Category Archives: Other Blogs

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My Real World BricsCAD series of posts on the Bricsys blog continues with more from the in-depth interview at Schrack Seconet.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

 

I hope when people read these things they can see that I’m probing for problems, issues, difficulties, and so on. That’s the sort of thing that those people who are considering switching to BricsCAD are going to want to know about before diving in.

I’m grateful that Bricsys is OK with me covering their products like this on the Bricsys blog. Some CAD companies only allow super-positive things to ever be uttered about their products from their corporate sites. Bricsys is different.

Other views on the Hexagon/Bricsys acquisition

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I’ve made a couple of posts on this subject, but so have several others who might have different perspectives. This post is merely an accumulation of links to those other sources.

There was also extensive live commentary on Twitter using the #Bricsys2018 hashtag.

Image source: Bricsys

I expect to add to this post over time rather than making a new one. If you have any suggestions for other links to include, please comment below.

My Real World BricsCAD series is coming soon on the Bricsys blog

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In February, my first Bricsys blog post appeared:

Inside Bricsys: Interviewing the creator of BLADE – the new Visual LISP IDE in BricsCAD V18.2

This was an amalgamation of my two similarly named posts on this blog where I interviewed BricsCAD’s Torsten Moses about BLADE, the LISP IDE that arrived with BricsCAD V18.2.

Today marked my first original-material post on the Bricsys blog:

Real World BricsCAD Series Coming Soon

I encourage you to hop over to the Bricsys blog to check it out. I’ve been interviewing real people about their use of BricsCAD and will be reporting what they have to say.

Disclosure: Bricsys is paying me to interview these people and produce these pieces.

Bricsys is not, however, paying me to sugar-coat anything. I’m being left alone to interview who I like and write it up as I see fit. A quote from today’s post will give you some idea of what’s in store:

The posts in this series aren’t going to be your average corporate-waffle puff-pieces. I mean, who reads those things anyway?

If you have used BricsCAD and are willing to be featured in this series, I would love to hear from you. Please contact me using this form and I will be in touch. In addition to the interviews in the pipeline, I have already had my first response to this invitation. A site in Austria with 70 users and lots of custom programming sounds like something I can get my teeth into.

CAD Panacea tip – startup files in BricsCAD

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One of the things that might initially baffle a CAD Manager or power user when investigating switching from AutoCAD to BricsCAD is how to set up the startup routines. Head over to CAD Panacea for R.K. McSwain’s concise, handy description of how to do it.

Due to BricsCAD’s high level of compatibility, you can maintain a common folder or set of folders containing LISP and other custom files for both applications. That way, you don’t need to do double maintenance during the transition period. I’ve done this successfully in a highly complex custom environment. Some code and other adjustments were required in places, but all but a handful of my hundreds of AutoCAD LISP files worked as-is in BricsCAD with zero effort.

Having added your AutoCAD custom folder(s) to BricsCAD’s search path, I suggest you make a common startup LISP file (e.g. rename your old acaddoc.lsp to something like CADStartupDoc.lsp) and have tiny stub startup LISP files for each application (acaddoc.lsp and on_doc_load.lsp) that each loads the common startup file.

acaddoc.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

on_doc_load.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

You can add error checking and messaging if you like, but if you have control of your environment you probably won’t even need that. If you find you do need any application-specific code, you can just add it or load it from the acaddoc.lsp or on_doc_load.lsp stubs as appropriate.

BricsCAD V18 – showing Autodesk how to do DWG CAD

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For years now, Autodesk has done very little worthwhile with AutoCAD. There have been a few small but welcome improvements, but it’s really just tinkering at the edges. The product as a whole continues to stagnate and yet blimp out. It’s getting bigger and slower with each new release. The downloads get bigger. The install times get longer. The startup times drag out. The responsiveness suffers. And for what? Pretty much the same old thing, every time. Sometimes you don’t even get a new desktop icon. Don’t get me started on value for money.

It’s as if Autodesk considers DWG-based desktop CAD to be a solved problem. Many CAD users accept this. There’s not much more that can be done to improve it, right?

Wrong.

Bricsys has, yet again, proven Autodesk wrong. It is very possible to significantly improve DWG-based CAD. The improvements to the just-released BricsCAD V18 go far beyond anything Autodesk has done for many years, and that’s improving on an already-excellent and innovative product in V17. I’ll be covering some of the most important changes in future posts, but for now here are a few Bricsys links:

Don’t take my word for it. The easiest way to test the validity of what I have to say is to try it out for yourself. Unlike Autodesk products, Bricsys downloads and installs are small, fast and efficient. How efficient? This efficient (R.K. McSwain, Twitter):

It’s a 258 MB download for an entire DWG-based CAD application which is significantly more fully-featured than AutoCAD. No nasty malware-like download manager. It’s not a stub or a pre-installer that expands itself before even starting the install proper. It’s a ready-to-run installer for the entire top-of-the-range product capable of parametric 3D, sheet metal design and BIM. It installs and starts up quickly. You can have no trace of BricsCAD on your computer now and be editing your DWGs with it (yes, including your AutoCAD 2018 and Civil 3D DWGs) in a few minutes.

Here’s the download link. You can evaluate it for 30 days.

Did I mention that perpetual licenses are available? Or that it’s way cheaper than AutoCAD? Or that when you report a problem it goes to a real developer who actually cares about fixing it in a reasonable timeframe?

Repost: Autodesk Subscription – it could be worse

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This is a repost of Autodesk Subscription – it could be worse from 18 April 2010.

