August 2012: Autodesk increases profits, but not as much as expected, and gets rid of 500 people. This sort of thing has happened before, resulting in the loss of good, skilled people, some with many years of priceless and irreplacable experience.
September 2012: Autodesk goes on a recruiting drive.
So, if you want to work for a company that will put you out with the trash the next time reality doesn’t quite match some financial analyst’s estimate, you know where to go. Good luck with that.
In a recent post on Between the Lines, Shaan passed on the following response from the AutoCAD Team:
There has been some recent discussions about the built-in help system in AutoCAD 2013, both positive and some criticism. As our longtime users know, AutoCAD help has been through many evolutions.
We are particularly proud of the new AutoCAD 2013 online learning environment we recently released (AutoCAD Online Help Mid-Year Updates.) This update addressed several user requested fixes and changes, and we will continue to take our direction from our user’s feedback.
We do recognize that the online learning environment may not be the solution for every user, so while we are focused on creating a rich and personalized online experience, we will continue to maintain our current basic offline experience.
(The emphasis is mine). This statement, although couched in marketingspeak, confirms what I’ve had to say on the subject. Here’s my translation into plain English:
AutoCAD 2013 Help sucked, the customers said so, the recent update improved matters somewhat for online users, but the awful old system stays in place for offline users. The offline system is in maintenance mode, and the experience will continue to remain basic (i.e. it will suck long-term).
There’s no mention of correcting this situation; it’s clearly a matter of policy rather than some unfortunate accident.
Today, I was using Autodesk Navisworks Manage 2013. As you might expect from an Autodesk product, it’s powerful but unstable. In addition to the lockups and crashes, it has various bugs and annoyances. In looking for a way of working around one of the annoyances, I delved into the Help system. Strangely enough, this product (much younger than AutoCAD) uses something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned CHM-based Help system. It worked offline. It was quick. It had contents, search and index tabs, and they worked on a Windows 7 64-bit system. It had a hierarchical structure and a breadcrumb bar that helped me understand the context of what I was reading. Using it was, in short, a breath of fresh air.
Memo to Autodesk: if you’re going to try to make online Help look good by mangling offline help, you’re going to have to do this to all your products at once to make it remotely convincing.
In my effusive welcome of AutoCAD 2013’s updated Help system, I wondered if I had been shocked into missing some glaring problem. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. In my enthusiasm, I managed to totally miss the fact that the new system has not been introduced for offline users.
If you use the new system, there’s a link on the front page to the offline files. I got as far as downloading and installing what I thought was the offline version of the new system and discovered that it didn’t want to install because the old one was already installed. What I should have then done, and didn’t, was to uninstall the old and install the new, before running it in offline mode. I intended to get around to that to check the performance and responsiveness of the respective versions, but didn’t have the time right then. If I had done so, I would have noticed that my download, uninstall and reinstall would have been in vain, because the offline version pointed to by the new system is still the old version. My apologies to anybody who wasted their time because of what I originally wrote.
There are many legitimate reasons why Autodesk customers want or need to use their software, including the documentation, entirely in offline mode. For example, the users I manage can’t access the online Help system from AutoCAD because Autodesk writes its software in such a way as to fail in a secure proxy server environment (yes, this has been reported as a bug, repeatedly). So for my users and many others, it’s true to say that despite the best efforts of Dieter and his team, AutoCAD 2013’s Help still sucks.
Look at this from the point of view of such offline AutoCAD 2013 Help users. We pay large amounts of money for software and Subscription. No “entitled” 99-cent users here. We’ve provided extensive feedback on the woeful system that was inflicted on us at release time. We’ve hung out for half a release cycle with no adequate stopgap, even though one could easily have been provided. A small team has finally wrought an outstanding improvement and deserves congratulations for doing so. The improved system is dangled in front of our faces, and then we discover that we’re not allowed to have it. Not for any plausible technical or resourcing reason, but because Autodesk simply doesn’t want us to have it. How are we supposed to feel about that?
