Category Archives: Autodesk

The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?

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

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

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

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

Steve: Autodesk is giving one away anyway.

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

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

Steve: It’s about 800 MB.

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

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

Erik: Yeah, yeah!

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

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

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

Erik: Maybe we’ll do that.

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

Erik: Yeah.

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

The big Bricsys interview 10 – platforms

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, R.K. McSwain asks about BricsCAD running on three different platforms. Erik explains why BricsCAD for Mac (and Linux) is so much more complete than AutoCAD for Mac, which has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

R.K.: Do all three platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) contain the same functionality?

Erik: Yes. Sometimes it’s a bit hard with the Mac to bring it along but so far, so good. The only problem sometimes is in the APIs.

We are using wxWidgets and not the Microsoft classes. This gives us the ability, with the same source code more or less, to serve Mac, Linux and Windows. By far Windows is the most important one. By history, all the applications are on Windows, because AutoCAD was only Windows. What we have as APIs, and the most important ones are BRX and .NET. If you want to port an application to Mac, it means our API must support that as well. BRX is doing that for 90 to 95%; there are a couple of functions that only work on Windows. For most of the applications, they can port their application to Linux or the Mac without any problems.

Steve: And you support the Visual LISP COM functions as well, right?

Mark: Yes, we cover them and they are also available on Mac and Linux.

Steve: You have a solution there that Autodesk doesn’t, which gives us the strange situation that BricsCAD for Mac is more AutoCAD-compatible than AutoCAD for Mac.

R.K.: AutoCAD for Mac leaves a lot of holes.

Erik: That’s because they rewrote the whole interface for Cocoa, and we didn’t. We are using one code base. You can be more Catholic than the Pope, yeah? If you rewrite AutoCAD completely for the Mac, the result is many holes, no applications possible, it doesn’t help anybody. We’re better off being pragmatic and doing it the way we did it.

Still, we must say that applications availability for Mac and Linux is not much. That has to do with 95% of our sales being on Windows. We expect that might change for BIM, because more architects are Mac users, partly because the first version of ArchiCAD was on Mac, Vectorworks is, so it’s really an Architect’s machine. We expect that maybe for BIM, it might change and we might sell more versions on the Mac.

Steve: Autodesk doesn’t have a competitor there, does it?

Erik: No, absolutely not.

Mark: I should mention that all of our keys are cross-platform. So when you buy a key, you can run them all. So every time you on decide to run on Mac and later on you decide to switch it to Windows, we don’t have any problem. You can switch whenever you want, from one to the other, on to Linux if you want.

Erik: Again, choice. It’s up to the users.

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

The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: Except for Intergraph, of course!

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

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

The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

Erik discusses where Bricsys can go in future and the place BIM has in that.

Cyrena: So what is your vision, ultimately, of what Bricsys will become in tandem with your partners? Do you have limits or boundaries of which markets you will address and which you won’t? Are you going to be bigger than… “somebody else” one day?

Erik: If it comes to the number of customers, challenging AutoCAD is difficult. 12 million registered users. If you count illegal users it might add up to, I don’t know, 20 million, 30 million? I don’t know, nobody knows.

What are the boundaries of where we can go? It’s more or less dictated by the application markets. We have application developers in GIS, we have them in AEC, we have them in mechanical. In Mechanical 3D, AutoCAD was not present. They were present with AutoCAD Mechanical, but that’s a 2D product. If for a moment I leave Inventor out, because it’s another file format, but for DWG, the market for sheet metal and the things that Solidworks and others do, you don’t see third party applications with power participating in that market, with AutoCAD. With all the other markets, there are plenty of other applications: GIS, AEC, it’s endless. We want to bring everyone who wants to work with us, we’re going to feed and help them, and that’s more or less the boundary of where we can go.

For BIM, that’s something we are driving ourselves and it’s a huge market. There’s a lot of attention being paid to Revit [by elements of the press]. We think there are a lot of DWG users that want to move to BIM, but first of all Revit is too expensive, it’s too complicated by far, and it’s another file format. These are hurdles that not everybody wants to jump at the moment. It’s fair to say that we are working to eliminate all those hurdles. An existing DWG user, AutoCAD or BricsCAD already knows 80% of our BIM product. He has to learn 20% extra and he can participate, probably in an easier and more intuitive way than he can ever do with Revit.

We didn’t talk a lot about the differences between Revit and our BIM solution. I think in six months and a year we’re going to spend more time to really explain the differences. BIM is hyped, but there are studies that show that 19% of the people who talk about BIM are actually using it. It’s a couple of hundred thousands, it’s not millions already. There’s a lot of hype around it but the real challenge is to bring five or six million people on DWG in the AEC space into BIM. That’s our goal. If they want to stay on DWG, we are their only chance. For that part only, that’s already a huge start. If you then count all the applications on top of that and around it, the addressable market for us on that is immense.

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

Teresa from Autodesk in subscription interview

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As a follow-up to the Pixel Fondue video I posted about earlier, Greg from Pixel Fondue conducted a follow-up interview with Teresa Anania, Autodesk’s Senior Director, Subscription Success.

Greg and I asked for your questions for Teresa and I passed on several of my own to him. A word of warning: don’t do as I did and watch through all 54 minutes waiting increasingly impatiently for those questions to come up. They don’t. Anyway, thanks to Greg for conducting this interview and to Teresa for participating.