I’m posting this to show that I’m not just having a go at Autodesk’s policies because they’re from Autodesk. I’m having a go at those policies because they are reprehensible. Whoever it is that’s being anti-customer, spinning bullshit, or otherwise misbehaving, they can expect to receive a brutally honest critique here.

It’s interesting that in this old post I pointed out that this policy was bad business. (Not quite the expression I used, but the sentiment was there). My agreement with Buzz Kross on this subject goes back seven years, even though I only just discovered that was the case!

  • 2010: Autodesk Subscription – it could be worse
  • 2017: Autodesk subscription – it is worse!

The old post is below the line. Some of the old links are broken, but some work and provide a fascinating insight into how customers – anybody’s customers – view the idea of being charged to fix defects. Enjoy.

I’m still looking for your questions about Autodesk Subscription and upgrade policies and pricing. No matter what you think about that, you have to admit that Autodesk’s current policies are less anti-customer than those inflicted on SolidWorks users.

Disallowing bug fixes for non-subscription customers is reprehensible, no matter what kind of spin is put on it. Not only that, it’s clueless. So you’re annoyed at Autodesk for whatever reason and are looking for alternative software from a company that doesn’t mistreat its customers? You know not to even bother looking at SolidWorks, don’t you?

Edit: more relevant links and customer comments from Devon Sowell and Matt Lombard’s blogs.

The big Bricsys interview 1 – why invite the press?

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

On April 26 and 27, I attended Bricsys Insights, a press event in Ghent, Belgium. Other attendees included Cyrena Respini-Irwin (Cadalyst editor in chief), R.K. McSwain (CAD Panacea), Ralph Grabowski (upFront.eZine), Randall Newton (GraphicSpeak), Roopinder Tara (Engineering.com), Martyn Day (DEVELOP3D), Jeff Rowe (AEC Café), Anthony Frausto-Robledo (Architosh) and Paul Wilkinson (pwcom).

Although Bricsys has invited some of these people (including myself) to previous events, this was the first gathering of such a significant number of illustrious industry press, bloggers and observers. So when myself, Cyrena Respini-Irwin and R.K. McSwain had the opportunity to interview Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh, the first thing that we asked was this:

Cyrena (clarifying earlier question): What was the change that led you to bring in more people for the press event?

Steve: Why are we here?

Erik/Mark: (Laughs)

Cyrena: That’s a big question!

Erik: If you look to the history of what we have done and it goes together with what we said in the beginning, that we chose to grow by organic growth, and for a long time we didn’t do any marketing, and especially for the American market, because if you do it too early… And really, if we had done that massively, five years ago we would have been categorized as just another clone of AutoCAD. Once you have that, it’s very difficult to leave that, and that’s exactly what we wanted to avoid.

And so we waited until we had really substantially different product technologies that add a lot of stuff to… if you compare it to AutoCAD, I think that’s the moment where we are now. And we decided from that moment on, probably it made sense that we tell it a little bit more to the world. And of course what do you do then? You invite influencers in the market, which is the journalists. That’s the reason we invited you all.

We’re going to repeat this more and more.

Mark: Just to add to that, just sitting here for just two days with you guys also helps us to really talk about everything. If you go to a conference (you [Steve] were also in Munich), the time is limited and so we don’t show the systems behind, the testing system, we cannot show everything.

The idea here was, OK, these are the things we’re doing, what you see of course but also what is behind, the people behind the DNA of the company. We thought that’s a good idea to do that in depth with an audience like you guys.

Erik: That’s an important element as well that we wanted to show: the DNA of the company. It’s a bit different from others. That’s who we are and it’s important to know.

Steve: You’re about 90% developers, programmers. Do you think that’s going to change as you put more effort into marketing?

Erik: I think that the awesome part of the company that has to be improved, and on the marketing side we’re going to need to improve… to give you a rough idea we think that over the next two, four years we’re probably going to grow to maybe 200-250 people.

Steve: So where are you now?

Erik: We’re at 130-140. We just hired six new developers here in the office last week so we have to recount where we are in total. Dmitri is hiring in Novosibirsk (Bricsys Russia) as well.

So for sure we are starting what I would call a second life now. There’s been a lot of development, but still the majority of people in our company will be developers. I think we’re always going to stay around 80% developers. But there’s a part of the business, and especially in the marketing, that we will have to improve.

What we have encountered now, with the new modelling techniques we have introduced for BIM, we have to teach all the resellers. We have to produce material to teach the people how to work with it. These are not developers we’re going to need. We’re going to need seasoned architects that have experience for the last six to ten years with BIM already, maybe with competitive products. But that understand the concept, have experience with it, those guys we are now attracting and we’re going to need. Those are not developers, but in that sphere we have to extend and we have to grow. And that’s what we’re doing. We are hiring.

The focus will always be… what we’re good at, is basic research and development. That’s really what we’re doing, that’s the focus, and the results are the products we make.

We have a good partnership network I think, we’re going to continue to feed that, so I expect that balance between developers and non-developers to remain always above or about 80%.

If you have a look at the system, how we sell and support our products, we are scalable, to maintain that balance of a high level of developers. There’s no need for us to change that model. But in certain aspects we’re going to have to extend.

BOA (Bricsys Online Administration) is helping us tremendously to be scalable. If we were to double our revenue we wouldn’t need that many more people to manage that. We are constantly investing in automating all the systems we have, and it pays off big-time.

Cyrena: So that very heavy R&D investment you’ve sustained thus far will be scaled back a little in order to invest in other areas such as marketing?

Erik: Yeah, but it doesn’t mean we will scale back from development. We will grow in development as well, but the balance will be a little bit different; the proportion is different. We will grow tremendously, even more still in R&D when it comes to number of developers than in any other area over any other field or kind of employee that we have.