That’s right. Autodesk has managed to snatch a crushing defeat from the jaws of what should have been a stunning victory. I guess I should have expected something like this; for Autodesk, the half-baked job is de rigeur. But this goes beyond the usual problem of countless features that would have been great if they had been finished. This isn’t a matter of a product team struggling to develop features adequately within an impossible timeframe imposed by the yearly release cycle. This is a matter of policy. Some Pointy Haired Boss at Autodesk has decided to deliberately disenfranchise a significant group of its paying customers, by refusing to make available something that already exists and could easily be provided. This adds insult to the injury of having to wait 6 months for a CHM stopgap that was clearly the right thing to do, but which never came.
Why? What on earth would lead anyone to even contemplate the possibility that this might be a good idea? Lack of resources? While I’m quite aware that individual parts of Autodesk have their own budgets and limited resources, I don’t buy that as an excuse for the organisation as a whole. A multi-billion-dollar corporation that pays its executives millions? One that just threw away $60M on a dud social media buyout? Crying poor over something that would have cost maybe a few thousand? Sure, sounds legit.
No, a lack of resources is not the reason. It’s a policy issue. “There’s no reason for it, it’s just policy.” But why would such an anti-customer policy exist? Vision. Autodesk is currently led by a Cloudy Vision. It’s important to Autodesk that everything Cloudy looks good. It’s clearly not enough to actually make online stuff work well. For one thing, that’s obviously pretty difficult, judging from Autodesk’s offerings to date. No, anything that’s offline has to be made to work badly, so the comparison looks as favourable as it possibly can. That’s much easier to arrange.
That’s why there was no CHM solution on the release date, despite Autodesk having a set of unpaid volunteers ready to put the thing together. That’s why there was no CHM solution provided a week later, or a month later, or six months later. Don’t think that it wasn’t provided because of a lack of resources; that excuse is entirely specious. It wasn’t provided because it would have made the online version look bad in comparison. The online version already looked abysmal, but an offline CHM solution would have just made the comparison so ridiculously one-sided that nobody would have been in any doubt about what a terrible idea on-line Help was. The Cloudy Vision would have looked suspect at best, and we can’t have that, can we?
What Autodesk wants is for people to think “Cloud good, non-Cloud bad”. If the Cloud can’t be made good, then making non-Cloud bad will have to act as substitute. Loading the dice in this way might stand a chance of working if customers were as clueless as some Autodesk decision-makers, but most of us aren’t total idiots. We notice these things.
This is a line-in-the-sand issue. This is about Autodesk pushing its vision at the expense of customers. No news there then, but from my point of view, this is one step too far. This is the tipping point where the not-convinced-about-the-Cloud phase could well turn into a full-scale take-your-Cloud-and-shove-it customer revolt. Me? I’m quite prepared to hand out the pitchforks and torches.
Source images: Hermann Anton (public domain) / Carl Bass (creative commons)
Carl Bass, you need to pull your troops into line. Let them know that while your Vision is important, implementing it must never come at the expense of common sense. It must definitely, never, ever come at the expense of your customers’ needs. Blindly following a Cloudy Vision didn’t end well for Joan of Arc, and it’s unlikely to end well for Autodesk either. Please remember the source of Autodesk’s income. Without customers, you are nothing. You are treating your customers badly, and worse, treating us as idiots. Please, give it up before we give you up.
Three years ago, I was happy to promote Autodesk’s then-new site AutoCAD Exchange. However, Autodesk has now given up on this attempt to maintain a social site of its own. My comment at the time, “AutoCAD Exchange is an important and potentially very useful site for AutoCAD users” turned out to be optimistic. I was closer to the mark with “It has yet to be seen if Autodesk manages to develop a real community on this site”. Now we’ve seen the answer. No, it didn’t. Autodesk has instead handed control to more socially successful sites, as this message indicates:
Thank you for visiting AutoCAD Exchange. In an effort to consolidate our online AutoCAD community efforts to more popular networks, we will be migrating AutoCAD Exchange content and activities to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Through the AutoCAD Facebook page we provide tips & tricks, tutorial videos and opportunities to engage with the employees at Autodesk that have helped build the product from the ground up.