Greg has now posted the video. Here’s the TL;DW (too long; didn’t watch) version:

  • Greg came up with some suggestions for making subscription more attractive (mainly to entertainment and media customers) and Teresa seemed open to those suggestions.
  • Teresa doubled down on a bunch of the spin that has been thoroughly skewered by myself and many others.
  • There was a rehash of the pricing information we already had a couple of months ago using the same figures Teresa provided in this blog post.
  • The one new piece of information was that somebody who switches from maintenance to subscription will be able to retain access to all prior versions held during perpetual license ownership. This could be interpreted in several different ways and it wasn’t clarified, so I guess we’ll have to wait for something in writing.
  • Despite what Teresa has apparently told some customers on the phone, there was no mention of a less unattractive subscription offer that involves keeping your perpetual license. Indeed, Teresa made it clear that trading in your perpetual license was very much still part of the deal.
  • Future costs for maintenance and subscription were as vague as ever but Teresa thinks it’s pretty impressive that Autodesk put out three years of pricing when asking customers to make a decision with decades-long implications.
  • Teresa wants you to give Autodesk a year to prove how wonderful subscription will be, and is very confident that subscription is for “the greater good”. (Andrew Anagnost also did the “give us a year” thing on Twitter so I guess we’ll see that theme repeated in an attempt to buy more time).
  • She has solemnly stated that Autodesk is never going to gouge its customers and wants to start building better relationships.
  • Teresa wants to hear from you and suggests the Autodesk Moving to Subscription forum as one way of getting in touch.

Here’s the video:

The big Bricsys interview 7 – the applications ecosystem

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik discusses the Bricsys efforts to work with and assist third-party developers. He does this without being prompted by a question – it’s obviously very important to him.

Erik: For our future growth it’s very important, the ecosystem of the applications we have now. We have talked a lot about what we are doing and about our own products, but we should maybe have spent more time on the importance of the ecosystem. The worst thing we could do is forget the application market for us.

We will not, and we are not able, to develop another HVAC system or a [inaudible] system. We are limited in our resources and focused too much in our development. We believe that if there are five or ten HVAC packages, one in Germany, one in France, one in the US and one in Australia, all those guys understand their local markets and it’s very difficult to take an HVAC package made in America and sell it in Germany. The last thing we want to do is destroy that diversity of the application market. On the contrary, we’re going to encourage it. Therefore we will continuously provide APIs to the application market and invite and encourage them to become more professional. This support is so important. That’s where we can make a difference with many of our colleagues, and we should bring the application market to the same level of professionalism. That’s where we are investing as well. They can use all our systems for free.

It would be a great and a wonderful world if you as a customer if you come to our website or you go to an application website and finds the same systems and buys something, and communicates… if there’s a problem, it’s our problem. He can tell us, the application partner can tell us, if it’s an application problem we will tell them or the customer will tell them. But that kind of trio between the customer, us and the application market is so important. We need that.

We need those kind of applications working with our system. And they are there! For over ten years they have wonderful applications. The point is, they lacked, for the moment, the technology to grow into IFC and the BIM market. That’s what we are developing for them now. Right now we need the apps, and we’re delivering to them. But it’s a very important thing for us, that ecosystem. And again I think that’s another difference between us and many, er, alternatives (laughs).

Steve: Not saying “the A word” there…

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

Steve: It’s something I’ve noticed for years, actually, that you guys look after the third-party developers whereas Autodesk sees them as a revenue source.

Erik: Absolutely. We are convinced we need them. They have to say they need us as well. That’s a very good symbiosis. And the top of that is Intergraph. For us, it’s an application partner, right? There’s scalability a bit more than before.  If Intergraph takes this step, let us invite every other application developer to do the same.

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

Autodesk products are falling like parrots

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Autodesk is killing off products at such a rate I can’t keep up with it all. The latest ones to fall off the perch and join the choir invisible are Structural Detailing and Advance Concrete.

I think. As I said, I can’t keep up.

Despite the recent departures, Autodesk still has way too many products and it’s inevitable that the cull of Carl’s acquisitions and creations will continue. It’s just too bad if you’re one of the people using a product that Autodesk feels isn’t profitable and/or exciting enough, you’ll just have to learn to live without it.

Although 2017 has been particularly brutal for End Of Life experiences, Autodesk killing off products is of course nothing new. Autodesk is even named after a dead product (well, stillborn).

Trace back through Autodesk’s history and you’ll see a long and bloody trail of product corpses and wailing orphans. Maybe you’re one of those orphans. Tell us all about your experiences if you think it might be cathartic. Were you looked after?

What sort of product does Autodesk kill off? Let’s narrow it down.

Autodesk kills new products, old products, cloud products, desktop products, mobile products, free products, paid products, full products, add-on products, large products, small products, products that were bought just to kill off for anti-competitive reasons, products that have been ignored to death, and products that Autodesk hyped to the heavens as the best thing ever and if you didn’t get on board you’d be left behind with all the other Luddites and look silly and old-fashioned as your competitors strode off arm-in-arm with Autodesk into a wonderful bright future.

You name it, Autodesk has killed it. It would seem that almost nothing is safe.

To give you some idea what I mean, I’ve resurrected my Autodesk Graveyard page. I tried this a few years ago but it was too big a job to create and maintain it so I killed it (ironically enough). Thanks to Edwin Prakaso on Twitter for inspiring me to have another go at it, with a bit less detail this time so hopefully it’s manageable.

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

The Autodesk Graveyard is by no means complete and what’s there may not be 100% accurate. Additions and corrections can be made by letting me know in the comments on this post. If you could provide references that show the birth and death dates of the products you know about, that would be ideal, but all feedback is welcome.

