This post originally contained assertions about Autodesk’s financials that were based on flawed understanding, and has been removed. It’s not really possible to delete things from the Internet, so if you ever want to relive the joy of seeing me get things spectacularly wrong, feel free to use the Internet Archive to do so.
Somebody at Autodesk really does seem to have it in for Bentley right now. I thought they were friends? Oh well, times change.
Autodesk has launched a campaign to promote its BIM offerings for transportation projects and is promoting this via emails to existing customers, all of which is fair enough. It’s suggesting BIM is a better tool than traditional CAD for such projects. Another reasonable claim, so it’s appropriate for us to evaluate the arguments and examine the options.
What did Autodesk decide to call its campaign? Beyond AutoCAD? Beyond CAD? To BIM and Beyond?
None of the above. It’s Beyond Bentley.
Huh? You may have noticed I’m keen on alliteration, but still, huh? What does Bentley have to do with this? Most Autodesk CAD customers are going to know and care nothing about Bentley products. So why mention them at all? The headline is “Move beyond Bentley to Autodesk, the makers of BIM”. The strong implication is:
Bentley only does traditional CAD. You should use BIM instead, and that means you need Autodesk.
However, I believe many Autodesk customers will think like this instead:
Autodesk seems very concerned about this Bentley mob. I wonder what they’re offering that has the Big A so worried? Bentley must be a big player in this area. I’ve been considering developing an Autodesk exit strategy anyway because of the forced rental thing and I’ve heard Bentley sells perpetual licenses. I must go check them out!
Those customers who do check out Bentley will learn that despite Autodesk’s implication, Bentley do in fact provide BIM products, and quite a few products specifically for transportation. I have no idea if Bentley’s BIM and transportation products are any better or worse than Autodesk’s offerings, but I do know you shouldn’t take either vendor’s word for it, including anything they say in webinars. Find out for yourself with a hands-on evaluation. Because BIM isn’t something you just pop in and out of, make sure you include long-term licensing costs into your calculations.
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.
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.
This post originally contained assertions about Autodesk’s financials that were based on flawed understanding, and has been removed. It’s not really possible to delete things from the Internet, so if you ever want to relive the joy of seeing me get things spectacularly wrong, feel free to use the Internet Archive to do so.
I just got this email. Maybe you did too:
Dear Christopher [sic],
I have some important information to share with you.
As we continue our transition to a fully subscription-based business, we remain committed to providing you greater value, more flexibility, and a simpler way to access the Autodesk software you need.
On August 1, 2016, we will introduce Autodesk industry collections and end the sale of Autodesk Design & Creation Suites.
Industry collections will provide you access to a wide selection of the essential Autodesk software for your profession. They will offer immediate access to new technology, cloud services, and several licensing options. In short, industry collections will give you the freedom to access the software products you want, when you want them. Learn more about the industry collections here.
To make way for industry collections, we will end the sale of new Design & Creation Suite subscriptions and perpetual licenses after July 31, 2016.
If you wish to purchase more Design & Creation Suites before August 1, 2016, we encourage you to subscribe now and rest assured that we will provide you with a simple way to switch to an industry collection in the future, if you so choose. If you prefer, you can purchase perpetual licenses of a Design & Creation Suite with a maintenance plan before August 1.
If you wish to continue receiving updates, support, and other benefits for your Design & Creation Suites, you can do so for as long as you continue your existing subscription or maintenance plan.
To learn more about Autodesk industry collections and options for switching your subscription (if you choose to do so) please read our Frequently Asked Questions. [I fixed the email’s URL which didn’t point to the FAQ].
I want to thank you for being an Autodesk customer, and I hope you share my excitement about these important enhancements to our offerings.
Yours sincerely,
Jeff Wright
Vice President, Customer Engagement
Autodesk, Inc.
No, I have no idea why I’m Christopher. No, I have no idea why Autodesk is so averse to using initial capitals for its product names. It’s confusing and silly.
As far as I can tell, industry collections are just renamed/combined Suites with a few things shuffled around a bit. If Autodesk were still in the business of selling software I might be interested in examining the pros and cons of moving to industry collections. Autodesk isn’t (or very soon won’t be), so I’m not interested. As it is, the annual cost is out of the question (unless I were actually going to use a decent number of the included products, which I wouldn’t). That’s to be expected, because the whole point of trying to push people onto desktop subscription (Autodeskspeak for rental) is to extract much larger amounts of cash over a given period of time.
Sorry Jeff, I don’t share your excitement. Thanks, but no thanks.
In response to Shaan’s variant on the old “if you question the value of any change you must be a Luddite” argument, I was going to write a lemming-based parody. I didn’t, mainly because I didn’t want to perpetuate the lemming mass-suicide misconception. Instead, I’ll answer the point more directly.