We look forward to interacting with you on our social properties.
AutoCAD on Facebook
AutoCAD on Twitter
AutoCAD on YouTubeNote:AutoCAD Plant Exchange will continue on this site, providing updates, content packs, and productivity tools. Click the Plant Exchange tab or visit www.autodesk.com/plantexchange.
If you are at a corporate location it’s quite likely that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are strictly off-limits, so I guess your AutoCAD-based social life just fell in a hole. OK, it was a worthy attempt which didn’t work, and it’s understandable that Autodesk pulled the plug. It was by no means the first Autodesk failed venture and it won’t be the last. Companies need to try out new things and nobody succeeds all the time. Apple Newton, anyone? Windows Me? IBM PCjr? AutoCAD for Mac? (The original attempt, that is. Jury is still out on the second one).
What if it had been a more important Autodesk on-line service that didn’t work out? One that you had grown to depend on? When Autodesk gives up on a piece of conventional software you’re using (as has happened countless times in the past, even with successful applications), you can at least go on using it until external factors force you to stop. That might be years down the track. I continued to use Autodesk’s Graphic Impact for presentations when most of Autodesk’s employees had forgotten it ever existed. But when Autodesk gives up on a piece of on-line software you’re using (and you’d have to be mindlessly optimistic to believe that such a thing won’t happen), you’re severely out of luck. So who’s going to volunteer to tie their company in to CAD on the Cloud?
I’ve made the point before that while Cloud proponents like Autodesk have been happy to talk big on the potential benefits, they have been conspicuously (suspiciously?) silent on the legitimate concerns their customers have raised. The best responses you have been likely to see regarding such concerns can best be characterised as “glossing over”.
So it’s good to see that Autodesk has put together a white-paper-type-thing called Autodesk® 360: Work Wherever You Are – Safely. This 275 KB PDF, with 5 pages of actual content, puts Autodesk’s point of view about one of the aspects of Cloud that people commonly raise as a concern. This is a good start, but of course there are quite a few potential dealbreakers that need addressing yet.
How well does this document address this issue? As you’d expect from Autodesk, it’s gung-ho positive, but there is at least some acknowledgement of Cloud concerns, e.g. “Customer experiences, however, can be largely impacted by the speed and quality of their Internet connection”. In addition to such occasional connections with the real world, there are some categorical assurances that may make some potential users happier. Here are some examples:
Autodesk 360 is delivered from data centers in the United States.
Files and identities are safe during storage, transit, and usage.
As part of Autodesk‟s due diligence for customer security and protection, prospective Autodesk personnel with potential access to sensitive data are screened through background checks before being employed.
Once purged, your data may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be recovered or read by anyone.
Customers own the content they create.
While that’s all well and good, Autodesk needs to get its legal team reading off the same page and fix up its terms and conditions to make them less anti-customer. Otherwise, this virtual document is worth more less than the virtual paper it’s written on. Some parts of the document are only superficially reassuring:
Any access to customer data or personal information is strictly governed by the Autodesk 360 Terms of Service (http://www.autodesk.com/termsofservice) Autodesk‟s Privacy Policy (http://usa.autodesk.com/privacy/), and internal procedures.
While that sounds fine on the face of it, Autodesk has violated its own Privacy Policy in the recent past and to the best of my knowledge, nothing ever came of it. That assurance is therefore rendered completely worthless by Autodesk’s own history. Add to that the fact that both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are extremely rubbery and rather one-sided, and this statement becomes more of a concern than a reassurance.
Other parts of the document are contradictory. Take these statements, for example:
Working in the cloud is all about reducing the hassles and headaches that companies and employees would rather avoid, like …. Managing data security and backups
It’s good practice, however, to personally observe safety and security wherever and whenever you are using Autodesk 360 …. Download and back up work locally in a secure environment.
Cloud’s great because it saves you having to make backups. However, make sure you make backups of the stuff you put on the Cloud. Hmm, okay…
So what do you think of this document? Is it all spin or does it address your security concerns? If it addresses your concerns, does it do so to your satisfaction? Please have a read and add your comments.