The big Bricsys interview 6 – lean and focused

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, the dynamic duo explain the mystery of how Bricsys can sell smaller numbers of a more capable product than AutoCAD for a fraction of the cost – and still make money.

Steve: It’s kind of interesting that your product is so much cheaper than AutoCAD, and more capable. They’re making a loss and you’re making increasing profits. How does that work?

Erik: I think it has to do with being lean and being focused. I mean, we’re talking about Autodesk, and we’re talking about AutoCAD and Revit and Inventor, but did you have a look at all the products they have? The managers that have to work on those products… I don’t study the detail of their annual figures, but I think it’s obvious that if you have that ton of products, not all of those products are profitable. Of course, not all of them are losing money, but you can’t call it lean.

What we are doing is… we are forced to be profitable. We force ourselves to be profitable. And then we have to be lean. We have four developers that constantly automate our systems, and that four will be extended again. That pays off big-time. It’s an investment; continuous, continuous, continuous. To invent new things where we can improve to be lean as well.

Mark: Stressing again that Autodesk has one hundred products, we basically have one product. We can see for mechanical, we can see for BIM, basically it’s one product.

Steve: It’s the same core.

Mark: It’s the same core, absolutely. So when we started to develop BIM, we used the same toolset as we used for sheet metal; exactly the same. Of course it’s tweaked to be used in BIM or sheet metal, but in the ground it’s the same.

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

The big Bricsys interview 5 – perpetual licensing and choice

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik confirms the Bricsys commitment to perpetual licensing. That’s a statement important enough to preserve, so here’s the recorded audio for posterity.

We also learn what proportion of CAD customers choose perpetual licenses over rental when given fair pricing and the choice. Hint to Autodesk: it’s not 0%.

Steve: Are you committed to the perpetual licensing model?

Erik: Yes, yes. We are committed to choice. If somebody wants another way of licensing our stuff, that’s fine as well. I mean you can hire our stuff, you can pay per month, it’s possible.

Steve: That’s not in all markets, is it?

Erik: We don’t promote it, but it’s possible if somebody contacts us, no problem. It’s choice, and we believe in choice. It’s not up to us to impose how people work with our stuff. But perpetual, it’s fair, I think. Somebody buys software, it’s always been like that, and we have to continue that. And we will continue that. Read my lips! We will continue.

All: (laughs)

Cyrena: Speaking of choice, can you talk about the type and portion of users who go for rental rather than perpetual?

Mark: Of course the vast majority go for perpetual.

Erik: 95% buyers.

Mark: When you see these clients in Russia that have these big oil projects in Siberia for six months or whatever, then it [rental] might make sense. But with the channel… 95, 97, 98% is just perpetual.

But what we see more and more is people are asking about it [rental] more and more, because of course in the Autodesk world there is no other option. So of course people just want to compare apples with apples.

Steve: So they’re just asking for the numbers?

Mark: Yes, for the numbers, “What would it be?” That’s the feeling that we have, ultimately when they make a decision they’re going to go for perpetual.

Erik: Because the price is acceptable as well, I think. It’s not that high a price for a substantial amount of software, so it’s not a problem.

Mark: Our price levels are completely different, of course. It’s affordable.

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

Clearing up the Autodesk rental / subscription / maintenance naming confusion

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Some people are confused by Autodesk’s naming terminology about subscription, maintenance and rental. This is entirely Autodesk’s fault, because it took a name (Subscription) which had a long-established meaning (including perpetual licensing) and used that name (but without its initial capital) to mean the opposite (no perpetual licensing).

There was a brief period, only last year, where the S word meant both things at the same time and differentiation between the opposing meanings was achieved using different prefixes.

Confused yet?

I’m not sure whether it’s kinder to view Autodesk doing something so obviously confusing as merely incompetence in communication or a deliberate attempt to confuse and deceive customers and/or the share market. Or maybe it was an inspired choice and I’m too obtuse to comprehend its genius. Choose whichever explanation you prefer.

In an attempt to clear things up, but at the risk of confusing matters further, Autodesk’s naming history goes something like this. The years shown below are approximate and some of them varied for different products and markets.

Year
 Name for perpetual license + pre-paid upgrades Name for rental
1997-2001 VIP Subscription Program –
2001-2003 VIP Subscription Program Rental
2004-2012 Subscription –
2013 Subscription Rental
2014-2015 Subscription –
2016 (briefly) maintenance subscription desktop subscription
2016- maintenance subscription

The current rental regime, which has run under two names to date but is currently called ‘subscription’, is the third attempt Autodesk has had at rental. The first two attempts failed in the marketplace because the vast majority of customers prefer perpetual licenses.

The big Bricsys interview 4 – thank you, Autodesk

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, we learn that Autodesk’s move to all-rental has helped drive BricsCAD sales higher and continues to do so.

Cyrena: Backing up just a step to sales, were you able to track any impact on your sales numbers with the chronology of Autodesk’s announcements of ending perpetual? Did you see an effect that you could map to that?

Erik/Mark (together): Yes.

Erik: We see that especially with large companies. I hear it from Mark always!

Mark: That’s what I wanted to explain this morning too, although we have an indirect sales channel, we have our resellers at work out there, especially with the large deals, we are involved always. So there’s always one of our guys, a business development manager together with the local sales person in touch with those larger corporations.

In the last few weeks, we have received tons of emails from large corporations; of course it’s hard to disclose them, but… [names a corporation]. It doesn’t mean they will switch right away, but we have meetings where they say that, “Our contract with Autodesk ends in July, August, whatever, that’s the time we will not extend it. We will not renew it, we will not go to subscription, and we are looking for alternatives.” These are really big, big, corporations. So yes, yes, we see an impact.

