of where you are accessing it from, you can still have your customisation go with you wherever you go.

To address your previous question about customisation, I think it’s a pretty relevant request to be able customise this application. But at the same time, remember who is the target audience for that. If you are an AutoCAD user, we assume you have AutoCAD with all the advantages that come along, but if you are not an AutoCAD user, you are somebody downstream that just wants to look at a document and collaborate on it, then you’re probably less sophisticated from that perspective and you will probably require have less customisation needs. Nevertheless, I do believe that the request to add customisation to this product is completely relevant.

Steve: As well as user customisation, there are third party developers wanting to be able to add their own value to the product. Do you see that being available in the longer term, that you will provide an API for third party developers, whether they are commercial developers or in-house developers for large organisations to do their thing with it?

Guri: We are considering it.

Steve: That’s tricky, isn’t it? It’s more difficult than if you have a desktop environment. How do people provide their add-ons to customers, or to their internal users?

Tal: I’m not sure. If you look at the major web platforms of today, look at the social ones such as Facebook, third party integration, customisation of that, that can be taken to the nth degree. I think a lot of the time, for organisations to deploy customisation on the web where you don’t even have to go to the PC and configure a customisation for a user, for that to be available centrally on-line, and to know that when you move to a different computer for example, all those extensions and all that configuration, all that good stuff, goes along with you, it’s actually an advantage. You can do a lot of the things around customisation and configuration of the product on line, that would be harder to do sometimes on a desktop.

Steve: There are a limited number of DWG object types that are currently supported. I assume you’ll be adding to them over time. What about 3D objects?

Tal: Butterfly supports all AutoCAD 2D objects that are supported by horizontal or vanilla AutoCAD at this time, so you can view that, and you can have drawings from vertical versions with proxy graphics that will be displayed. So for 2D I think you have probably full and complete support for 2D data types. Before we move on to 3D, we want to make sure we nail the experience just right. You say you have a list of things you’d like to see us improve in 2D, and we’d like to be able to go and work on as many of our users’ lists for 2D before we head on over to 3D, because at the end of the day it’s all about nailing the experience just right rather than just adding a lot of the functionality to the product which is not fully mature and fully complete, and as a result of that, not add value to our customers.

Steve: I guess people may be concerned with losing data because you’re not supporting the full set of object types. Is round-tripping fully supported?

Tal: I can rest your mind at ease on that point. When you upload an AutoCAD drawing to Butterfly, that file is not converted, and resides in fully original form on the server. And when you make changes, for example on line, those changes are then injected into the drawing using authentic genuine DWG technology, so when you download that file back to your computer, you maintain full integrity of it. There’s no conversion process, no data loss, and you get a very strong experience on that front. So users should not have any concerns at all concerning that.

Steve: So round-tripping works with everything; is that true? For example, you may have a Civil 3D DWG that you modify using Butterfly. Does the drawing return fully intact, including the Civil 3D objects with all their intelligence?

Tal: That Civil 3D object is intact in the same way that if you take that Civil 3D drawing, and open it in AutoCAD LT and manipulate geometry. All your Civil 3D objects remain intact. It’s the exact same experience. That data is not modified, it’s not converted, it’s not lost. While Butterfly may not be able to edit the contents of those Civil 3D objects in the same way that AutoCAD LT or AutoCAD vanilla does not enable you to, it still maintains full data integrity and there is no data loss.

This post concludes this interview series. Links to part 1 and part 2.

CAD on the Cloud according to Autodesk’s Jim Quanci

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In all of the Cad on the Cloud discussion so far, both here and elsewhere, there have been a lot of anti-Cloud comments and very little in the way of response from the pro-Cloud crowd. Participation in the debate from Autodesk people has been minimal. In one way I can understand that, because given the current atmosphere, who would want to stick their head above the parapet? On the other hand, Autodesk wants to position itself as a Cloud leader and obviously needs to bring its customers with it. It is unlikely that many hearts and minds will be won over with press releases and other forms of corporate self-praise. Therefore, it makes sense for someone to get their hands dirty and engage with the plebs.

Step forward Jim Quanci, director of the Autodesk Developer Network. In the last edition of upFront.eZine, Jim was brave enough to enter the fray with a “letter to the editor” response to Ralph’s The Cloud is Dead position. I appreciate that Jim went to some length to compose his epistle and I thought he deserved more of a reply than Ralph’s one-liner. There will probably be a few letters in reply in next week’s upFront.eZine, but I’m placing my own response to Jim’s arguments here. It’s quite a lengthy tome and it would be unreasonable to expect Ralph to publish the whole thing unedited. I have quoted parts of Jim’s letter for the purposes of comment and criticism; for the full context you should read the original in upFront.eZine.

You’ve been at this CAD thing a long time; use more of that long term perspective you have. Think past that time you and I have retired. I think of my two kids in college. My younger son (in engineering school) believes having valuable data (like a mid-term paper) on his PC is an accident waiting to happen. Why would any sane person want to do that?

This is similar to several pro-Cloud arguments I have seen that I find unconvincing. Just because kids do a lot of stuff on the Cloud these days doesn’t mean much of anything. I have a couple of very smart kids myself. Like all kids, not everything they do makes sense, and I’m not about to start copying their behaviour. As people grow up, they start doing different, more mature things. That will, hopefully, include the appropriate use of technology.  It may involve storing data locally, on the Cloud, or both. Yes, storing one copy of your work on your PC is indeed an accident waiting to happen. This is something I have learned through difficult experience. No, storing one copy of your work on the Cloud isn’t any more sane, particularly if your ISP is down when you really, really need to get at it to meet a deadline. This is something that Jim’s son will hopefully not need to experience in order to learn.

Jim then gives a potted and somewhat debatable history of CAD on the PC, with the implication that CAD on the Cloud in 2010 is just the same as CAD on the PC in 1982, with the implication that the same kind of takeover will inevitably happen. He concludes that part of his argument as follows:

The naysayers on the cloud could be the same naysayers we saw with the PC, just ‘find and replace’ a few words and the reasoning is identical (control, trust, capability, performance, productivity, etc). ‘Sure PC’s are good for word processing and spreadsheets -– but not CAD. They are just toys.’

Using terms like ‘naysayers’ for anti-Cloud people doesn’t add much to the debate, any more than calling Cloud supporters ‘mistyheads’. That aside, there are several ways in which this argument is flawed. First, as Ralph pointed out, ‘past performance is no guarantee of future returns’. Second, if you do wish to use history as a guide to the future, it is fair to say that the Cloud appears to be an aberration in the overall trend away from the bad old days of centralised computing towards putting control into the hands of individuals. Third, the ‘naysayers’ on the Cloud are generally not the same people who were ‘naysayers’ during the rise of the PC. On the contrary, they are typically those people who supported and actively participated in the PC revolution. They are those who have watched that history evolving and who have learned hard lessons from it along the way, instilling a stubborn resistance to giving up their hard-won control and freedom.

The cost-based naysayers. What makes them think the cost is going to go up?