A blog post from BIM person Gregory Arkin contains a number of confidently-made statements about what Autodesk intends to do with its upgrade and Subscription pricing model. If the information is correct, the news is all bad for customers. The prices for both upgrade and Subscription are getting jacked up substantially. In fact, for upgraders the pricing (70% of full whack for the cheapest upgrade) will be completely non-viable and you’ll effectively be forced onto Subscription. This goes beyond the trebling of upgrade prices that Autodesk’s Callan Carpenter spent some time defending here two years ago. The link in that post to the relevant Autodesk page doesn’t contain any pricing specifics other than the vague statement “save up to 20%”, but I’ll take Gregory’s word for it.
Gregory sees this business of upgraders being hunted to extinction as something that Subscription customers should have a good laugh about, but he’s wrong. Resellers can have a chuckle, but Subscription customers should mourn the lack of choice for customers. It means customers are no longer able to compare Subscription with any kind of sane upgrade pricing and make a decision about the best option for them. This lack of internal ‘competition’ is not even worth a snigger, because it inevitably means Subscription prices shooting up. Autodesk has racked up Subscription prices already and will do so again next year. For those customers who have fallen for the ‘free’ upgrade-to-suite offers, their Subscription prices will be higher again. With everyone on Subscription, Autodesk will just keep pushing up prices indefinitely. From Autodesk’s point of view, there is no down side to this; tie people in and the gravy train goes on for ever.
There are various terms in common use for this kind of thing. One is price gouging. Anybody who has ever booked a hotel near a big sporting event or bought drinks at a nightclub will be familiar with the realities of businesses doing this whenever they can get away with it. It’s part of the free market and generally perfectly legal, no matter how unpopular it makes the business. However, it only works when competition is effectively absent and customers are left with no realistic alternative but to pay up. Autodesk obviously thinks it is in such a position. Is it right? Sadly, history says it probably is.
Edit: This post originally stated that Gregory is a reseller. He has informed me that this is no longer the case and I have edited the post accordingly. My apologies to Gregory for the misstatement.
I’ve added a poll asking this question over on the right. I would like to see this done as soon as possible as a courtesy for those customers who find the current AutoCAD 2013 Help system inadequate. If you agree, vote Yes. If you disagree (for example, you think Autodesk should instead concentrate on improving the current system), vote No. If you wish to make a comment on this specific issue, feel free.
In an email to Subscription customers, Autodesk made several announcements about its Autodesk 360 Cloud services.
Autodesk reserves the right to change all of this without notice, and to terminate access to Autodesk 360 services at any time and for any reason.
I have closed the polls asking if you trusted various companies to do the right thing by their customers. Here is a summary of the results, showing the percentage of “Yes” votes for each company. The most trusted company is at the top, the least trusted is at the bottom.
Remember, this is not a scientific poll and as with all polls and surveys there will be some self-selection bias. Does anyone find anything about the above results surprising?
Following some email discussions, I am happy to present a response from a relevant Autodesk person to the posts and comments here about AutoCAD 2013’s Help.
Thanks for the opportunity to respond to your readers, Steve.
First, I want to assure you that we’re listening to your comments about AutoCAD 2013 Help. We are adding it to the valuable feedback we’ve already received from users who participated in our Beta program. I responded promptly to every comment from each Beta user and will now address a wider audience.
Here are some of the trends we’ve seen so far in the suggestions users are making about AutoCAD Help:
- Additional navigation to supplement our Search function
- Alphabetical listings of AutoCAD commands and system variables
- Improved precision from the Search function
- Access to information about new features
We are working right now on our update plans. We invite your additional comments about any other problems you’ve had so that we can have a broad view of your needs as we define the scope of our update.
I’m glad to say that Help updates will no longer have to wait until the next product release. I’d also like to emphasize that the software industry, Autodesk included, is trending toward online delivery of both software and documentation, and that these technology changes pose significant challenges to all of us.