Erik: When it comes to alternatives, and with all respect to our colleagues [competitors], we are not the only alternative, but I think we are in a good position. If you see what we have to give people a perspective beyond AutoCAD, well…

If we would only be an AutoCAD clone, and AutoCAD stops further development, it would mean the clones stop further development more or less as well. And all of a sudden the market is going to 3D mechanical, 3D BIM, etc., then it’s a problem. I think that’s where we can play an important role.

The DWG market, the DWG community, if they really want to move on slowly, slowly (and everyone makes his own choices about staying on 2D AutoCAD-based, fine as well), but at least there is a growth path. And I see that BricsCAD is the only product that goes in that direction. All the other alternatives more or less stay around what Autodesk is presenting, with a few differences here and there.

But it’s not really mainstream that there is investment in R&D or really a big jump of other stuff than just being compatible with AutoCAD. It makes a difference.

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

Schrodinger’s CEO – Autodesk top job speculation

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In an earlier post, I asked for your votes on a pair of polls regarding Autodesk’s replacement for Carl Bass as CEO.

Here are the final results from those polls. Although the details of who voted and for what will remain strictly and permanently confidential, I found it interesting to see a number of votes logged from IPs that originate from a well-known software company. I will get no more specific than that.

First, here’s who you think is most likely to be appointed:

Amar’s well ahead in the “person most likely” poll. But note the contrast with who you actually want to be the next Autodesk CEO, where outsiders get bigger numbers. Anyone would think people reading this blog aren’t happy with what the Autodesk candidates have been doing and would like to see a change.

Despite Elon Musk’s popularity, I suspect he may be a little too occupied right now to take on the Autodesk job and give it the attention it deserves.

Among CAD notables I talked with in Ghent, the general view was that the delay in the appointment of a CEO is bad news for current co-CEOs Amar and Andrew; if the Autodesk board was going to give the job to one of them that would have already happened.

I’m not so sure about that. The board might be so happy with the job A & A are doing that they feel there is no rush, but who knows? Maybe the board is struggling to find somebody else with a name where (wcmatch ceoname “Car*l Ba*”) returns T. Maybe one of the dynamic duo has already filled out the deed poll forms and will emerge as Carmel Bartholemew or something.

The big Bricsys interview 3 – looking after people

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, I learn about Bricsys’ astonishingly good staff retention record and the reasons behind it.

Autodesk likes to periodically pat itself on the back for being a great employer, but history shows it’s a company that discards about 10% of its workforce every few years to keep the share market happy. I suspect another round is coming up soon, unfortunately. There’s a stark contrast between a company that disposes of its chattels in that way and one with a CEO that says, “…every time somebody leaves the company that’s really, really bad.”

You as a customer may not think that matters to you, but it does. I believe there is a direct correlation between Autodesk losing knowledgeable staff and Autodesk repeating old mistakes and breaking things. If today’s developers don’t know why some things in the software are the way they are, or why most changes should automatically come with an off switch, or why some things shouldn’t be done at all, or even how a feature can be maintained (e.g. Visual LISP), then the product suffers. AutoCAD users have to deal with the consequences of those knowledge holes with every release.

As in so many other areas, Bricsys proves to Autodesk that it doesn’t have to be like that; there is a better way.

Steve: Speaking to your people, they appear to like working here and they stick around. What’s your staff turnover like?

Mark: It’s very low, very low.

Erik: Job-hoppers, you mean? People who leave? I think in the last fifteen years… maybe five, six, something like that?

Steve: Wow.

Mark: I remember the reasons, maybe two or three times here, maybe having to leave to move to another city or another country. There as well, we try to find solutions.

We really have a good team atmosphere and if those people can work, if they’re a developer for example, people can work from remote areas. We have a guy who has been working for us for years who is now working from Turkey. That was the discussion we had, “I have to leave because I’m moving to Turkey now.” No, you don’t have to leave, just work from there.

Erik: I will add that in Novosibirsk (Bricsys Russia) it’s more difficult to keep the people. We are growing very fast there. We started when we took over the LEDAS team with 3D modelling, we started there with six or seven people. We now have thirty. Along the road for the last four or five years, maybe five or six left. In percentage, that’s way more than we have here. We are stopping the bleeding now!

Steve: That’s still fairly low!

Erik: That’s still fairly low but every time somebody leaves the company that’s really, really bad. We are investing a lot in making it comfortable for our people. To give you an idea we have a culture here of every Friday, we go to the pizzeria for lunch here. We have our own floor there in the restaurant every Friday. Sometimes we talk about software but sometimes we talk about politics and sometimes just rubbish and nonsense and a lot of fun.

Mark: Mostly!

Erik: But we give a budget to all our teams. In Novosibirsk they do that as well. So they have a budget and we force, well, encourage them very strongly to do that.

Mark: Same in Singapore, [inaudible], all our teams.

Erik: Every year, with all the families, we go to a chateau near Paris for three to four days. In Novosibirsk they have a budget to go for a trip with their families once a year, if there is a special occasion. That’s investing in your people.

If anyone has a problem, everyone knows that all doors are open, that we will try to find a solution to make you comfortable. We always say to our people here that the last thing we want is if they are stressed. It doesn’t work for developers and for a company like ours. No stress.

I was really sorry with Dieter yesterday [one of the presenters at the press event]. They only told him the day before to give a presentation! He’s not used to doing that. He was really good about it as you all saw, but he was really stressed. We will avoid putting him in that situation ever, ever again. It doesn’t work.