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

Disclosure: Bricsys covered travel and accommodation expenses and provided some meals. Oh, and beer. Mustn’t forget the Belgian beer.

Why owning stuff is still important (repost)

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This post was originally published on 19 November 2012. What’s happened since then is that Autodesk has indeed ended the sale of perpetual licenses and gone all-rental even though customers remain reluctant.

Autodesk’s cloud push, however, is struggling. Many Autodesk cloud products are dying or dead. Others (mostly free) carry on but many have failed to live up to expectations.  Some paid cloud products (e.g. Fusion 360) are starting to generate some return on Autodesk’s huge investment. However, it’s all years behind schedule. We were supposed to be cloudy CAD users several years ago. It hasn’t happened. How much of that is because of technical blockages, how much is because we have problems trusting the cloud, and how much is because we prefer to own our software licenses? I have no way of telling, but I’m sure the latter factor is somewhere in the mix.

Most of this post might as well have been written today. The three Cs matter in 2017 and I believe they always will. Here’s the original, unmodified.

Let’s start with a few questions:

  • Do you own your home or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your car or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your TV or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your computer or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

If you’re like me, you answered the same for most or all of those questions. I own all of the above and rent none of it. I prefer owning all of the above. Why? Three Cs:

  • Continuity. If I own my home, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll be able to go on living in it as long as I like. There are exceptions (wars, natural disasters, etc.), but ownership is generally much safer than renting if it’s important to retain access in the long term. This is because it removes the significant possibility that the owner may eventually terminate the agreement for reasons of their own, or make the relationship financially impractical.
  • Control. If I rent my home, for example, there are strict limits on what I can do with it. I can’t just install an air conditioner if the place gets too hot in summer. The owners or their representatives can come calling to make sure I’m looking after it as they desire. If I want to keep pets or smoke in the property, my options are severely limited.
  • Cost. There’s a reason people invest in property to rent out to others, or run profitable multinational businesses hiring out cars. It makes sense to be on the side of the relationship that’s taking the money rather than the one that’s paying it out. In other words, it usually makes financial sense to be the owner rather than the renter.

That doesn’t mean renting things never makes sense, of course. I wouldn’t buy a car to drive around while visiting another country, for example. Many people can’t afford to buy their own homes and have no alternative but to rent. But that doesn’t alter the basic point that ownership is the most desirable situation to be in. Let’s look at another situation and see if that point still applies:

  • Do you own your music or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

There are an increasing number of people who feel that owning music is old hat. For example, have a look at Scott Sheppard’s blog post on this subject. Here’s one thing Scott has to say:

When you think about it, you don’t want to own an album or CD, you want to hear the songs when you want to.

Sorry, Scott, but there is more to it than just hearing songs when I want to. I have thought about it, very carefully, and I do want to own an album or CD. I want this for the same reasons I want to own my home, my car and so on.

  • Continuity. If I own a CD and look after it, I know I’m going to be able to keep using it indefinitely. I don’t have to worry about whether the rights holder wishes to continue making that music available, or changes the terms of the agreement to my detriment.
  • Control. If I own a CD, I can listen to it in good conditions on my home system without the music suffering from lossy compression. I can put it in my car’s player along with a few others and quickly flip to it without having to search for it among several thousand tracks. I can rip the music from the CD and place it on my iPod Nano watch, or Android phone, or computers, and play it when and where it’s convenient. I’m not reliant on any external parties or connections.
  • Cost. Once I’ve paid for my CD, the incremental cost of each listen is extremely close to zero. I’m still enjoying music I bought years ago, cost-free. My eldest daughter only listens to music on her iPod, but she generally buys CDs rather than downloading songs from iTunes. She does this because she works out what’s cheapest and it’s usually the CD, even allowing for one or two tracks she doesn’t want.

The cost issue may or may not apply, depending on the album and the service, but for me the other two factors are dealbreakers anyway. Besides, there are other reasons I want to own an album. These include artwork, lyrics, the pleasure that comes from collecting and owning an artist’s works, and so on. I understand that these aspects are down to my personal preference. There are plenty of kids out there who just want to listen to this week’s stuff without thinking about the future too much. However, huge numbers of those sort of people aren’t customers, and don’t enter into the commercial equation. When they download music, they don’t pay for it.

Scott’s experiment with Spotify is hardly a compelling argument for non-ownership. He lists a whole bunch of things that are irritating and which detract from his ability to listen to the music when and where he wants to. Things that don’t apply to those of us who own our music (or those who download it for free). In fact, it’s a very convincing argument that the “anytime, anywhere” mantra needs to be turned on its head. Want to ensure that you’ll be able to listen to the music you want? Anytime, anywhere, uninterrupted, problem-free and independent of external factors? Ownership, not Cloudy stuff. Every time.

With that in mind, let’s look at one more situation:

  • Do you own your software or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

Let’s sidestep the convenient (and court-approved, in some locations) legal idea that customers don’t actually own the software they buy. Let’s interpret the word “software” above as the ability to use the software. This includes whatever is required to do so, from a media, technical and licensing perspective. While you and I might prefer to permanently own our software (or licence to use that software), Autodesk likes to think that society:

is moving from [sic] only requiring access to products instead of owning them

and so it wants to:

move from offering a perpetual license with maintenance to a termed subscription model

In other words, Autodesk doesn’t want you to own software any more, it wants to rent it to you. This desire is clearly the prime mover behind its Cloud push. Never mind that the last time Autodesk tried renting out its software, the experiment was a dismal and short-lived failure because of a lack of customers. This has nothing to do with what you want, it has everything to do with what Autodesk wants.