We always appreciate your feedback and we take it seriously.
Thanks and best regards,
Dieter Schlaepfer
Principal Content Developer
Autodesk, Inc.
As Dieter suggests, please comment here with your problems and suggestions. Please be as brutally honest as you wish about Autodesk, its offerings and its future plans. However, I ask that you remain civil. I have ‘known’ Dieter on-line for about 20 years and can attest to his integrity, intelligence and intense desire to do the best job possible. He did indeed respond very fully and honestly to the comments made by myself and others during the Beta program and in our emails. He may very well be the best listener I’ve ever come across, in any context.
In short, Dieter’s one of the good guys and he’s doing a brave thing here. Let him know what you really think, but please don’t beat him up.
Autodesk’s API guru Kean Walmsley is the second Autodesk person I’ve seen who has been brave enough to stick his head above the parapet by discussing the Cloud, in writing, and in a medium that allows for public comment. Kean has always seemed like a straight shooter to me. Please note that his blog represents his personal opinions rather than an official Autodesk position. He’s after your comments, so please go and let him know what you think on his post. Add your comments here if you’re more comfortable with that, and I’ll make sure Kean sees them.
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?”
In AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk introduced on-line Help. It was badly done and poorly received. It was slow and generally awful to use, and so obviously inferior to the generally well-crafted old CHM-based system in so many ways, that there were squeals of joy when somebody discovered that one of the AutoCAD-based vertical products hadn’t been updated to the new regime and still provided a CHM file. That file became hot property, being posted by users on Autodesk’s own discussion groups and other places. Eventually, the outcry was loud enough that Autodesk was forced to make the CHM version of Help available for download. Those of us who actually use the documentation from time to time (or support people who do) breathed a sigh of relief and got on with our work, grateful that Autodesk had seen the error of its ways. But had it, really?
No. In AutoCAD 2012, Help was not only online, but integrated with AutoCAD Exchange in Autodesk’s dodgy version of a pseudo-browser. How good is Autodesk at writing browsers? About as good as you’d expect, sadly. No AutoCAD 2012 CHM was provided with the product at launch time, or even later as a download.
So how well did this new and improved attempt at on-line Help go down with the punters? In my poll on the worst AutoCAD features of all time, Help (on line / 2012) came in third, which gives you some idea. Third worst of all time! That’s a really, really bad place to be. There’s only one place to go from there, surely?
With AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk has wrought a miracle, taking this terrible failure of a system and completely revamping it. Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, Autodesk has managed to make it even worse. Not slightly worse, either. Much worse. AutoCAD Help has been plucked from the depths of mediocrity and plunged deeper still, to a dark place where the pressure of awfulness is so great that spontaneous implosion is a real risk.
Enough rhetoric, what’s actually wrong with it?
OK, for an individual user that’s a drag, but for a CAD Manager with a large number of computers to set up, that’s way beyond inconvenient. Not to mention a user that’s in a location where online access is expensive, intermittent and/or absent. It would not have been at all hard to include offline Help in a 2013 install, and the fact that a deliberate decision was made to not do so smacks of arrogance. Assuming this worked properly, this situation would reflect pretty badly on Autodesk. But it’s worse than that; read on.
A little investigative work proved that the Help files were not located in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2013\Help location, but rather in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2013 Help\English\Help. That’s right, Autodesk requires you to perform two installations, one of which apparently places files in a different location from that in which the other will go looking. Luckily, instead of going round moving files or changing settings, I just restarted AutoCAD and the problem went away. It’s quite possible I would never have seen the problem if I had done the second installation while AutoCAD wasn’t running, but it’s quite likely that many users will download and install in exactly that situation. The result is confusion, the impression given is amateurish.
Where’s the User Guide? Command Reference? Customization Guide? Gone. There’s no structure to it. It’s basically just a huge mass of web pages you’re expected to search through. There is no index, no contents, no list of commands, nothing. You want to find Help on something, you go search for it. Not sure exactly what the name is of the feature or command you’re searching for? Bad luck.