I have to admit I literally LOL’d at this one. Jim, they think the cost is going to go up because they weren’t born yesterday and they’re not totally clueless. OK, hands up all those people who think that Autodesk and various others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the Cloud as part of a cunning plan to ultimately take less money from their customers? Anyone? Nobody? Hang on, there’s one at the back. Thanks, Jim, you can put your hand down now.

Then there are the ‘Unique to the Cloud’ benefits of increased productivity through mobility, collaboration and for all practical purposes unlimited computing power.

It cannot be denied that the Cloud has several unique benefits. Neither can it be denied that the Cloud has several unique drawbacks. The question comes down to where the balance of pros and cons falls for a particular application and a particular customer. The jury is very much out on that one. I have already discussed several of the Cloud benefits, but not many people appear to be that impressed by them. The drawbacks, however, appear to be dealbreakers for many.

Everyone needs to think past today, this year and even the next five years. As you and I know, being of the mature sort with children, five years is the blink of an eye and ten years goes so very fast. The impact of big changes are almost always over sold in the short term (applied to existing problems and processes) and under sold in the long term (it’s hard to envision what the new problems and processes will be in a world we haven’t yet experienced).

I can agree with most of this, particularly the part about it being oversold in the short term. The difficulty of predicting the future also rings true.

Sixteen years ago I bought my first copy of Netscape. The web was oh so slow through dial-up and though thoughtless people with graphics heavy web pages. Back then one could see the web as a marketing, sales and education tool. But no one was predicting Google and Facebook. What will the Cloud enable in a similar period of time?

No idea! But companies that waited till the PC and Web future was clear are themselves mostly in the dustbin of history. Ken Olsen died earlier this year, the PC having ‘done in’ his minicomputer. One might say Compaq was done in by the Web enabled Dell. What software companies will and will not survive the Cloud? One of the biggest software franchises in history, Microsoft Office, may be one of the first victims of a too slow migration to the Cloud.

This attempt to align the Cloud with the winners and the non-Cloud with the losers is specious. The winners and losers haven’t been decided yet, and there may not even be any. In any case, computing history is full of examples of pioneers who did the hard work for little or no reward and relative latecomers who cashed in on it. Also, I remember predictions of doom for Microsoft some years ago when the Internet was ramping up; Microsoft itself was worried by being run over by the Internet. It hasn’t happened yet, though.

Who out there would recommend their children invest most of their time becoming masters of the PC as a great career development investment? How about becoming masters of the web and the Cloud as a good forward looking career development investment?

I’m quite happy for my children to learn to become masters of the PC. Learning web development skills is likely to remain useful, too. Concentrating on one area to the total exclusion of the other is not a wise strategy, because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the computing world by the time they will need those skills. It’s quite likely that many of the skills my kids learn now will be near-useless to them by the time they need to use them, whether those skills relate to standalone or web-based software. Unless they’re learning AutoLISP, of course; that’s a gilt-edged investment. My 25-year-old skills in that arena are still feeding those same kids. Who would have predicted that when VBA was The New Black? And where’s VBA now?

Five years ago when folks like salesforce.com and NetSuite were breaking new ground offering CRM and ERP software as a service, one might have had some doubts. But not anymore. The train has left the station – and folks that missed getting on board better start running hard to catch up (or retire).

I could ask if the clue train stops at Autodesk Station, but that wouldn’t be adding much to the debate either, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll point out that CRM and ERP ain’t CAD. Your smartphone ain’t CAD. Facebook ain’t CAD. CAD on the Cloud is a whole different battle and it needs to be fought on its own merits. CAD is much more than text and a few small raster images, yet Autodesk has stumbled badly even when trying to provide that kind of simple SaaS, for example the poorly received online Help and the abysmal Lithium discussion group software.

Nobody has even proven that CAD on the Cloud can work properly yet. Real, full CAD on the Cloud, I mean. Not a few ultra-niche selected components with a handful of users kicking the tyres. Not a glorified viewer. Proper CAD. With 3D, instant response, full customisation, APIs, that sort of thing. On the Cloud. In bulk, for millions of simultaneous users. Online 3D games like World of Warcraft indicate that it might be possible, but it’s still not exactly CAD, is it? If and when it can be made to work and perform significantly better than standalone CAD, then you’ve got a chance to start selling it, despite various inherent disadvantages, to a bunch of grizzled CAD Managers who have been trained into cynicism by decades of hard knocks. Good luck with that.

How can anybody preach the absolute inevitability of something that might not actually happen at all? That’s not the basis for a rational discussion; it more closely resembles religious dogma. You and the rest of Autodesk management might be convinced, but that really doesn’t matter much at all. What matters is whether your customers are convinced. Have a look at the comments and polls here and elsewhere; do you think they are?

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 2

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Steve: Autodesk is currently giving away these Cloud-based services, Butterfly for example. Presumably you’re not going to keep doing that for ever. Are you going to start charging for these services eventually?

Guri: Again, you’re pushing us to talk about future. Currently, for as long as this is in a Labs environment, we’re encouraging users to use it and we’re giving it free in the Labs environment and we’re not putting any limits on it during the Labs experiment. Once we make it a commercial product we may change that.

Steve: I put a poll on my blog asking readers what they thought about CAD on the Cloud, and most of them are either concerned or frightened. Solidworks users are in revolt about what they see as being forced onto the Cloud. Why do you think there is this fear or apprehension of CAD on the Cloud?

Guri: I’m not sure. I’m curious myself about this type of reaction. Maybe it’s fear of the unknown, it’s a new environment, maybe there is some fear about security of documents while they are in the Cloud, it’s just “it’s a new thing”. We believe the approaches we are taking in providing a complementary product to the desktop environment which takes advantage of the latest and greatest web technology and enables those advantages to the user actually will make them feel more at ease. We’re not changing their normal CAD tools, we’re adding to them by enhancing them to take advantage of the capability of infinite storage and infinite CPU that the Cloud brings to them. So in a way, it’s a mixed environment. It’s probably easier to think about moving from desktop only to a mix of desktop and Cloud rather than a step-function where you move entirely to the Cloud.

Tal: Yeah, and when moving to a new platform, you probably know, even when moving to PCs say 10 or 15 years ago, there was a lot of apprehension and whenever you move to a new platform (and rightly so), you’re going to see a lot of concerns being raised by users and it’s our responsibility to provide our users with a very gradual and easy migration path which enables them to pick which components, which things, which processes they would like to do on the desktop and which make more sense to be able to do on the web.

Guri: Steve, you’ve been around CAD for many, many years. You know that CAD users usually worry about a few things. They worry about their documents and drawings. They have a lot of investment in archives of documents and drawings, they want to know that whatever changes happen in the future in the world, will enable them to keep using those drawings as usual. The other thing they worry about is their own training and experience, the way they work every day. They have a lot of habits and practices that they develop over the years and they want to know that they don’t have to retrain themselves or any other new users into new ways of doing things. And what we’re proposing is addressing both. You can use your drawings, this is still DWG, these are still AutoCAD documents, you don’t have to change, every drawing that you have that is created now or 10 years ago is still going to be useful.

So that’s one comment and the other is you can still use AutoCAD; that’s your tool of choice and whatever you do in the Cloud we purposely keep very simple so learning it and training it is really a very, very simple task.