Is this all OK with you? Do continuity, control and cost really not matter when it comes to software? Are you happy to hand matters over to your friendly vendor and not think about the future too much, like some pop-happy teenager? Or, like me, do you think owning stuff is still important?

Please let me know if you would like to see occasional selected reposts like this in future or would prefer to avoid post necromancy.

AutoCAD 2018 – at last, something to praise

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This isn’t supposed to be an Autodesk-bashing blog. Really, it’s not. Sure, Autodesk (and anyone else) gets criticism where deserved. There’s been a lot of that lately, but only because Autodesk has thoroughly deserved it. I don’t make up things so I can have a go; Autodesk provides the material all by itself.

Among other things, I’m a customer advocate. I don’t care who you are, act in an anti-customer manner and I’m going to slam you. Hard but fair. Dish up bullshit to your customers and I will gleefully point that out and heap derision on you. Deal with it.

On the other hand, act in a pro-customer manner and I’m going to praise you. I do praise Autodesk (and anyone else) where deserved. There are dozens of examples of that on this blog. Lately, the pickings have been slim. Time to redress the balance a little.

I’ve mentioned before that Autodesk has some great documentation people, including Lee Ambrosius…

…who does a great job with developer documentation. That job’s less visible, but still very important and performed to an excellent standard. Lee is very technically knowledgeable and understands users, developers and their documentation requirements. Within the confines of the systems he’s forced to work with, Lee has done the very best job it would be possible for anyone to do.

Lee has again stepped up to the mark and done exemplary work with the AutoCAD 2018 developer documentation. See Lee’s post for details. This list of AutoLISP changes is an example of the sort of thoughtful addition Lee has provided. Thank you, Lee!

AutoCAD 2018 – why did the DWG format change?

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In my review of AutoCAD 2018, I had this to say about AutoCAD 2018’s changed DWG format:

Why does AutoCAD 2018 need a new DWG format? It probably doesn’t. The 2013 DWG format is capable of holding pretty much anything you want… Although Autodesk cites performance reasons with certain drawings, I strongly suspect the new DWG format was introduced purely to make life difficult for competitors, and to encourage wavering customers to stay with Autodesk for fear of losing compatibility. In other words, it seems likely this is an anti-competitive change rather than a technical one.

In a recent blog post, highly respected Swiss-based Autodesk development and research person Kean Walmsley had this to say on that subject:

The main reason for the break in compatibility is some longer-term work that’s going on inside the AutoCAD codebase. For now this is really only surfacing in small ways – I expect it’s contributing some performance benefits, for instance – but the work is absolutely critical to the long-term viability of the product.

Kean’s a straight-shooter and I’m always ready to be corrected if it can be shown that I’m wrong. So I would be interested to learn more detail about this long-term work that’s critical to the long-term viability of the product. It might be good news for customers or really terrible news. If the groundwork is being laid for a file format that’s more heavily cloud-reliant or subject to continuous change, say, that would be an absolute tragedy for customers.

Autodesk is clearly manoeuvring customers into a position of maximum tie-in using various nefarious means, and if the DWG format change is part of that then it’s to be condemned. Maybe further information would help alleviate such concerns. Kean can’t provide that information, and neither can the selected bloggers who were given some insight under NDA last week, but I’m sure someone at Autodesk could. That is, if there really is nothing to worry about.

Kean also had this to say:

AutoCAD continues to be a core part of Autodesk’s business – and it continues to receive significant investment in terms of development resources – but don’t expect that to translate to buckets of shiny new features: AutoCAD’s feature maturity means the investment is rightly being focused in other areas (at least for now).

This had me wondering if Kean mistyped “immaturity”, because almost every AutoCAD feature from the last decade was released immature and only the lucky few eventually got finished. There’s a huge mass of outstanding work left to do in AutoCAD just to bring its existing half-baked features up to scratch, practically all of which could be done without disrupting customers with a new DWG format.

As for the feature set itself being mature, I can’t agree with that, either. Maybe it’s considered mature within Autodesk because of defeatist thinking about what’s possible with DWG-based CAD software? Kean’s comments seem to reinforce that impression. From where I’m standing, the lack of progress in recent AutoCAD releases demonstrates a severe lack of imagination and hunger to improve the product, not any inherent natural plateau in CAD development.

I believe this because Autodesk’s keener competitors have shown that no such plateau exists. Bricsys has proven that it’s very possible to improve an AutoCAD-like DWG-based product out of sight with genuinely useful and productive new features, and they can do it without changing the DWG format. Incidentally, my preliminary tests indicate BricsCAD V17 opens and saves DWG significantly faster than AutoCAD 2018, again without the need for a new format. More on that in a later post.

Back to Kean:

This is a tricky balance – and could easily be interpreted as a big company not caring about (some of) its users and only being interested in milking its cash-cow – but the work happening behind the scenes is significant and I believe will ultimately prove to be of real value to our customers.

Real value? History has taught me to be dubious about that. Many things that Autodesk promotes as being of value to customers turn out to be of net negative value. Time will tell with this one.

Sorry, but I really don’t believe that Autodesk cares about AutoCAD and its users as anything but an income source. I know there are still honest, hardworking, enthusiastic people within Autodesk (like Kean) who want to improve the product on behalf of customers. Good luck to those people, because their efforts are being stymied by management. The results we’re seeing out here in customer land are dismal, and no matter what spin is put on that, it must be disheartening.

Autodesk people, caring about users? Sure. Autodesk, the public listed company, as directed from the top? Nope. Autodesk’s actions and inactions tell me otherwise. Zero cares are given. No words can fix that, no matter who they come from.