I could go on and on with the faults, but this post is already a monster so I’ll stop there. It’s difficult to think of ways in which this could have been done worse, but I’m sure Autodesk is working on it for 2014. Seriously, this is just embarrassing.
Autodesk, it’s not as if your software is cheap or sells in tiny quantities. You’re not short of the resources you need to do a good job, yet your AutoCAD Help system is so ridiculously inferior to that of numerous freeware and shareware applications that it’s not funny. What on earth were you thinking when you spewed out this rubbish? Did you think we wouldn’t notice?
You obviously want to convince your customer base that you’re all on-line trendy and capable of providing great Internet-based solutions that will have people flocking to use your Cloud stuff. OK, start by getting your finger out and making this stuff work. After three releases, you can’t do an acceptable job at something so seemingly tailor-made for online use as a bunch of text, images and video (which pretty much describes the World Wide Web). What kind of job can you be trusted to do with something much more difficult, such as CAD on the Cloud?
Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.
This year, Autodesk appears to have finally got its act together in terms of making software downloads and serial numbers available to Subscription customers quickly after the AutoCAD release. For me at least, the serial numbers and downloads were available as soon as I looked for them, so Autodesk deserves praise for improving matters considerably when compared with the last couple of years.
If you’re a Subscription customer about to download AutoCAD 2013, you may be wondering how you can avoid the awful Akamai Download Manager. If you go to the download page, scroll through the various languages and find the product you’re interested in, you will see a Download Now button. Do not click it, because that will trigger an Akamai infestation. Instead, click on the down arrow to the right of the button. That will give you the option of performing a Browser Download. Click that and away you go.
The download sizes listed on the site are nearly double the real size of the downloaded files. The 32-bit version is actually 0.98 GB, not 1.89 GB. When you run the executable, it will unzip itself to expand to that size, but that’s not the size you need to know about when you’re downloading something.
In my case, the download happened at rather less than half the speed at which the trial came down (taking over 30 minutes for the 32-bit version rather than 13 minutes), but that’s not a valid comparison as I used a different Internet connection and a different browser. The file I downloaded from Subscription was byte-for-byte identical to the equivalent file downloaded as a trial.
Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.
It’s AutoCAD new release time again and many of you will want to get hold of the trial software, or download the production software from the trial site rather than the Subscription site for performance or other reasons (the resultant downloads are identical). As in previous years, Autodesk is heavily pushing the use of the Akamai Download Manager to download it, going to what I consider unethical lengths to do so. For a variety of reasons, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss and others of which I have already discussed extensively, I strongly recommend not installing this software. In my view, it is a very bad idea to let anything by Akamai anywhere near your computer. If you’re in a secure corporate environment, it’s quite likely that you won’t be able to do so, or if you can, that it won’t work anyway.
Although the Autodesk download process gives every impression that you have no choice in the matter, this is not true. In the past I have had to install an unsupported browser (Opera) to get at a straightforward download link, but this time it is possible to get the software without having to resort to that. Here’s what to do. Go to http://usa.autodesk.com/autocad/trial/, fill in the form and click the Download Now button. You will be presented with this screen:
This is a pack of lies. Ignore everything except the line that says If you cannot complete the installation, click here. Click that and you will see this:
The feedback link takes you to Akamai’s site so it’s probably not useful as a mechanism to let Autodesk know what you think of its use of the Akamai Download Manager. I have used it in the past and it’s a black hole, so don’t waste your time there.
As you can see, there may not be an OK button visible, but if you scroll down you will see it. Click it.
That will get you to this screen:
More misleading stuff here, but the important thing is the text that says Click here to download using your browser. Click that and you can start actually downloading the installation executable.
The links I eventually got to using this process were:
http://trial.autodesk.com/SWDLDDLM/2013/ACD/ESD/AutoCAD_2013_English_Win_32bit.exe
http://trial.autodesk.com/SWDLDDLM/2013/ACD/ESD/AutoCAD_2013_English_Win_64bit.exe
At home, using Firefox 11.0, each download took just under a quarter of an hour without using any special download manager software. These links may not work for you and your experience may vary depending on your browser, location and language.