Steve: I think you raised a valid point there about people being afraid of “what’s going to happen to my drawings”; people are concerned that if they move completely to the Cloud then they’re handing over control; they no longer have control of their documents. Do you think that’s a valid concern?

Guri: Well, I think that’s a concern, and people who have it will probably have it for a long time. What we want to do is let them choose how to deal with that. So we are not forcing anything here; we’re letting them keep their drawings on the desktop if they want, we’re letting them upload to the Cloud if they want to take advantage of it, so it’s entirely up to the user what to do. What we’re trying to do is show them that if they want to move to the Cloud, the advantages are the same advantages as photography sites such as Picasa. If you upload your family photos to the Cloud, somebody has done the backup for you; somebody has put security on it that is probably even better than you can do yourself, you can share it easily with others, provide access to your family without sending attachments and stuff like that. So there is a lot of advantages. We’re telling users it’s completely up to you; there are advantages that come along with moving stuff to the Cloud, if you’re not confident with that, that’s perfectly fine, stay on the desktop. So we’re letting the user do it at their own pace.

Steve: Can I share some of my experiences with using Butterfly? Perhaps I was using it wrong; I was trying to draw with it! As you’ve indicated, that’s maybe not what it’s really there for. I found that it wouldn’t open some drawings that I tried to upload. The display was a bit fuzzy, particularly on text, particularly when it was selected. A big issue I have with it is that I have two great big screens here in front of me and because Butterfly is confined to a browser window, it’s only using one rectangle. With AutoCAD, I can grab various bits and pieces of the interface and drag them over to the second screen, so I find Butterfly rather limiting. There also seems to be a lot of wasted space in the Butterfly environment. I can get AutoCAD to use about 91% of the screen space for drawing area; with Butterfly it was about 53%. So you’re working in a tiny little window. People pay lots of money for these big screens, and because you’re working within a browser, and because within that there’s a lot of wasted space, a lot of that investment is wasted. I’ll stop there before I confuse you all, but I have a great big list here of stuff that I found difficult to live with.

Tal: I’d love to have that list. We get a lot of requests from users, and a lot of different things bother different people. You know, we get a lot of requests that are the complete opposite, like I have a laptop with a small screen so I want to be able to optimise, I use Butterfly on the go, I need to have Butterfly optimised for that kind of resolution. But if you have a list of things we’d actually love to see it, and a lot of the times when you’re connected to a product designer on our team and have you talk to him and really go through the things that bother you, because at the end of the day it’s really our job to be able to do a good job and provide the tools which a user loves and delights users, and be able to focus on the things that are important to the majority of users and really do a good job of nailing those experiences. So if you have a list we’d love to have it and engage with you on it and see what makes sense for us to put in there and what we feel is not the highest priority for us feature-wise right now.

Steve: I’m sure you’re working on printing/plotting, because it’s pretty terrible at the moment. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that’s a priority.

Tal: Basically it does not plot right now. It enables you to print your screen, but not plot. I wouldn’t say it’s bad plotting, it does not plot right now. If you want a quick printout of whatever you have on screen, it will do the job. Plotting is one feature that is definitely very interesting to us, it’s important to a lot of users, and we’re definitely looking into it, and providing hopefully in the future a better experience revolving around that.

Steve: And the limitation of selecting more than 30 objects; is that going to go away at some stage?

Tal: I believe you’re going to be seeing a lot of improvements in that area relatively shortly.

Links to part 1 and part 3.

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 1

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On 26 May 2010, I had the opportunity to ask Autodesk some questions about the Cloud in general and what was then Project Butterfly (now AutoCAD WS) in particular. The Autodesk people were:

  • Guri Stark,Vice President, AutoCAD & Platform Products
  • Tal Weiss, R&D Center Manager (Israel)
  • Noah Cole, Corporate Media Relations

The interview was conducted by phone conference with no prior notice of the questions. Here is the first part of the interview, which I will be posting in three sections.

Steve: Guri, are you responsible for all of Autodesk’s Cloud-based offerings?

Guri: Tal and I are responsible for Butterfly, that’s the only Cloud-based offering that we are responsible for.

Noah: Steve, you can put the cloud-based offerings into three categories, those that are related to current products and therefore come out of the same organisations and divisions that those products come out of. So Butterfly which is related to AutoCAD so it’s coming out of the AutoCAD group. Similarly what you’d see happening with manufacturing and those projects. You also have the more emerging Cloud solutions like Dragonfly was (that’s now Homestyler) that’s coming out of Labs. So you see projects coming out of either the divisions if it’s related to product or the Labs group if it’s more forward-looking.

Steve: Can you give me a one-sentence summary of each of the Cloud-based offerings and what market it’s intended to fill?

Guri: Butterfly is one we’ll talk about in more detail in a minute. One we just launched as a product is Autodesk Homestyler (previously Project Dragonfly). It’s a SaaS-based offering done completely in a browser, targeting the home improvement market. It’s free to the end user so users who want to redecorate or remodel their kitchen or their living room can access this product, do a layout, place in it different types of furniture from libraries, and see how physical spaces fit together in this 2D and 3D type of product which is a completely SaaS-based offering.

The end user for this is not traditionally an engineer or CAD user at all, it’s more like the person at home; a typical user would be a 35-year-old lady who is interested in home decoration. The libraries in the product are either generic libraries or branded vendor-provided libraries from a variety of vendors in this space. That’s another type of product using SaaS technology that enabled us to get into a market that we’re currently not in.

There are other projects going on under the umbrella of taking existing products and trying to run them in a Cloud environment, and measuring the performance that they give us. All of them are experimental; some of them are on Labs already with some limitations of distance. So if you are in the California area you can try and use, mostly for trial and evaluation, some of our products such as AutoCAD or Inventor even, in this type of environment. You don’t need to install anything because the application runs in the Cloud; you have full access to the full application for a trial perspective.So there are different approaches to the Cloud. One approach is starting from scratch, developing something like Butterfly or Homestyler from scratch in the cloud to try and target a new market possibly. Another attempt is to take an existing application and try and run them centrally in the Cloud and see whatever performance it gets. Currently our intent is to use it for product evaluation.

Steve: The existing products running in the Cloud in the geographically restricted trial, is it just AutoCAD and Inventor?

Noah: AutoCAD, Inventor and Maya are the only ones currently running. There are also two recent technology previews happening in Manufacturing for Centaur and Cumulus which are different, but that involves Inventor and Moldflow.

Steve: With my experience with Project Butterfly, I agree that as a collaboration and review and viewing/markup tool it’s excellent, but it seems to me that it’s also being promoted as a drafting tool; that people will actually draw with it. It doesn’t seem so strong to me, for that. What is Project Butterfly now, and what is it going to end up being?