AutoCAD really is being treated as a cash cow; hang one of those bells around its neck and be done with it.


(Original image: Daniel Schwen)

AutoCAD 2018 – disable InfoCenter

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Here’s another AutoCAD 2018 download, just in case you haven’t had enough.

If you want to disable AutoCAD’s InfoCenter (and you should, unless have a specific reason for keeping it – here’s why), go get the updated download from uber-expert Owen Wengerd’s ManuSoft Freebies page. It works for AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT.

AutoCAD 2018 – bear this in mind

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Given the dearth of new functionality in AutoCAD in recent years, it’s understandable that Autodesk has taken to claiming credit for the same thing twice. The same features have been touted once for the 2017.1 mid-term update and again as 2018 new features. Even I fell for it, listing linetype gap selection as a 2018 feature in my original review.

For the purposes of reviewing the earlier AutoCAD releases and AutoCAD 2018 as upgrades, I have included the 2017.1 features in 2018, not 2017. Some of those features are praiseworthy, and there have been some minor improvements to some of the 2017.1 features in 2018, but let’s count them just once, please.

Blogs and sites that just regurgitate Autodesk’s take on what’s new in AutoCAD 2018 might inadvertently repeat the double-dipping. Bear that in mind when you read reviews.

Autodesk starts answering subscription questions, but many remain

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Getting worthwhile non-rubbery information out of Autodesk on the maintenance to subscription push has been like pulling teeth. Well, one tooth has popped out now. There are a rotten mouthful still to go, but some progress is being made.

Here is the latest Autodesk communication on this subject. While it gives the impression of providing transparency, there’s still not enough there to provide enough certainty to convince any but the most naive customers to throw away their perpetual licenses. If you try pumping Autodesk’s numbers into my costing spreadsheet, you can get so far and then you’re back to guesswork again. If you guess low, it’s merely a bad deal. If you guess high, it’s an atrocious deal. For you, not for Autodesk; I’m sure Autodesk will be happy with whatever deal it decides to inflict.

There are huge holes in what has been stated that allow Autodesk to charge pretty much whatever they like in the future. I have about a dozen questions about those holes. If they get answered, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, I suggest you still assume it’s a trap to leave you open to future massive price gouging without the safety net and escape route that a perpetual license provides.

Script for creating AutoCAD Classic workspace

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Edwin Prakaso at the excellent CAD Notes blog has done something that, in hindsight, is blindingly obvious but nevertheless very useful to a multitude of people. He’s written a simple script file that sets up the Classic workspace (or something close to it). It works in any recent AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. Here’s the blog post:

AutoCAD Script to Create Classic Workspace Automatically

Edwin uses Microsoft OneDrive to store the script file, so if your workplace restricts access to Cloud storage you might need to download it at home.

I’ve added a reference to this script to my post AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal”.

Return of the bullshit – baked beans edition

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In an October 2015 post I’ve only just noticed, snappily titled No More Software Like a Can of Baked Beans: Why Software Subscription Serves It Up Fresh, Autodesk VP (edit – now CEO) Andrew Anagnost bravely attempts to sell Autodesk’s move to all-rental software. This is a rather belated response, but fortunately there is no statute of limitations on skewering spin so let’s get started.

How does he go? On a positive note, top marks for creative writing! The general theme is a strained and somewhat Californian analogy in which perpetual licenses are like canned goods (bad), and rental is like fresh produce (good). However, it’s presented well and professionally written. Among the highlights are:

  • Perpetual software licenses are like high-fructose corn syrup – no, I’m not making this up. Stop laughing at the back there!
  • This is a change that is simply a better experience for everyone – everyone who likes the experience of paying more for less, that is.
  • It’s to create a better product, something tailored to customers – creating a better product seems beyond Autodesk, at least where AutoCAD is concerned. Actually, it’s to create a more expensive product. Tailoring is something we customers been doing for over 30 years without the use of rental software, thanks.
  • There will be less disruption – except a) how we pay for the product is independent of how/when the product is updated and the disruptions inherent in that, and b) even ignoring the erroneous conflation, it’s a mistake to assume that continuous updates are less disruptive. Recent history proves otherwise.
  • Companies (e.g. Autodesk) will work even harder to keep you happy as a rental customer – history gives the lie to this one, too; the closer Autodesk has got to this model and the more people have been locked into annual subscription/maintenance payments, the worse the value for money has become. It also ignores the various alternative ways Autodesk will use to try to keep you tied in. What do you think all that Cloud investment has been for?
  • Autodesk is focusing on helping customers succeed with its products and services – I don’t think so. Autodesk is focusing on trying to keep its shareholders happy.
  • Serial numbers are a terrible dehumanizing thing, rental will make them go away and relying on Autodesk’s internet expertise for Cloud-based licensing is a much more attractive proposition – serial numbers are fine, that’s just silly. There are a host of unnecessary problems introduced by Cloud-based licensing, even when dealing with companies that aren’t as crap at the Internet as Autodesk (e.g. the Redshift site won’t even let me scroll back up once I’ve scrolled past the end of the post). The idea of Autodesk disposing of serial numbers and implementing a phone-home scheme instead is pretty terrifying, and I can only hope that technical issues prevent it from ever reaching production. Mind you, the fact that some new thing is clearly unfinished to the point of uselessness doesn’t seem to prevent Autodesk releasing it these days, so who knows? Hmm, I feel another post coming on about this…
  • Autodesk will make all your customization work for you on all computers and other devices wherever you go – let’s put aside for a moment Autodesk’s total failure to even provide a usable vanilla AutoCAD on the Cloud so far. CAD Managers, would any of you care to hop in and let Andrew know what’s wrong with this picture?
  • Constant automatic incremental updates are like reading news articles daily and much more convenient than larger upgrades which are like getting a whole year’s worth of news at once – again, this makes the fatal error of conflating payment and upgrade delivery methods. Putting that aside, if we’re talking about virus definitions and OS or browser security hole fixes, then yes, automatic updates are the way to go. CAD software, not so much. Particularly software from Autodesk, given the incompetence shown to date in its attempts to make this model work. Even putting aside the practicalities, I could do a whole long post on why this concept is all wrong. Maybe I will later. Meantime, Andrew needs to talk to some CAD Managers to get some idea of how the real world works.
  • “OK, so there’s still the major elephant in the room: What about the cost?” – good of you to mention that elephant, tell me more.
  • For customers, there is real financial advantage by eliminating that huge upfront payment. – For some customers, yes. Not so many, though. Short-term customers are the minority. What about the millions of long-term users who would have their annual costs blown sky-high by falling into your rental trap? Andrew, I see you mentioned the elephant in the room and then tried to avoid meaningful discussion of it, giving the impression you had addressed the issue without actually doing so. Sorry, but I noticed. Care to try again? Tell me more about how you expect either a) customers to be better off by paying more, or b) Autodesk to be better off despite customers paying less. Pick either one of those and run with it, I’m sure it will be entertaining.
  • “And if you don’t need a product for months at a time, switch it off, and then switch it back on. It will be there ready and waiting for you” – strange, that kind of flexibility seems to work for perpetual licenses too, at a fraction of the long-term cost of rental. No guarantee that flexibility is a reality for rental products, though, because the vendor may not provide that product when I need it, or may have racked up the prices to exorbitant levels, or may have introduced new incompatibilities or other technical problems. Oh dear, the boot is very much on the other foot with that argument.
  • “After three years, software becomes obsolete…” – er, no. Many people (myself included) are happily productive using at least some software more than three years old. Some of it works better than the newer stuff. Hands up all those people who couldn’t possibly live without the latest version of Word or Excel, for example. Anyone? Didn’t think so.
  • “…and the pace of obsolescence is rapidly increasing” – if we’re talking Autodesk software, then the pace of obsolescence is doing the opposite. AutoCAD improvement has slowed almost to a halt, for example. There is little in any of the last few releases that gives an AutoCAD 2017 user a significant productivity advantage over an AutoCAD 2013 user, say. And anyone using AutoCAD 2010 or earlier has a much more efficient Help system than that provided in any of the last 7 releases. I guess that’s the kind of anti-progress that happens when you sack a bunch of knowledgeable people every few years and divert too many of the remaining resources to trendier projects that you end up junking anyway.
  • Customers of Autodesk can continue to renew their maintenance contracts for as long as they want – except that Carl Bass has now indicated otherwise. Andrew, maybe have a word with your boss and get back to me on that one?
  • “The company is always listening to how to improve the transition and setting out for the long road, not the short win” – except rental is all about the opposite: short term savings that cost big in the long term. And don’t get me started on the irony of claiming Autodesk is “always listening” while promoting an all-rental scheme that goes against the very clearly expressed wishes of customers.
  • “It’s this beautiful kind of world where things are connected and work together better” – does it have rainbows and unicorns, too? Strewth. Come off it, Autodesk is rubbish at CAD interoperability, even among the AutoCAD-based products. Why should anyone who’s been struggling with poxy proxy objects for a couple of decades believe that paying differently is going to act as some kind of magic spell to make everything exquisite in CAD Connectivity Kingdom?

Here’s the TL;DR version of my response to Andrew’s arguments if you can’t be bothered reading all that:

Bullshit.

 
What are the real reasons Autodesk is going all-rental?

  • Autodesk wants to charge us long-term users three times as much money for the same thing and leave us with nothing at the end of it.
  • Autodesk thinks we’re all stupid and don’t own calculators.
  • Adobe did this and made it work, and Autodesk thinks it can do likewise despite significant business differences, much higher prices and an untrusting customer base.
  • Autodesk has run out of motivation and/or ideas to improve its traditional cash-cow flagship products, to the extent that customers increasingly no longer see value in upgrades or maintenance.
  • Increasing income by product improvement is way too difficult; price gouging and spin is much cheaper.

I’ll conclude with my own strained analogy:

Autodesk spin is like a tin of baked beans. No matter how attractive the packaging, the end result is just a bad smell.

Autodesk has some great documentation people

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The most heavily commented post on this blog is AutoCAD 2013 – An Autodesk Help writer responds, featuring Dieter Schlaepfer‘s response to posts and comments here about AutoCAD 2013’s Help. I don’t always agree with Dieter but I respect him enormously, and not just because he was brave enough to stick his head above the parapet in a hostile environment. Dieter is a principal technical writer at Autodesk with many years’ experience and is therefore responsible for large amounts of documentation content. You’ve almost certainly read his work.

I’ve been critical of AutoCAD’s Help system since it was broken in 2011, and I make no apologies for that. The Help system sucked then, it sucked even worse in 2013, and it continues to suck badly in 2017. None of that’s Dieter’s fault. It’s the Help engine that’s at fault, or to be more accurate the Help engines, because the online and offline engines still both suck in various ways. Clearly there’s someone important at Autodesk satisfied with the ongoing Help engine awfulness, but that’s not Dieter. He’s responsible for content, not the engine. Content isn’t the problem. The content is actually very good, and gradually improving as Dieter finds ways to do so. It’s just that the system for accessing that content is so terrible that not many people get to read much of it these days, which is a crying shame.