But for the rest, even with deadlines, we change priorities then, but we don’t want people stressed. And that has a very good result. If you see where we are coming from, what we have, in fifteen years, millions and millions of lines of code, of testing code as well, it’s a ton of development that is done, quality that we have developed. So far, so good, without stressing our guys. Why would we change that?

Mark: Also, the transparency we show to the outside world with the bug reports and so on, that’s also done internally. Everything here is open. On a quarterly basis we get everyone together, we show the numbers, it’s no secret at all internally. So everyone knows how the company is going, how things are moving, new projects that we are doing, and that feels nice with people.

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

Minority interest in keep-your-perpetual Autodesk subscription idea

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It’s undeniable that the vast majority of Autodesk’s customers don’t want to give up their perpetual licenses to sign up with Autodesk’s subscription (rental) model. I’ve gone through the evidence for this in an earlier post.

To bring that up to date a little, here are the final results from the poll “Autodesk is ending the sale of perpetual licenses. This is: (Good/Bad)”:

People are clearly attached to their perpetual licenses, regardless of what Autodesk does to manipulate prices.

A while ago I floated the idea that Autodesk might possibly come up with a better offer; one that lets you keep your existing non-upgraded perpetual license when signing up for subscription. I wanted to know if there was any more interest in that, so I wrote a post around that and created another poll, “Would you be interested in switching to Autodesk subscription if you could keep your old (non-upgraded) perpetual license? (Yes/Maybe/No)”. Here’s how the results ended up:

While the level of interest in this idea appears higher than in Autodesk’s current unappealing offer, it’s still not great. It seems most people don’t just want perpetual licenses for the sake of it, they want an escape route: the option to stop paying and keep playing, regardless of file format and OS compatibility issues. That means they want those perpetual licences to remain current.

The upshot is that Autodesk is going to find it very difficult to push most of its existing customers onto subscription, no matter what the offer.

Autodesk’s revolting customers are evaporating

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The revolting customers themselves aren’t evaporating, of course. They remain solid and are still as irate as ever. It’s just that the appearance of outrage is gradually fading away on the Autodesk Community forums.

As mentioned before, forum moderators have been busily vacuuming up threads from all over the place and moving them to the Moving to Subscription forum. Some time in the last week or so, that forum became less visible. It’s no longer listed among the bold links on the right pane under Subscription Management, but for now can still be found (if you look hard) in the list of 96 forums. Or at least you can get to the page above that forum, from where you can click on another link.

As it’s now so hard to find, I’ll help Autodesk with its sincere desire to be transparent about its extortion scheme, er, wonderful discount offer by making the link a bit easier to find. Here it is:

Autodesk Moving to Subscription forum

Don’t mention it, Autodesk!

Oh, and the first time I tried to get in as a signed-in user, I got kicked out to the top forum list level. Don’t give up, try again and it should work.

From the beginning, I’ve had no doubt that the main idea behind the forum is to keep customer dissent neat and tidy in one easily-hidden place. It will almost certainly lose its final link in due course, then it will be made read-only and merged into semi-oblivion, just like the last one. When I dared to suggest such an outrageous thing, an Autodesk moderator accused me of being a conspiracy theorist.

Well, melt my steel beams with jet fuel, look what’s happening! Who would have thought it?

I’ll be sure to let you know when each of the final evaporation stages occurs. If you happen to notice before I do, please let me know and I’ll pass the information on to my readers.

Autodesk acquires Angry Birds developer Rovio (repost)

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This post, originally published on 1 April 2012, brings back fond memories. That’s mainly because of this tweet from Carl Bass:

Autodesk announced today that it had welcomed Rovio Entertainment into the Autodesk fold. Following a US$2.6 billion acquisition, the publisher of mega hit video game Angry Birds is now Autodesk’s Mobile Entertainment division based in Espoo, Finland. “This is a tremendously exciting development for Autodesk going forward,” said Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. “Rovio is the world leader in mobile entertainment software,” he added, “so for Autodesk to have access to that market and that technology opens up a whole new world for us.”

Bass was effusive about the synergistic benefits of the merger and the benefits it will bring to the user interfaces of all Autodesk products. “When a kid starts playing Angry Birds, they don’t need to read a huge mass of documentation. Just show them a few cartoons and they’re away, instantly productive. This is the essence of the democratization of design; it’s not dumbing down, it’s funning up.” This potential ease of use is excellent news for AutoCAD users, because the documentation is now so terrible that it will be wonderful if we no longer have to try to use it.

Former Rovio CEO, Taikke Monniennren, now Autodesk Vice President in charge of Mobile Entertainment, is equally excited about the future. “We have already been given access to the Autodesk code base and my developers can see the potential there. By copying and pasting some code modules, we hope to be able to piece together the Angry Birds 3D Max Suite in a few short years,” said Monniennren. “The main challenge will be in keeping the download size manageable, but with a bit of luck we will be able to keep it down to just a few gigabytes.” In comparison, the original Angry Birds game was just over a megabyte.

“Do not underestimate the strategic importance of this announcement,” said Bass. “Although it may come as an unpleasant surprise to our competitors, our customers are well aware that this is the direction we have been moving for some time now.” This is true. Autodesk is doing whatever it can to appear young, hip, cool, trendy, mobile, social and just totally with it, man. It has been talking and sometimes acting big on Cloud and mobile computing for a while. Clearly, acquiring Visual Tao (now AutoCAD WS) was just the beginning.