Guri: Steve, we’re not promoting this as a drafting tool, we say that the real authoring tool to create drawings is AutoCAD on the desktop. This enables you to upload a drawing that was created using AutoCAD to the Cloud, and in addition to review it and annotate it and share it; you can also make changes to it, to edit it. So what we’re providing in Butterfly is editing tools, not really drawing creation tools. I can tell you we have a free product called Autodesk Design Review, this product has only viewing and annotation capabilities. What a lot of users there are asking for is some basic editing tools where they want to make some local changes, and that’s what we are providing. The editing tools are intended for users that are not necessarily AutoCAD users, we keep them simple for that purpose.

Steve: So it’s not intended to be a drafting tool and you never intend it to actually become one in the end; is that correct?

Guri: I’d rather not comment on future direction. I can tell you right now that the positioning of the product is as a web accompaniment to AutoCAD, in a way similar to Microsoft’s Office Online in the most recent Office application is doing, in which an author on the desktop using Microsoft Word can upload it to the Cloud, view it, share it, edit it. So we are enabling editing of documents in the Cloud.

Tal: Just to add to that, we have different platforms, the desktop and the web. Each platform does certain things very well. So authoring, for example, on the desktop is something that is great, it’s mature and you can do a lot of amazing stuff there. What we want to focus on in building a tool for the web is leverage what the web can do for our users. Stuff like being able to access from anywhere, design timeline, collaboration, sharing; really hitting all those sweet spots instead of trying to imitate what’s already up there on the desktop and is working well. That’s why you see the different focus on the different platforms trying to do that thing it can do best.

Links to part 2 and part 3.

Any Autodesk/Akamai people care to explain this?

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Akamai is an Internet/Cloud infrastructure company, used extensively by Autodesk. To be polite, my experiences using its services over several years have been somewhat negative. Back in March, when trying to download the AutoCAD 2012 trial, I went through the usual Akamai download manager struggles before being informed of the wonderful Opera workaround (thanks again, Helper). I thought I’d seen the last of Akamai for a while, but today, while left unattended, Windows threw up this warning:

Huh? What is Akamai software trying to do here? I hadn’t asked it to do anything. I’m not downloading Autodesk software or even visiting an Autodesk site. There’s no reason for it to be running at all. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. Time to uninstall anything and everything Akamai, I think; something I should have done back in March. But wait! When I go to uninstall, what do I see? This:

Note that the dates are in DD/MM/YYYY format. There’s an application installed back in March, for which I granted permission (unwisely, apparently). OK, but there’s another one installed today! No permission was sought or granted. Right, that’s it. Akamai is now on my brown list, which is not a place anyone wants to be. Nothing in any way related to Akamai will ever be installed any my computer or any computer over which I have influence or control. If Autodesk continues to use Akamai’s services, Autodesk can expect to see continued strong criticism in this area. Unless, of course, somebody from Autodesk and/or Akamai can provide a reasonable explanation of what’s gone on here. Over to you.

All major Autodesk products on the Cloud by 2014?

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As reported by multiple on-line news outlets, Autodesk just announced that it is increasing its research and development budget (having slashed it last year), and increasing the percentage of that budget on the Cloud. Carl Bass:

When there are technology transitions in place, you better be more mindful of that, or you become roadkill.

That’s fair enough. Autodesk would be stupid to ignore the Cloud, and needs to bet at least some of its cash on anything that stands a significant chance of being important. This quote from Autodesk spokesman Paul Sullivan gets more specific:

We are devoting a larger percentage of our R&D budget to cloud computing, with a significant portion of our new product investments going toward products that are cloud-enabled. We expect that all of our major products will be available in the cloud within the next three years.

Now “available” can mean various things. The restricted trial of Cloud-based AutoCAD, Inventor and other products is already year-old news, but that fits the “available” bill. So does a situation where the product is exclusively available on the Cloud and you can no longer buy standalone software. Between those two extremes, there are a variety of possible definitions of “available”. So we’re not that much wiser as a result of that statement.

However, one thing is clear. Autodesk is spending up big on making this Cloud thing happen, so traditional software is going to suffer from a comparitive lack of investment. Autodesk customers, you’re the source of all that cash. How do you feel about subsidising the move of your software tools to the Cloud?

Cloud concerns – tie-in

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One of the major attractions of the Cloud for vendors is that it ties in customers, providing a reasonably consistent revenue stream. It is an effective anti-competitive strategy. There are various technical and other methods that can be used to ensure that it’s difficult or even impossible for customers to jump ship. While that’s all very nice for vendors, it’s not such a wonderful thing for customers.

Let’s say you’re a CAD Manager who persuades your company to use a great new SaaS service and Cloud storage. Let’s assume it performs well, is secure, has 100% uptime and offers functionality that is not available with standalone software. Your company is pleased with all this and uses it increasingly over several years, eventually moving completely into the Cloud. A good news story, right?

Well, maybe. There are a few things that could go wrong. Very wrong. Wrong enough to get you fired. Most of these things have multiple precedents, some of them quite recent. They are realistic concerns and it’s not really plausible for anyone with any knowledge of the past to argue that they won’t happen in the future. I have grouped these concerns into five categories:

  1. Impermanence. The vendor stops providing the service. There are many possible reasons for this happening. Computing is full of product failures and withdrawals. Autodesk alone has such a long history of dead products and orphaned customers, that it would be a major undertaking just to document them all. If the product’s not making money, it’s unlikely to have a future. The vendor itself could go down the tubes. Computing history is littered with the corpses of once-dominant companies. Because there is a chain of dependencies in a typical Cloud solution, there are several potential points of corporate failure. Maybe Autodesk doesn’t go down, but Amazon does, or Citrix. One day, your software just isn’t there any more. What now?
  2. Price ramping. Once you and enough of your fellow customers are tied in, there is nothing to prevent the vendor from racking up the prices. Autodesk has already done this kind of thing with upgrade pricing and Subscription, so it’s not as if it’s an unlikely scenario. If the boil-a-frog-slowly approach is used and you’re the frog being boiled, you’re better off not being tied down when you decide it’s time to get out of the water.
  3. Unwelcome terms and conditions. The terms and conditions under which you operate are often in the Cloud themselves and can be changed by the vendor without you having any say in the matter. What if one day your company lawyer spots a clause has been added that is totally outrageous (even more than normal, I mean) and there is no way your company can possibly continue to operate under those conditions? Good luck trying to negotiate your way out of that one from a position of weakness.
  4. Unwelcome technical changes. I intend to cover the issue of as-you-go upgrades more fully later, but let’s say the vendor introduces a new feature that seriously impacts your ability to use the software productively. No off switch is provided. Sound familiar? It happens to standalone software. It will happen to your SaaS choice, too.
  5. Ignoreware. Your once-fashionable product stops being The New Black. The vendor decides to concentrate its resources in other areas to attract new customers rather than the ones it has already tied up. While your SaaS product continues to be provided, it is put into maintenance mode and nothing useful is added to it. As the rest of the computing world moves on, your SaaS product does not. Holes start to appear that make your life difficult or impossible. Again, Autodesk history is replete with examples of this kind of thing.

If you’re using standalone software and any of the above occurs, it’s probably a pretty big deal, but you can work around it in the short term by simply continuing to use the product that works. You can keep doing this into the medium term, perhaps for several years. Sure, if Autodesk goes down you’ll find that you can no longer authorise new installations or transfer software from one computer to another. But you’ll have some breathing space. You’ll still have all your data, bang up to date. You’ll be able to continue working productively while you look around for an alternative.