I digress. Dieter’s awesome.

Also awesome is Lee Ambrosius, who does a great job with developer documentation. That job’s less visible, but still very important and performed to an excellent standard. Lee is very technically knowledgeable and understands users, developers and their documentation requirements. Within the confines of the systems he’s forced to work with, Lee has done the very best job it would be possible for anyone to do.

Everybody knows Lynn Allen, of course. Not just an entertaining and engaging presenter at AU and a thousand smaller gatherings, she has been producing beautifully prepared tips-and-tricks and what’s-new articles, posts and documents for so long she must surely have been a toddler when she started. The value of Lynn to Autodesk and its customers is hard to calculate, but is clearly immense.

Last but not least, Heidi Hewett has done an exemplary job for many years in producing preview guides, posts and other documents. You don’t get to see some of them because they are confined to pre-release testers, but I assure you that they are done to the same high standard as the ones that go public.

The work of our illustrious foursome and other talented writers can be found on the AutoCAD Blog and I’m sure my readers will find something of use there.

Restoring the Classic workspace in AutoCAD 2015, 2016 and 2017, etc.

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One of the more common queries on my putting things back to “normal” posts is how to restore the AutoCAD Classic workspace in those releases where it is absent. Since Autodesk removed that workspace it has been too involved a process to fully describe how to do it in the context of my post. In the 2017 version of that post I’ve added a useful link, but as that’s a massive post and the link is buried near the end of it, this may have escaped your attention.

Here’s the link to Brazilian AutoCAD expert Luciana Klein’s step-by-step guide. It’s for AutoCAD 2016, but the principles apply to other releases and variants. Thanks to Luciana for going to the effort of putting this together.

Battle of the Bullshit part 2 – Autodesk’s sophistry

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In my last post, I gave Bentley a well-deserved slap for, er, saying things that perhaps weren’t entirely factual. Now it’s Autodesk’s turn.

What’s this about? Carl White, Senior Director of Business Models at Autodesk, wrote a blog post Not so fast Bentley: Separating fact from fiction responding to statements made by Bentley in its press release Bentley Announces Autodesk License Upgrade Program. Some of Carl’s observations on Bentley’s claims were perfectly valid, but unfortunately he went beyond that and wrote a few more things – “facts” – where he’s on shakier ground. Let’s examine Carl’s interpretation of reality, shall we?

Fact #1 – No Autodesk customer ever  loses the right to use the perpetual software license you’ve purchased, it is “evergreen”.

This is generally true. There are exceptions (read the EULA), but let’s not split hairs. In the vast majority of cases, we don’t lose the right  to use the software. We can, however, lose the ability  to use the software. That loss is practically inevitable long-term because of the progress of technology. I have several old AutoCAD releases I can’t run for environmental reasons, not licensing ones. This means that if we want to use our licenses long-term, we rely on Autodesk’s ongoing cooperation. That’s where customers have legitimate concerns, because there are no guarantees that Autodesk will continue to provide that cooperation. If it does, there are no guarantees that cooperation will remain free or even affordable.

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

This has been officially promised, and let’s give Autodesk the benefit of the doubt and assume that this promise will be fulfilled to the letter. There’s still an elephant in the room. What will the benefits of updates and support cost us? Based on what Autodesk has done in recent years, it is a pretty safe bet that the cost of maintenance (formerly called Subscription) is going to rise, and rise sharply. Give it a few years and I expect maintenance customers will be paying the same as rental customers. I expect other strong-arm methods will be used to “encourage” people onto rental. When this happens, our perpetual licenses will be near worthless and Bentley’s claim about a “…write-off of the future value of their investment…” will become uncomfortably close to the truth.

We’ve shared key dates well ahead of time to give customers time needed to adjust, but that does not mean we’re taking away options.

The latter part of this statement goes beyond disingenuous; it’s arrant nonsense. Of course Autodesk is taking away options. Autodesk has been taking away options for years, and this has only accelerated. As of right now, I can no longer buy an Autodesk software perpetual license. I no longer have that option, which I had before. How is that not taking away options?

Fact #2 – Our customers have a choice. When you subscribe to Autodesk software, you have flexible terms (monthly, quarterly, annually), and multiple access points (single user, multi-user and shared). Now Autodesk customers can get the software they need for a year or a month, in ways that are more convenient and better for their business.

Well, I guess the first sentence is kind of true in a sense. Long-term customers (that’s most of us) do have the choice between paying merely a lot  more per annum for an Autodesk license via annual or multi-year rental, or paying vastly  more by doing it monthly. Suggesting this is better for our business is, of course, laughable.

Customers can buy and use it for as long as they want and can match their subscription type with the demands of their workforce. When the workforce expands, they can ramp up, or in quieter periods, they can scale it back. In short, subscribing gives you flexibility and predictability.

This is true; rental is  the best option for some customers under some circumstances. It is good that Autodesk has made that option available for the small minority of customers in that situation. However, it is the opposite of flexibility to make it the only  option.

When it comes to value, lower upfront costs make our software more accessible and allow you to try more tools without the risk of a large upfront expenditure. Plus, you only pay when you need it. This is a big deal. Some of our customers prefer this cost is considered an operating expense, allowing you to bill the cost of the software back to the client or project. And if you subscribe for a longer, multi-year term, you lock-in your rate. Combine that with flexibility in the length of contracts and you may find that you’re actually paying less.

Nice attempt at spin here, but ultimately it’s nonsense. Except for the minority of customers who need that level of flexibility, rental is not about paying less. If it was, Autodesk wouldn’t be doing this. Pushing Autodesk customers on to rental is all about trying to extract more  funds from us for the same thing, not less. Suggesting otherwise is disingenuous.