Who would dare to call Autodesk antisocial? Autodesk videos are all over YouTube. On Twitter, many key Autodesk people tweet many times a day. The recent AutoCAD 2013 launch in San Francisco was done entirely via Facebook (which enhanced Autodesk’s green credentials by allowing a reduction in the number of press and bloggers flown in from around the world to only 120). The first thing a new AutoCAD 2013 user sees on installation is a Welcome screen that is largely dedicated to Autodesk pushing its app store and Facebook and Twitter pages. Because the Welcome screen phones home on each use, Autodesk can easily slip in new links to any other sites it wishes to promote. I expect your AutoCAD 2013 Welcome screen will sport Angry Birds gaming links within a few days. Angry Birds gaming plug-ins for AutoCAD and related products are likely to appear in the app store soon, but I expect we will have to wait for AutoCAD 2014 until the games become part of the core product.

Clearly for Autodesk, kids are the new adults. But is what spoiled teenagers do on their iPhones really a sound basis for the needs of professional CAD users in a corporate environment? How well does this concept work in practice? Bass answered that by showing a prototype user interface for AutoCAD that uses the new technology. He demonstrated it on a 48″ touch-screen, but it is believed that it will be at least partly functional using old-fashioned mouse-based technology.

Bass started by selecting a red bird from the Ribbon, which sported a snazzy new flouro theme. He dragged the bird down into the drawing area (which had a beautiful animated background with kittens, rainbows and unicorns; let’s hope that makes into production). While this was going on, the system was providing haptic feedback, with the screen vibrating and the bird squawking when dragged close enough to an existing object. By dropping the bird close to the end of a line, Bass was able to start drawing a line from exactly that point. He then drew back the bird and released it such that it was launched in the direction he wanted the line to go. As the bird shot forward, Bass touched it just as it crossed another line and it snapped on to the midpoint with a happy chirp. Perfect!

He then demonstrated other birds in action. To draw a polyline you use the yellow bird and touch it at each vertex as it flings itself along your desired path. To explode a block you use the black bird, triggering a loud explosion which I think will have to be toned down for office use. Ellipse? That white chicken thing that lays an egg. Multileader? The little grey one that splits up when you touch it. And so on. Bass already has his Finnish developers hard at work devising hundreds of new birds that cover most of AutoCAD’s key functionality. Some unimportant features, such as plotting and xrefs, are difficult to translate into birds and will be deprecated into command-line-only versions before being dropped completely in a future release.

The demonstration had to be curtailed after a few minutes when Bass’s arms became too tired for him to continue, but it provided an enticing view of a future where CAD is fun, fun, fun! Addicted users are productive users, according to Bass. “If you’ve ever seen kids playing Angry Birds, you know that they will happily sit there playing it all day every day without complaint. They don’t even stop to eat. The only time they take a break is when they’re forced to visit the bathroom. Even when they’re in there they will probably photograph themselves in the mirror and post it on Facebook. CAD Managers, don’t you wish you could tap that astronomical productivity resource?”

According to Bass, those managers will soon be able to do exactly that. His advice is, “Fire the old fuddy-duddy naysaying Luddites who are allergic to change and replace them with a bunch of kids off the streets. Give them Autodesk software they can’t resist using and they’ll soon be flinging pixels around like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll have an instant office full of the cheapest engineers you’ll ever find, and they’ll be begging you to take their work home with them. With the literally infinite anytime anywhere power of Autodesk 360, they’ll be able to do exactly that. In a few years, the kids in hoodies you see hanging around shopping malls won’t be waiting to snatch your bag, they’ll be leeching wi-fi so they can design your next car on their phones. And they’ll be doing it using Autodesk software.”

Bass refused to be drawn on leaked details about the upcoming iPod Shuffle version of AutoCAD or its supposed marketing slogan Shake to Design, though. “We have a very strict policy of never discussing our plans for future products,” he explained, “except when it suits us.”

The marketing gurus at Autodesk have written an independent productivity report that shows that AutoCAD with the new interface improves productivity by 632.7%. On Windows only, that is. This productivity phenomenon will not apply to AutoCAD for Mac, because there are no plans to provide the Angry Birds interface on OS X. Autodesk believes that this won’t concern Apple users, because Macs are shiny and look really nice.

The impressive productivity figure was generated by performing carefully selected tasks on AutoCAD 2013 using the prototype interface, when using the latest, fastest and most expensive hardware. This was then compared with completely different tasks performed using AutoCAD 1.4. On a twin-floppy IBM PC. With a 12″ monochrome monitor driven by CGA. But without an 8087. The resultant percentage was then multiplied by the number of years since Autodesk produced an AutoCAD feature that wasn’t half-baked on release.

In related news, Autodesk’s legal department has lodged applications to register the words ‘Angry’, ‘Birds’ and all images of feathered flying creatures as Autodesk trademarks. Cease-and-desist notices have already been sent to publishers of ornithologist guide books. Also in Autodesk’s legal sights is Disney Corporation, which clearly violates Autodesk’s intellectual property rights with its depiction of Donald Duck as not just a bird, but frequently as an angry one who goes around smashing things up.

The last word goes to Bass. “Look, the trend is irresistible, and those who can’t keep up will be left behind. Here at Autodesk we believe in freedom of choice. You can either choose to follow our vision of the future, or take to the streets with a cardboard sign and a chipped enamel mug. What could be more democratic than that?”

Hot tip for Autodesk

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Hey Autodesk high-ups, I’m sorry you’ve been having so much trouble persuading your customers to throw away their perpetual licenses and throw themselves on your perpetual mercy. It’s clearly difficult to persuade technical types to do dumb things like rent your software at enormous and ever-increasing prices. I feel for you. But there’s an answer.