If you’ve deeply committed your company to a Cloud solution and the SaaS hits the fan, it’s more than a big deal. It’s a disaster. It could kill your company. It could kill your career. As a computer once asked me, “Do you really want to do this?”

(so (long (and (thanks (for (all (the (parentheses))))))))

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A few days ago, John McCarthy died at the age of 84. He didn’t make a fortune selling gadgets, he just profoundly affected the world of computing. He will be remembered mainly as the father of LISP, without which it is quite possible that AutoCAD and Autodesk would not have survived beyond the 80s. However, his original thinking went well beyond the development of a language. For example, 50 years ago he came up with an idea that is very relevant to what we are actively discussing today:

In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT’s centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing.)

(Credit: Wikipedia)

Back to LISP, I still use John’s antique language today. It’s still the best language choice for the vast majority of the development I do. Thanks, John.

Cloud benefits – collaboration, with Autodesk’s Tal Weiss

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In May 2010 I took part in a phone conference with several Autodesk people about the Cloud. Part of that discussion was in the form of an interview, which I will publish in later posts. Another part was in the form of a verbal presentation from Autodesk’s Tal Weiss, concentrating on what was then Project Butterfly, Autodesk’s then Labs-based Cloudy CAD offering. This product had been called Visual Tao and was later renamed again to AutoCAD WS. As this presentation was largely based on the benefits of the Cloud for CAD collaboration, I think it is worthwhile reproducing it here. Obviously, it represents Tal’s view rather than my own.

First, a little background. Project Butterfly started with an Autodesk acquisition in November 2009 of a company called Visual Tao, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. This is now an Autodesk development office led by Tal Weiss, former CEO and co-founder of Visual Tao. Here is what Tal had to say:

Butterfly is a web application to enable users to edit, share and collaborate on AutoCAD drawings, on line using any web browser. One way to describe it in just a single sentence is, “Google Docs to AutoCAD”, meaning a web application to which you can upload your desktop content to then be immediately able to view and to edit that content using just your web browser with no desktop software necessary, and to share that content very easily with other users without them having to have any kind of software to download and install on the local machine.

The way that we look at it is that Butterfly extends AutoCAD to the web, meaning turning AutoCAD from a best-in-breed software experience for drawing, drafting and modelling on the desktop and extending that over to the web; putting the power of the web at the hands of our AutoCAD and even non-AutoCAD users. That kind of signature was the reasoning behind doing that acquisition [of Visual Tao]; really creating a strong web component from AutoCAD, really enjoying the synergy that both companies could have by incorporating that hopefully in the future to one coherent offering.

The main capability of Butterfly: to allow users to be able to upload content and to be able to edit it on-line. Butterfly today offers a fairly rich set of functionality in terms of what you can do, and we’re constantly adding more tools and capabilities. When we designed this interface, we wanted to make it on the one hand familiar to our existing AutoCAD users, but on the other hand familiar to people who are not AutoCAD users. We’ve seen really good success with that; people are very easily able to upload content and immediately be able to interact with it and manipulate it, edit and comment on content using just a web browser. So that’s probably first of all the one key feature.

Another thing Butterfly needs to do is to allow you to very easily manage and browse through your on-line content. You upload drawings and Butterfly allows you to manage folders in a structure, and to move files around and navigate through your content very easily and to search for your content. We’re making it dead simple for you to manage your AutoCAD drawings on line.

Once the content is on line, it becomes very easy to share that content with other users. With one click, you can take a drawing, or a group of drawings, or an entire folder, and share it with another user. You give them access in a way that is very familiar with Google Docs. You’re not sending them emails with file attachments that they then have to download to the local computers and they need to have the right software for them to be able to open it. What you’re giving them is a link which you can send via email or even post on the Internet, and once they click it those users are able to open that drawing in a web browser and to be able to view and edit it with very good fidelity without having to have any sort of software or files stored on their machines.

There are also a couple of cool things you can do here when you share content, we give you a lot of control over the way you share it. You might want to share your content with someone but without allowing them to edit it. If you’re sending content out to a client you might want them to be able to review the drawings and just do simple markups over them. Or you might not want the user you’re sharing the content with to be able to download it to their machine.

You can do all of that very, very easily. Because you’re sharing the same content with multiple people, you’re not duplicating it in the way you would if you were to send drawings via email, where every time you send out an attachment you’re creating a duplicate where it’s very hard for you to manage which version of the content your consumers are using, especially down the line. This method of sharing on line using just one centralised copy on the web provides you with the ability to have one single point of view for all your design consumers to be able to view, edit and interact with that content. So that’s another exciting feature that you get by using Butterfly for managing and sharing your drawings on line.

Another nice thing about security is that you can actually unshared content. So if today you’re sending out files to users you’re never really able to reclaim that content back; once you’ve sent it out you’ve basically lost control of it. People can do whatever they want with your design and you’re not able to control it. What you can do here [with Butterfly], you have a lot of control over the content because you’re not actually giving them a copy of it, just giving them access to it. You can at any point in time remove access to that content or revoke permission to download and edit once a specific phase of the design process, just leaving up there the content for others for documentation. So there’s a lot of things you can do with the web which are very hard to do when using a file or email-based approach.

One of the things we set out to do when we built this product was provide very strong collaborative capabilities. We’ve seen these for asynchronous collaboration where it’s dead simple for me to just share a file with somebody, give them a link to that drawing and permit them to view and edit it. We also wanted to bake into the system a strong real-time component, especially with the web becoming more and more real-time, and we did it. So it’s very easy for users who are using Butterfly to go into meeting mode with another person, in which they can really laser [focus] in and work on specific components and work and exchange ideas and communicate over design very easily. We provide them with a lot of tools to do so, such as synchronised viewports, shared cursors, enabling users to really co-edit and view drawings together at the same time. So you can have changes propagated between two users as they happen.

For example, if I’m an architect and I want to walk a client through a design, I can just send him out a link to click, and he’s in the drawing with me, we can discuss the drawing together, I can show him various alternatives, things I’d like to do and I can actually control what that other user can do with the drawing. It might make sense for me to only provide that user with viewing and mark-up capabilities and just walk him through that design. Or if I’m working with an environment engineer working on the West coast and another engineer on the East coast and I want them to exchange ideas on the specifics of design we might want both of them to be able to move, edit and manipulate drawings together, and this enables our customers to not only collaborate asynchronously, but also in real time without having to set up any sort of dedicated web conferencing solution, which as we see a lot of the time is hard to set up and get it to work, and those tools which are not really design-dedicated.

So we really want to build a design-dedicated tool for enabling real-time collaboration between users over designs. That’s another key feature that the system today provides users with.

When we set out with Visual Tao and later on Butterfly, we really wanted to build a system that was open and mashable from the ground up. We architected the system and we built it that way, and we launched that on Autodesk Labs. We wanted to be able to test the feature aspect of the system with our users with something that’s meaningful and not just an exercise in technology.