If rental really was  better value, Autodesk would give its customers the choice between perpetual and rental and let the market decide. But wait! Autodesk did exactly that a few years ago, and the market decided; the rental experiment failed miserably. Autodesk knows  it has to make rental compulsory because otherwise most customers wouldn’t go for it. Yet in a painful piece of patent paralogy, it paints this compulsion as a selfless act of customer service.

Fact #3 – Software as a service is essential for technological evolution. It allows for continual and consistent innovation and support. The software will get better, faster and more seamless in the way you use it. The experience is customized to you or your organization, and provides a simplified way to access and deploy software, manage your users and collaborate on projects. With this new way of delivering software, everyone will always have the latest, most up-to-date Autodesk tools available.

Even ignoring the conflation of software as a service (SaaS) and rental, the first sentence is breathtaking in its audacity. It goes beyond spin, beyond disingenuity, into the realms of the surreal. No, SaaS is not essential for technological evolution. The whole history of computing screams that loud and clear. Autodesk wouldn’t exist if the first sentence were true. It isn’t remotely close to true. To be generous, it’s a terminological inexactitude.

Reading beyond the first sentence, there’s a lot of wonderfully utopian wishful thinking that nobody familiar with Autodesk would believe for a second. It’s shown up for the other-worldly spin that it is by Autodesk’s years-long ongoing decline in maintenance value-for-money and its woeful attempts at trying to make continual updates work (which you probably don’t want anyway).

It’s not just Autodesk saying this; the entire software industry is moving in this direction. Frankly, design and engineering software has been a bit slow to make this change. But the benefits for end-users are clear, and it’s just a matter of time before all vendors have similar ways of buying.

While it’s true that various software companies are moving at least partly towards SaaS and rental of conventional software (some more successfully than others), it’s not at all a uniform industry-wide position. It’s disingenuous to imply that going all-rental is already almost universal and Autodesk is just catching up. As for the “benefits for end users” being clear, I guess all those customers who like paying lots more per year for their software will agree.

Yes, it’s likely that many vendors, maybe even most of them, will have similar ways of buying in the next few years. No, it won’t be all of them. No, not all vendors will make rental compulsory for new licenses as Autodesk has done. Some of Autodesk’s competitors (e.g. Bentley, Bricsys) will continue to provide their customers with the ability to purchase perpetual licenses. The law of give-the-customer-what-they-want-or-die tells me that those competitors are much more likely to thrive than Autodesk.

What does this mean? It means that millions of you are already seeing the benefits of shifting to subscription and are making that choice voluntarily.

Voluntarily? Really? I can’t imagine anyone typing that statement in that context without either wincing (if they have any self-respect) or laughing (if they don’t). Strewth!

So who won the Battle of the Bullshit? Nobody. First, Bentley lost. Then Autodesk put in a supreme effort, summoned up a steaming stack of sophistry, and lost more.

Raise your game, people; we’re not all stupid out here. If you can’t support your argument with the truth, then your argument isn’t a good one and you need to rethink it.

Battle of the Bullshit part 1 – Bentley’s terminological inexactitudes

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I note with interest the blog post Not so fast Bentley: Separating fact from fiction by Carl White, Senior Director of Business Models at Autodesk. In this, he responds to statements made by Bentley in its press release Bentley Announces Autodesk License Upgrade Program, stating:

Earlier this week, Bentley announced an “upgrade program” for Autodesk customers. We found the offer to be disingenuous and mischaracterizes what Autodesk offers our customers.

OK, let’s have a look at what Carl is complaining about. Here’s one Bentley statement that could be considered questionable:

For consideration by owners of Autodesk perpetual licenses facing Autodesk’s imminent deadline for the write-off of the future value of their investment, Bentley Systems is offering recovery of the value otherwise subject to forfeit.

Carl has a point here. The “imminent deadline for the write-off of the future value” line is presented as fact, but at this stage it’s not true. While perpetual license owners may legitimately fear for the long-term value of their investments, there is nothing subject to an imminent deadline other than the end of the ability to purchase further perpetual licenses. Likewise, the “subject to forfeit” thing is a scaremongering phrase that deserves Carl’s “disingenuous” label. Autodesk isn’t subjecting anything to forfeit right now. Anything else dubious in Bentley’s statement?

Bentley Systems considers purchases of perpetual licenses to be long-term investments by our users, so we continually innovate to increase their value. We are glad to now extend this ‘future-proofing’ to Autodesk license owners who otherwise will lose value in their applications.

That’s all pretty reasonable but the “…will lose value in their applications” part is questionable. We might suspect that will happen, but we don’t know  it yet. Perhaps “…may  lose value in their applications” would be more reasonable. Bentley also quotes a customer as saying:

Autodesk continually sets deadlines forcing us to give up our perpetual license for an annual subscription.

Now while it’s accurate to say that Autodesk continually sets deadlines and has certainly been very heavy-handed in its years-in-the-making push to rental (currently called subscription in Autodeskspeak), it has not yet forced customers to give up perpetual licenses. Those of us with perpetual licenses have not  been forced to give them up. We can continue to use them. Bentley shouldn’t use inaccurate statements like this in its marketing, even when quoting others.

In summary, Carl is right. Bentley has  been disingenuous and deserves a slap for it.

If only Carl had just stuck to the sort of analysis I made above, I could have ended my own analysis right there. Unfortunately, he didn’t. He couldn’t resist the urge to add his own “facts”. My next post will put these under the same kind of scrutiny.