Find dumber customers.

Lots of them. And fast, before the stock market notices that you’re no Adobe and we’re not buying it. Sorry, I mean not renting it.

Look no further! Simply buy this company, discard the product when you’re bored with it (you’re very familiar with that process) and get hold of the customer list.

Sell subscription software to those people. They’ll have no idea what they’re renting or why, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll buy anything that’s pretty, hip, now, connected, and preferably organic. They will commit to perpetually shelling out large sums just to keep using it, no matter how poorly it performs. They’re rich and dumber than rocks. All of this makes them ideal customers for you.

If you’re a bit strapped for cash at the moment, just have a word with the investors (including Google) who pumped $120M into an Internet-enabled $700 (sorry, now $400) machine that squeezes expensive pre-squeezed juice out of DRM-protected short-lifespan bags, and manages to do it slower and noisier than you can do it with your bare hands. They’re even dumber than the customers, so squeezing money out of them will be easier than squeezing juice out of a bag when the Wi-Fi’s down.

This is a perfect fit for you, Autodesk. It has everything you need to ensure mission-friendly proactive synergistic compatibility on a going-forward basis. It’s disruptive. It looks good. It’s an overpriced, poorly functioning product. It has on-point (but pointless) compulsory connectivity. It ties users into paying whatever you ask, for ever. And best of all, it connects you to a collection of completely clueless cashed-up customers.

Thanks to @internetofshit on Twitter for making me aware of this and other hilarious Internet of Things (IoT) idiocy. Examples:

Enjoy!

Dissecting Dieter’s perpetual points

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I like Dieter Schlaepfer, we’ve been arguing for years.

Dieter and I have never met in person, but online we go back to the CIS:ACAD CompuServe days of the early 1990s. Dieter’s a good guy who has done a splendid job with AutoCAD documentation content for decades. He is genuinely interested in improving the product and customer experience, and has done a great deal to do so over the years.

Dieter’s responsible for the most-commented post on this blog, AutoCAD 2013 – An Autodesk Help writer responds with 164 comments and was a heavy contributor to the 95 comments on the recent AutoCAD 2018 – why did the DWG format change? post.

If you read the comments here, you’ll know that Dieter is the only Autodesk person brave enough to put his head above the parapet and enter into discussions here in recent times, even though he’s not doing so in any official capacity. Autodesk’s PR people give me a wide berth and the Autodesk view would be completely unrepresented here if not for Dieter. He’s prepared to put his hand up and say, “But what about this?” when it’s an unpopular viewpoint and nobody else is prepared to say it. Props to Dieter for that.

Among Dieter’s many recent comments, he outlined 12 considerations in the rental v perpetual argument. Myself and others have been having fun eviscerating his tortured pub analogy, but his more serious arguments deserve a more considered response than can be comfortably provided in a comment, hence this post.

Let’s take Dieter’s considerations one by one. Bear in mind I’m approaching this from a long-term Autodesk customer point of view. You may look at things differently, and that’s fine.

1. Cost – if a rental, lease, or membership were low enough in price, almost everyone would do so (at a dollar a month, heck, I’d lease my shoes)

Fantasy argument. If Lear would hire me a private jet for $1 a month, sure, sign me up. The reality is that rental costs more, except in the short term. That’s why companies rent things out: to make money. That’s why Autodesk is doing it; it’s an attempt, however hamfisted, to make more money. On cost, rental loses.

2. Business model, terms and conditions, and their consequences

Vague. But given the terms and conditions attached to Autodesk rental (standalone users must use a terrible licensing system) and the consequences (software stops working the instant you stop paying), rental loses big-time here.

3. Quality of fulfillment – this is to your point

Not sure what Dieter means here. ???

4. Tax consequences

This varies from place to place. I can get a 100% write-off whether buying a perpetual license, maintaining it or renting it. I may want to get a bigger write-off sooner, or not. Neutral.

5. Opportunity cost – by tying up a lot of cash, what potential opportunities do you lose?

Depending on a business’s cashflow and other circumstances, this is a possible valid argument. However, only in the short term. Because rental costs more in the long term, it costs you more in potential opportunity in the long term. Overall, rental loses.

6. Financial accounting – rental, lease, or membership costs can easily be assigned to each project and billed to each customer

If I don’t have the need to do that, it’s irrelevant. But even if that’s the way you need or prefer to do things, it’s still only partially true that rental can be a benefit. Let’s say you have won a project that is planned to take 9 months and rent Autodesk software for a year: it costs you $3000 and you pay up front (because you’re not insane enough to pay Autodesk’s monthly rental prices). You finish the project in 10 months. You use that software for other smaller projects that crop up during that 10 month period, and after it’s over. Quick, how much of that $3000 do you apportion to each project? See, it’s not as simple as it appears.

It’s really not difficult to have perpetual license software costs handled in the same way as overheads and other long-term costs that can’t be directly attributed to a project. You’re not going to be able to sack your accountant thanks to software rental. Neutral.

7. Flexibility – you can easily increase or decrease the number and types of licenses for several (not just one) products

Ah, flexibility. Let’s say I’m convinced by Dieter’s other arguments and convert my perpetual license to rental under the current so-called “discount” offer. In doing so, I throw away my flexibility. I can’t ever stop paying or my software stops working. Down the track I may not need that license for a while, but even then I can’t hop off the rental train because if I do that and then hop back on, my software costs will treble (roughly – it varies).