One of the things that’s good about having a project out in Labs is that you get a lot of input and a lot of feedback from the community; a lot of engagement. We’ll be passing the 100,000 visitor mark this month* and we’ve received hundreds and hundreds of emails from users who talk about different things we’re doing with the app, features that are missing. We’ll actually be seeing probably over 27,000 AutoCAD files and drawings already uploaded to Butterfly* by our users. One of the prime requests we have is they wanted the ability to view and share, to collaborate on their drawings in a real-world context.

That’s something we really took to heart and that might mean overlaying your drawing over imagery, or aerial image, or it might mean positioning your content over a third-party service such as Google Maps. So we decided we were going to do that and build that feature out for our users and we provided support for over 30 popular image formats for people to overlay on their designs, and on the other hand we connected our system to Google maps, enabling users to position their drawing over a map and view and edit it in that real-world context in order to be able to share that with other users. We put it out on Labs and we immediately saw a lot of activity revolving around that feature. For probably the first 3 or 4 weeks after putting it out we have seen over 1,000 drawings overlaid over Google Maps and it’s very satisfying for us to be able to get requests from users regarding features that they like and being able to work on that very quickly and put it in their hands and see them using it and see them deriving value out of that.

I think probably over the course of the four months since the service has been up, we’ve actually updated it six times. Each time adding more features, more functionality, all based on user and community requests. That’s something that is very satisfying for us, to be able to get that feedback from the community and to be able to deliver on that.

A strong feature that the web provides is the ability to provide our users with infinite storage space. Whenever you upload a new file version to Butterfly, whenever you send out a drawing to review, whenever you meet on a drawing and co-edit it with a colleague or review it, Butterfly stores all that information and automatically places it on a design line, enabling you with just a couple of clicks to immediately go back to a previous versions, reviews, meetings, without having to archive or manage all that data yourself.

So if you’re working on a design and you need to incorporate some changes based on comments you got from a design review which happened 3 or 4 weeks ago, there’s no need for you to go back to an email or a file to look for those spots, you can with just one click go back to Butterfly and see all the changes and comments that were made during that meeting or review session automatically, and not only view it but download it to your machine, take it back to AutoCAD and work on the file some more, then re-upload it and have that design timeline automatically updated and all of the users sharing that file automatically getting access to the latest version. That’s another strong and interesting feature that Butterfly provides our users with today and which we’ve seen a lot of excitement about.

* Remember, this was back in May 2010, about 4 months after Autodesk Labs launched Project Butterfly.

Cloud benefits – processing power

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A frequently stated advantage of CAD on the Cloud is the access to large amounts of processing power. Instead of relying on your lowly local processor to perform complex tasks, you can instead zap the job up to the Cloud where vast numbers of processors churn away in massively parallel fashion and then zap the results back to you before you’ve even had time to head for the coffee machine.

This is a scenario that applies only for certain types of very complex tasks that are suited to subdividing the calculations among many processors. Autodesk already has a big toe in the waters in several of those areas. The recent Autodesk Cloud changes made available Inventor Optimization, Cloud Rendering, Green Building Studio and Conceptual Energy Analysis to a small subset of Subscription customers. It’s safe to assume that these services will be improved and expanded over the next few years. (Is there anybody out there using Autodesk Cloud services for these processor-intensive tasks? Let’s hear about your real-world experiences.)

What this doesn’t mean is that it makes sense for us all to be using CAD on the Cloud, all the time. The processing time gained by using the Cloud is offset by the communication time spent passing the data back and forth, so any processing gain has to be substantial to make it worthwhile. Twenty years ago, when every zoom extents was followed by a looooong wait, a big swag of extra processing power would have come in very handy. These days, processors are ridiculously fast in comparison. They are also very cheap and getting cheaper. Even low-end PCs have had multiple cores for some years, and these days seeing eight almost unused cores on your performance monitor is pretty normal.

The performance of today’s CPUs and the variable performance of today’s Internet, mean that calculations need to be very substantial to make them worth outsourcing to the Cloud. For the vast majority of tasks associated with using CAD software you simply don’t need to hand the job to somebody else’s hardware, because there is ample capacity right there on your desk.

(As an aside, whether it’s on your desk or a server farm, writing software that takes advantage of all those cores must be really difficult. I say that because today’s CAD software seldom uses more than one or two at the same time. Even a seemingly straightforward split like loading AutoCAD’s Ribbon while allowing you to start drawing appears to be too hard. It took Autodesk four Ribboned AutoCAD releases to even attempt this, and the result is a failure; the cursor lag while background loading the Ribbon is unacceptable.)

For tasks where there is the technical potential to share the load, a remote service still might not be the best solution. How about a private cloud instead, where the processing load gets shared between your company’s idle processors via your LAN, and your data never leaves the premises? It seems to me that such a solution could provide most of the Cloud benefits and remove almost all of the concerns. This has already happened in pilot with some Autodesk software. I’d like to see more emphasis placed on private-cloud-friendly software, because I think it has a much better chance of customer acceptance and the development effort is less likely to be wasted.

Cloud concerns – downtime

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One concern with any SaaS (Software as a Service) product is the potential for downtime. Is this really an issue? After all, big Cloud vendors have multiple server farms as part of their huge infrastructure investment. This provides redundancy to keep things going even in the event of a major local disaster or two. Cloud vendors have a lot of experience handling things such as power outages, hackers, denial-of-service attacks and the like. Amazon, the vendor currently used by Autodesk, promises an annual uptime of 99.95%.  That’s got to be good enough, surely?

Maybe not. The Amazon cloud service has had some noticeable failures, in some cases affecting customers for several days. Amazon may promise a certain average uptime figure, but it provides only credits if it fails to meet its targets. Amazon has been known to be slippery about using fine print to avoid paying those credits, which in any case would go to Autodesk. Joe Drafter, who relies on a Cloud application to do his work and who suffers a significant loss of income and business reputation from a 4-day outage, probably shouldn’t hold his breath while waiting for a big fat compensation check to turn up.

But is a Cloud solution really going to be less reliable than what you have now? Nothing’s 100% reliable, including a standalone PC, so what’s the problem? The problem is that with the Cloud, the potential for downtime is in addition to that you currently experience. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the sort of things that could stop you producing a design using traditional software:

  • Power failure at your office
  • Your hardware fails
  • Your operating system fails
  • Your CAD software has problems bad enough to prevent you working

Here’s an equivalent similarly non-exhaustive list for a SaaS CAD application:

  • Power failure at your office
  • Your hardware fails
  • Your operating system fails
  • Your browser or thin client software fails
  • Your modem fails
  • Your Internet service provider has an outage
  • Internet connectivity infrastructure failure
  • Cloud vendor infrastructure disaster
  • Cloud-based CAD software is down for maintenance
  • Cloud-based CAD software has problems bad enough to prevent you working

Each of these items may represent a relatively small risk, but the additional potential for disaster adds up and is real.