Oh, and Autodesk, the 2013 trial download page is still called AutoCAD 2012 – Free Trial – Download AutoCAD Trial – Autodesk and contains a link to the 2012 download FAQ. You might want to change that. You might also want to change the wording on the messages shown above to something less deceptive, especially if you’re interested in how much your customers trust you in future. Finally, I strongly suggest you give up on pushing this Akamai junk. Please.
As AutoCAD 2013 (yes, that’s what it’s called, shock, horror!) has now been released in Japan (Google translation), I can start to discuss it. I’m not yet free to go into details about anything that does not have publicly released information avaialable, but here’s a brief summary of what I can say. I will discuss some of these things in more detail later.
OK, I’m kidding around, that’s just the Google translator struggling a little. Let’s get serious and list some new things that are easy enough to understand from the translation:
Here are some things that are not so easy to understand from the translation, so I won’t be commenting on them for now:
There are also several things listed that are specific to AutoCAD 2013 for Mac. The additional functionality here is because it’s still playing catch-up to fill in some of the many functionality holes, but there are still plenty of obvious holes left (e.g. DCL):
So, AutoCAD users, what do you think? In the days before you were financially press-ganged into Subscription, would you have called this a Compelling Upgrade? The sort of thing you would berate your boss to upgrade to? Anything there reach out and grab you?
As I mentioned earlier, any company that wants to move its customers to the Cloud is going to need the trust of those customers. Three months ago, I started a poll to try to get some measure of how trustworthy you consider Autodesk to be, in terms of doing the right thing by its customers. The results of that poll look pretty awful for Autodesk. Right from the start, the distrusters have outnumbered the trusters by three to one, with the current results showing an overwhelming majority of respondents (77%) not trusting Autodesk.
Why? What has Autodesk done in the past, or is doing now, that leads people to this level of distrust? If you have voted in this poll, I’d like to know your reasons, so please add your comments whichever way you voted. If you think there’s an issue with the question wording and/or its simple Yes/No choice, feel free to say so.
There will be a number of people who have an inherent distrust of corporations, so as a control I’ve added a number of polls to try to see how much that influences the results. There are near-identical polls for a wide range of different corporations. There’s a poll for an on-line retailer and Cloud service provider (Amazon), one for a computer and gadget maker (Apple), one for another CAD company (Bricsys, makers of Bricscad), one for a maker of cars, motorbikes etc. (Honda), and one for a traditional retailer (Target). I’ll be interested to see how trustworthy you consider those corporations to be, and how they compare to Autodesk.
It goes without saying that any company that intends to win at CAD on the Cloud had better be pretty darn good at doing Internet stuff. So, does Autodesk qualify?
There’s a poll on the right and your comments are welcome.
At this year’s Autodesk University, Autodesk is running a series of Innovation Forums. There was one scheduled for Tuesday November 29 at 10:00 (Las Vegas time) called The Promise of the Cloud – The Implications of Virtually Infinite Computing for Your Industry. That’s about 12 hours ago as I type this. I was hoping to attend this event, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.
Did any of you attend that Forum? If so, what did you think? How did Autodesk address the concerns and promote the benefits? Did you feel any differently about CAD in the Cloud after attending it? Please add your own comments here, or if you wish to make more expansive observations, please contact me and I may publish a post dedicated to your review.
It’s probably worth pointing out that if you you have no problem emailing your designs around the place without some form of protection or encryption, there’s little point in getting all worked up about Cloud security. Email isn’t remotely secure. FTP isn’t exactly watertight, either. If you’re still interested in Cloud security issues, this post includes some relevant links you might like to peruse.
First, here’s what Autodesk’s Scott Sheppard had to say about Project Photofly (now 123D Catch Beta) security last month: Project Photofly FAQ: What about the security of my data? This covers some of the same kind of stuff I’ve already discussed, but from an Autodesk point of view (albeit a pretty transparent and honest one, as you might expect from Scott). Here are some selected quotes:
In essence, we don’t want to accept liability when we don’t take money…
We intend to have a reasonably secure service, better than email, but less secure than a bank account.