As for the several products thing, Autodesk has been pushing customers into suites and collections where a high price is paid for a block of products. Can you drop back from a collection to a product or two for a while, then back to other products or up to a collection again? Sure, Autodesk is very flexible. Just forego your “discount” and pay an astronomical increase, no problem.

Autodesk has been progressively removing its customers’ flexibility for decades and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as it thinks that will make more money that way.

So please don’t come the rental=flexibility argument with me. On flexibility too, Autodesk’s rental loses.

8. A truly perpetual software license requires you to maintain obsolete hardware and old operating systems, and discourages the adoption of new technologies

No it doesn’t. A non-upgradable license might do that, whether perpetual or otherwise. That doesn’t apply to perpetual licenses under maintenance. It didn’t even used to apply to perpetual licenses not under maintenance. Whose fault is it that perpetual licenses not under maintenance are no longer upgradable? Autodesk’s. False argument.

9. Perpetual licenses put most of the financial burden on new customers rather than spreading it more fairly between all users

Actually, with perpetual licenses the financial burden is much more fairly spread. What costs more, developing a product from scratch or maintaining it? Perpetual license purchasers pay a higher amount for the initial purchase, just as the developer pays a higher amount for the initial development. The developer is fairly rewarded for providing the product for the customer to use. Following that, the developer is fairly rewarded for maintaining and improving it.

But I really hope you’re not trying to convince people that Autodesk is price-forcing customers onto rental in order to be fairer to them, because I think incredulity would be the appropriate reaction. False argument.

10. Perpetual software licenses create “a long tail” of product versions, making data sharing between users more difficult

Perpetual software licenses that are maintained do no such thing. If a vendor provides good value for that maintenance payment, then people will maintain the software. Autodesk maintenance value for money has been dreadful in recent years, leading to people dropping it. Improving Autodesk’s performance in that area would reduce the length of the tail. Making maintenance value for money even worse by racking up prices will lead to people dropping it and sticking on old releases much longer. Autodesk’s rental push is lengthening the tail, not shortening it.

Incidentally, there is a new benefit for subscription customers with multi-user (network) licenses. Guess what? Five releases are now supported rather than four. Yes, Autodesk rental is literally lengthening the tail. False argument.

11. Perpetual software licenses encourage users to use less secure software and operating systems in a time when cybercrime and espionage are mushrooming

See 10 above. False argument.

12. Providers of perpetual licenses have less incentive to support long-time customers than providers of rental, leased, and membership business models do

Absolutely wrong. This is literally the exact opposite of observed reality.

You know what model really provides an incentive for vendors to improve the product? Perpetual licenses with optional paid upgrades. With the perpetual/upgrade model, if there’s no improvement, there’s no ongoing income. But that model was too much like hard work. Easier to just remove our options over the years to manipulate customers into paying more and getting less. Autodesk priced that model out of the market and then killed it off because it wanted to get people paying for just using the software rather than as a reward for improving it.

It’s proven by history. The closer Autodesk got to the all-rental model, the worse the rate of improvement became. As an improvement incentive, rental loses.

There you go, Dieter. Rental loses on five considerations and wins on none. And I’m being generous by considering points 10 and 11 as neutral.

Feel free to add your own observations on perpetual v rental. If you want to have a go at Dieter’s arguments or mine, go for it. I just ask that you play the ball, not the man.

AutoCAD 2018.0.2 arrives

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AutoCAD 2018.0.1 is dead, long live 2018.0.2!

Here’s the readme.
Here’s the 64-bit direct link.
Here’s the 32-bit direct link.

This supposedly fixes stuff that 2018.0.1 broke, such as the signed VLX thing. Will this one break other stuff? I guess we’ll find out.

You can still buy Autodesk perpetual licenses in Europe

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Yes, you really can still buy Autodesk perpetual licenses in the European Union. You just can’t buy them from Autodesk.

Where can you buy those licenses? From other customers who don’t need them any more. Unlike some jurisdictions, the EU respects the doctrine of first sale for computer software. This means sale of pre-owned software is allowed, and any EULA restrictions attempting to prevent that are invalid. This was established in 2012 by the EU’s highest court, The Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) in the case of UsedSoft v Oracle.

Autodesk and all other software vendors in EU countries have to respect that, so the perpetual license remains valid after transfer to the new owner. The previous owner must be able to document the validity of the license and must delete or disable their copy of the software upon transfer.

While I have no personal experience of the transfer process, according to what’s being said in this CGTalk thread*, it’s all very easy. Fill out a form and you’re done. However, I suggest you contact your local Autodesk office for the details. Don’t bother to ask AVA, she doesn’t know.

I’m no EU lawyer, but my reading of the judgement is that Autodesk is not obliged to transfer any maintenance contracts along with the perpetual license (clause 66). It is, however, obliged to consider the software to be upgraded to the original owner’s level under any maintenance arrangements (clause 67). This means the software license will be permanently stuck on the last activated release prior to the sale. Companies with a single license permitting use by 50 users and who want to shed 20 of them can’t split off and sell those 20 (clause 69). Again, check with your local Autodesk office for confirmation.

If you’ve been through this process, please comment on your experiences for the benefit of others.

Software licenses within the EU are valid in all EU countries, so it would appear there is nothing preventing, say, a German buying a used AutoCAD license from the UK, at least until Brexit is complete. It is unlikely that an EU license will be legally valid outside the EU, as outside Europe Autodesk only permits license transfers under certain circumstances described here.

It’s interesting that this market for perpetual licenses exists, but Autodesk has locked itself out of its own market! Indeed, by ending the sale of perpetual licenses, Autodesk has made them a rarer and more valuable commodity.