There’s another aspect to this issue that makes it significant, and that’s the psychological one. People hate feeling powerless when faced with a problem. If your hard drive crashes, even if you don’t have IT people to look after it, you can hop in your car, buy another drive and start working towards getting your problem fixed. If Amazon has a Cloud outage, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it but wait for an unknown amount of time. Even if you were Amazon’s direct customer and not a sub-customer through Autodesk, you could expect to have a very frustrating time even trying to find out what’s going on. I’ve been in that situation when my old web hosting company went through a massive and protracted meltdown, and it’s horrible.

What do you think? If everything else about the Cloud was great, would worries about downtime prevent you from considering a SaaS-only solution? Is it non-negotiable for you to be able to keep working even when “the Internet is broken”?

Cloud benefits – collaboration

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The “other” C word – collaboration – was super-trendy in a mildly amusing way a couple of years ago, so I hesitate to use it here. But it seems to me that it represents a real potential benefit of CAD on the Cloud. Not just potential, because it’s already here, free for anyone, thanks to AutoCAD WS. The optional ability to put your designs where they can be worked on by those who are contributing to the design, regardless of their location, has to be a good thing, surely?

Let’s find out how it’s going in the real world. I’d like to hear from people who have used AutoCAD WS, or tried to use it, in order to collaborate with others. What are the benefits and problems? Does the workflow match your needs, or do issues such as contractual and legal responsibility prevent you from working in this way? Are there practical difficulties in areas such as performance and CAD management? Is AutoCAD WS a good enough CAD tool for this job, or does it have a way to go yet?

Cloud concerns – terms and conditions

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I just used Autodesk Cloud Documents for the first time, and was asked to confirm my acceptance of the Terms of Service. Fair enough. But just what is in those terms, and what do they mean to you if you are dubious about using the Cloud? Will you be reassured by what you find there? Maybe not. Here are a few clauses that might make you go hmmm…

The terms applicable to a particular service may vary.

Translation: Autodesk can move the goalposts.

Autodesk has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor Your usage of the Service to verify compliance with these Terms.

Translation: Autodesk can keep its eye on you.

You acknowledge and agree that: (a) You will evaluate and bear all risks associated with Your Content; (b) under no circumstances will Autodesk Parties be liable in any way for Your Content, including, but not limited to, any loss or damage, any errors or omissions, or any unauthorized access or use; and (c) You (and not Autodesk) are responsible for backing up and protecting the security and confidentiality of Your Content.

Translation: whatever happens, it’s your problem, not Autodesk’s.

Third Party Content and services may be made available to You, directly or indirectly, through the Service (including Content shared by other users of the Service, through Forums or by any other means). In some cases, such Content and services may appear to be a feature or function within, or extension of, the Services or the Autodesk Software. Accessing such Content or services may cause Your Computer, without additional notice, to communicate with a third-party website … for example, for purposes of providing You with additional information, features and functionality.

Translation: Autodesk and others can use the service to advertise to you.

Autodesk reserves the right to delete inactive accounts or purge related Content (and all backups thereof), without further notice and Autodesk Parties shall have no responsibility or liability for deletion or any failure to store Your Content.

Translation: don’t just leave your stuff up in the clouds and expect it to still be there a few years later.

You acknowledge that Autodesk may use third-party service providers in connection with the Services, including without limitation the use of cloud computing service providers which may transmit, maintain and store Your data using third-party computers and equipment in locations around the globe.

Translation: it’s not just Autodesk here, there is a chain of responsibilities and vulnerabilities.

THE SERVICE OFFERING IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE.” AUTODESK PARTIES MAKE NO, AND HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL, REPRESENTATIONS, WARRANTIES, OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND…

YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE OFFERING IS AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK.

AUTODESK PARTIES DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE OFFERING WILL PERFORM IN ANY PARTICULAR MANNER AND HEREBY DISCLAIM LIABILITY FOR NEGLIGENCE AND GROSS NEGLIGENCE.

Translation: Autodesk lawyers LOVE SHOUTING. Whatever happens, including gross negligence on Autodesk’s part, it’s still all your fault and you’re severely out of luck.

…for all Service Offerings accessed as part of Subscription, these Terms and Your access to the Services will terminate when Your Subscription (and the Subscription Program Terms applicable to Your Subscription) terminates or expires.

Translation: here’s a further disincentive to ever dropping out of Subscription once you’re on it.

It is Your responsibility to retain copies of Your Content. Upon termination Autodesk shall have the right to immediately delete, without notice, Your Content, if any, and all backups thereof, and Autodesk Parties shall not be liable for any loss or damage which may be incurred by You or any third parties as a result of such deletion.

Translation: don’t rely on the Cloud alone.

Autodesk reserves the right, from time to time in its sole discretion, to (a) modify or release subsequent versions of the Service, (b) impose license keys or other means of controlling access to the Service, (c) limit or suspend Your access to the Service, and (d) change, suspend or discontinue the Service at any time.

Translation: Autodesk can do pretty much whatever it likes, including killing the whole thing.

I don’t think any of this means Autodesk is evil. Looked at from the point of view of a corporation that needs to cover its backside and reduce risks to itself, it’s quite understandable. Much of it is just very sensible advice. You can expect similar conditions from other companies providing Cloud services. But what if you’re not happy with using a Cloud service that has such conditions attached? Well, you can use it anyway and keep your fingers crossed, or you stay away from it altogether.

How do you see this? Assuming you were happy with everything else about the Cloud, would clauses like those above be a dealbreaker?

Edit: this post is also being discussed on the Dezignstuff blog.

Note: the above clauses are Autodesk copyright, reproduced here under fair use (comment and criticism).

How do you feel about CAD in the Cloud?

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Early last year, I ran a poll to gauge your feelings about CAD in the Cloud. Here are the results of that poll:

Cad in the Cloud 2010 Poll

As you can see, the poll response bell curve was clearly biased toward the frightened end of the spectrum, and there was little in the way of excitement at the Cloudy prospects for CAD. A fair bit has happened since last February (particularly the recent Autodesk Cloud announcement), so I thought I’d see how the ground lies at the moment. Are you feeling more positive about Cloudy CAD than you were 18 months ago? 

I’ve just added a poll for you to vote on, identical to last year’s. In addition, I’d love to see your comments on the subject. Is CAD in the Cloud inevitable, or is it not going to fly? If you don’t think it will take off and take over, why not? Is it going to be Heaven, Hell, or somewhere in between? I have my own views, but I’ll keep them to myself for now; the floor is yours.

Autodesk Cloud – don’t panic, business as usual

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Autodesk recently made a big announcement about its Cloud initiatives, and reactions have been all over the place. Some people can barely contain their breathless excitement while others are outraged to the point of passing out the pitchforks. Why? It’s pretty much business as usual.

It’s nothing like Dassault’s disastrous we’re-moving-you-to-the-Cloud FUD campaign against its own product, SolidWorks. There’s no hint here of AutoCAD (real AutoCAD, I mean, not “AutoCAD” WS) being moved to the Cloud, or anything as radical as that. (Yes, I know there’s a limited experiment along those lines but that’s nothing to do with this announcement). It’s just a collection of relatively minor changes to Autodesk’s existing on-line services, collected together to make a newsworthy press release.