We store your files on Amazon’s S3 service, and they maintain their own physical and data security policy that is considered robust.
Next, here are the 123D Terms of service, which raise many of the same alarm bells I mentioned before. Selected quotes:
We reserve the right to change all or any part of these Terms, or to change the Site, including by eliminating or discontinuing the Site (or any feature thereof) or any product, service, Content or other materials, and to charge and/or change any fees, prices, costs or charges on or for using the Site (or any feature thereof).
By uploading, posting, publishing, transmitting, displaying, distributing or otherwise making available Shared Content to us and/or any Users of or through the Site you automatically grant to us and our sub-licensees…the worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid-up, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right and license to have access to, store, display, reproduce, use, disclose, transmit, view, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, broadcast, perform and display (whether publicly or otherwise), distribute, re-distribute and exploit your Shared Content (in whole or in part) for any reason and/or purpose (whether commercial or non-commercial) by any and all means in any and all media, forms, formats, platforms and technologies now known or hereafter devised, invented, developed or improved.
Please note that with respect to Non-public Content, we will not authorize your Non-public Content to be made available to others on a public section of the Site, although we cannot guarantee complete security (e.g., of cloud servers).
Moving on to another Cloud security-related issue, something that Owen Wengerd raised on Twitter was the idea that:
…once data is on the cloud, it can never be deleted.
Deelip Menezes thought this whole idea somewhat loopy:
Actually I’m implying that it is ridiculous to even start thinking along those lines. 😉
However, I see Owen’s point. Once your data is on someone else’s server, you have no control over it. You have no idea where it lives, how often it is backed up, what happens to those backups, and so on. Let’s say you place some highly sensitive design data on the Cloud. It might be commercially sensitive, or about something that represents a possible terrorist target, or just something you don’t want certain parties to know about, ever. A week later, you delete the design data. Now, is it really gone? Any responsible Cloud infrastructure vendor must regularly take multiple backups and store them securely. So you now have multiple copies of your “deleted” data floating around, who knows where? What happens to old servers when they die? Where do backup hard drives, tapes, etc. go? If backups are stored off-site, how are your files going to be permanently removed from the media?
While there may be policies, procedures and ISO standards in place, we’re dealing with humans here. If one backup copy of your data ended up in a country where a rogue employee decided to better feed his family by selling off old hard drives, your nuclear power plant plans could end up not safely deleted at all, but instead delivered into the hands of some people you’d really prefer not to have it.
This may sound like paranoid nonsense, but risk from non-deleted data is real. There was a local case where a company was illegally siphoned of funds and went bust. The company’s old internal email servers were supposedly wiped and sold off. Somebody bought them, undeleted the data and was able to pass on incriminating emails to the police. While that ended up being a good thing in terms of natural justice and it’s not even a Cloud issue, it illustrates that making sure your stuff is properly deleted can be very important. This is related to something that Ralph Grabowski mentioned on Twitter; the “right to be forgotten”. Here is a Google search that includes various links that touch on some of the struggles related to this issue.
Finally, here’s something related to the possibility of the data being accessed illegally while it’s up. You put it up there, somebody copies it, you delete it, it’s not really gone and you are none the wiser. Is that something that only tin foil hat wearers need worry about? Have a read of this article before answering that one: Cloud Services Credentials Easily Stolen Via Google Code Search. Selected quotes:
The access codes and secret keys of thousands of public cloud services users can be easily found with a simple Google code search, a team of security researchers says.
Now the team is offering one word of advice to companies that are considering storing critical information on the public cloud: Don’t.
…an attacker who knows Google and some simple facts about cloud services authentication can easily find the access codes, passwords, and secret keys needed to unlock data stored in public cloud services environments such as Amazon’s EC3.
We found literally thousands of keys stored this way, any one of which could be used to take control of computers in the cloud, shut them down, or used to launch attacks on other computers on the same service.
Here’s a PDF of the presentation, if you’re interested.