(As an aside, I must say this was a much more worthwhile announcement than the ridiculously over-hyped DE8.16N thing. So I was supposed to get excited about a routine upgrade of a product I have already been using for months, on an OS I don’t use, when the upgraded product is still half-baked just like the first underwhelming effort? Fortunately, I didn’t get sucked in by the pre-announcement build-up so I wasn’t disappointed, just amused when the truth was revealed. Autodesk PR, please don’t cry wolf so often; keep the hype in reserve for the hypeworthy stuff.)

Back to the Cloud thing, and putting aside hype and horror, here’s the stuff that has just happened:

  • Autodesk Cloud documents lets anybody store up to 1 GB documents on-line, or 3 GB if you’re a Subscription customer. This isn’t new, but until recently it was an Autodesk Labs project called Nitrous. The infrastructure is provided via Amazon and Citrix.
  • AutoCAD WS has been updated to integrate its storage with Autodesk Cloud documents. Remember, WS isn’t anything like real AutoCAD, but rather a limited on-line DWG editing tool. There’s a WS iPhone app, but that’s not new.
  • There’s an Autodesk Design Review iPhone app for reviewing DWF files you’ve stored in Autodesk Cloud. It won’t do DWG; use WS for that.
  • There are several cloud-based services that are available “free” to Subscription-paying users of a small subset of Autodesk software, mostly Revit and Inventor-based suites. They are: 
    • Inventor Optimization
    • Cloud Rendering
    • Green Building Studio
    • Conceptual Energy Analysis
    • Buzzsaw (now bundled with Vault Subscription)

    AutoCAD users need not apply for any of these services.

So some of Autodesk’s on-line services are now being provided only to Subscription customers, and one is offered in improved form for Subscription customers. There are two obvious reasons for this: tie-in and revenue.

First, Autodesk wants its customers tied to the Subscription gravy train, if you’ll excuse a fairly awful mix of metaphors. Offering Subscription benefits like this is preferable to some of the much less pleasant arm-twisting that has been happening recently (e.g. trebling upgrade prices). Is it too much to hope that Autodesk has learned that offering carrots to its customers is a better strategy than threatening them with sticks?

Second, Autodesk needs to start making money out of this stuff somehow. For some years, it has spent several fortunes on buying and developing on-line services and then given them away for nothing, usually as Labs projects. This obviously can’t go on for ever, but just slapping a charge on these services wasn’t going to fly. Bundling Cloud services up with Subscription is a way of easing people into paying for them, and this is something I expect to be expanded in future, for example with AutoCAD WS. Once that’s been established for a few years, it wouldn’t surprise me to then see Subscription for at least some of the services split off, so you’re paying for Cloud services explicitly. By then, enough customers may consider them to be worth paying for and they may therefore survive beyond the short term.

Will it work? I’m not sure. Time will tell which of these services will thrive and which will die, and such uncertainty is one of the many reasons real-world customers aren’t excited about getting their heads in the Cloud. I don’t intend to make use of these services (I’m not even allowed to), so I’m not too bothered what happens to them. Like the vast majority of Autodesk customers, I will just carry on using conventional software in that old-fashioned 20th century way that just happens to work very well. Autodesk will go on providing its software in that way, because that’s what most customers will want for at least a while yet, and Autodesk can’t survive on wisps of Cloudy revenue.

Move along, people, nothing to see here.

Will Autodesk have to explain itself to the SEC?

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The observant among you may have noticed that for many years, Autodesk’s free patches, service packs and updates haven’t added any new functionality. Bugs may get fixed, severe performance issues may be addressed, but design errors generally have to wait for the next release (at the earliest), and new features definitely don’t get added.

The last time new functionality was added to AutoCAD in a free maintenance release was Release 13’s c4 update which shipped on 12 February 1996. (There was a public beta available some months earlier; I picked up a copy at Autodesk University 1995). That free update contained not only a host of bug fixes, but also more useful new features than some later full-price upgrades (e.g. AutoCAD 2000i). In an outbreak of outstanding customer service, a c4 CD was shipped free to all registered users. Maybe Autodesk was trying to recover from disastrously shipping Release 13 prematurely, but issuing such a comprehensive update free of charge was still highly commendable.

Why did Autodesk stop providing new functionality in free updates? While it involves more work for Autodesk and hardly encourages paid upgrades or Subscription, the reason we’ve been given over the years is that there are accounting regulations that prevent Autodesk from providing new functionality in free updates. This does not apply to benefits from paid Subscription, and various new features for Subscription users have indeed appeared (albeit in fits and starts) over the intervening years.

I have to admit that I have always thought that this accounting thing was a pretty unlikely-sounding excuse for Autodesk’s inactivity. This attitude was reinforced by a lack of Autodesk response to my requests for further information about the alleged regulations. Until recently, I didn’t care enough about this matter to bother finding out for myself, but something extraordinary just happened that piqued my curiosity.

What happened? Autodesk released a free Service Pack that included new functionality for the first time in over 15 years. I was particularly interested in this, because part of what’s new is a new command providing a subset of the functionality of my ClassicArray™ plug-in. When I put in the time and effort to develop this product to fill a hole of Autodesk’s making, I did so on the assumption that Autodesk wasn’t going to provide an Array dialog box until at least AutoCAD 2013. It turns out that this assumption was wrong.

So what’s all this about accounting regulations preventing new functionality being provided free between releases? Was I right to be vaguely cynical about that? After some research, it would appear that I was wrong about that, too. There is an FASB (responsible to the SEC) accounting standard called SOP 97-2, which covers software revenue recognition. I’m no accountant and the regulations are large and complex, but here is my layman’s understanding of the basics.

In a simple case where a vendor (e.g. Autodesk) sells a complete product (e.g. AutoCAD 2012) at a given date, it records and declares the revenue for that product in the appropriate period as a single unit of accounting. If there are multiple elements of the product, things get more complex. If Autodesk ships part of AutoCAD 2012 (the main product) at one time and part (e.g. a Service Pack with new functionality) at another, then it is required to separate the elements into multiple units of accounting. It is required to make available vendor-specific objective evidence (VSOE) for each element of the product. If Autodesk has not done so (which seems likely), there is probably a problem. My understanding is that without VSOE, Autodesk is required to allocate the revenue for AutoCAD 2012 sales not at the point when it was received, but when all the elements have been delivered (i.e. when SP1 was released).

What about an argument that the new ARRAYCLASSIC command and new SNAPGRIDLEGACY system variable are not new functionality in themselves, but merely mechanisms to restore functionality that was available in previous releases? I don’t think that matters. The functionality is new to those customers who purchased AutoCAD 2012 and thereby provided Autodesk with revenue between March and September 2011. If that revenue has been allocated incorrectly, then Autodesk has some revenue shuffling and explaining to do.

I repeat that I’m not an accountant and this is all a layman’s uninformed opinion. It is quite possible that the regulations have recently changed, or that a relaxed interpretation is now permissible, or that I have the wrong end of the stick entirely. I’ve admitted being wrong in this post twice already and it could well be thrice.

If I’m wrong and Autodesk is in the clear, that’s great. Why? Because it means Autodesk customers can look forward to a lot more functionality being provided in future service packs.