Autodesk will acheive better success in convincing customers about Cloud computing and other concepts by actively and interactively engaging with them. Addressing their specific and legitimate concerns has a chance of success if the concepts have merit. Insultingly likening customers to allegedly stupid animals isn’t going to convince anyone.
Besides, the point has little validity. Armadillos have 20 species, are currently dramatically increasing their territory in North America, and have been around rather longer than humans. Maybe we should wait until we’ve been around a few tens of millions of years longer before we get too cocky about how terrible those stupid armadillos are at surviving.
Edit: Shaan has responded to this post on his own blog, deleted my reply and closed comments. He seems rather upset about something.
Edit: …and has now restored my comment and opened comments again.
As reported by Joe Francica (via WorldCAD Access), Carl Bass has confirmed, in a somewhat ambiguous way, that his Cloud-only vision rules at Autodesk.
I do believe that everything is moving to the cloud.
But…
There are a lot of applications that will [still] be done on the desktop. Whether Autodesk does it or not, I can’t think of a single function that won’t necessarily be done in the cloud.
Still a bit confused? Me too. It’s not clear where this leaves his underlings who have been rushing to contradict Carl’s earlier statements by unambiguously reassuring customers that Autodesk would continue to provide desktop software. Will they now come out with “clarifying” statements that fall into line with whatever it is Carl’s saying here? I doubt it, that would be just too embarrassing. I suspect we’ll see things go very quiet on this subject for a while.
Now we know (or do we?) it’s full steam ahead with desktop dismantlement, what about all those Cloud concerns? Carl does the standard Cloud PR thing of “addressing” that question by restating some of the concerns, ignoring others, but not coming up with answers for any of them other than expressing a vague hope that some of them will go away:
Foremost in people’s mind is security, privacy, reliability, confidential information. Some of those concerns will fall by the wayside.
Asked to come up with a compelling reason for customers to embrace the Cloud, he didn’t:
In many cases, for anyone to move to any technology platform you have to do more than what people have today. So what’s the compelling event? I think what you will see in the cloud is that it will look like every other disruptive technology. Some people will downplay it. Some will poo poo it.
More of the same, then. It’s disruptive, but people with legitimate concerns about that disruption are just naysayers to ignore. With an attitude like that, the chances of Autodesk taking its dubious customer base with it into Cloudy Heaven are slim indeed.
Caveat: I do not have access to the entire interview, so the opinions expressed here are based only on what I do have. It’s quite possible that Carl had something useful to say that didn’t appear in the article.
I was going to ignore this subject, but I’ve changed my mind because it allows me to post something positive about Autodesk. After all, I do try to post positive things; it’s hardly my fault that Autodesk has a habit of making it difficult.
In upFront eZine #756, Autodesk’s Andrew Anagnost (or was it Clay Helm?) had the following to say, and must say I agree totally with the first sentence:
The best evidence is how we have behaved historically. When we included Mechanical Desktop with Inventor, the media complained that we were killing Mechanical Desktop; you were probably one of them. But we didn’t; we came out with six, seven more releases of it, completely free.
So, MDT users, you’re the poster child for how Autodesk looks after its customers. You’re also evidence for how wrong those nasty media naysayers can be. So here’s your opportunity to offer your gratitude to Autodesk for looking after you so well and giving you all that completely free software. Or perhaps you’re the user of another Autodesk product that fell out of fashion or was deemed a technological dead end (like desktop software, apparently). Let’s hear your good news stories about how well Autodesk treated you and your investment.
If you don’t want to add a comment, there’s a poll over on the right. I look forward to seeing the “Brilliantly” option show a near-100% rating!
Ever wondered why Autodesk is putting so much emphasis on social media these days? Why AutoCAD needs Facebook and Twitter commands? It’s because Autodesk pays social media consultants lots of money to tell them about the importance of social media, and how to be social and media-ish. In this video, one of those consultants explains the process:
Does Autodesk intend to move all its applications exclusively to the Cloud? That is, online only and no longer available on the desktop? Autodesk people who say yes:
Carl Bass, CEO
Phil Bernstein, Vice President, Building Industry Strategy and Relations
Scott Sheppard, Autodesk Labs Software Development Manager (with private Cloud caveat)
Autodesk people who say no:
There’s huge irony in the way Clay (or Andrew) attempts to paint the shafting of MDT customers as a we’ll-look-after-you example, but I think that’s a deliberate distraction tactic; other than this comment I’m going to ignore it. I’m ignoring, too, the spin about informal interviews, misinterpretation and the like. There’s a black-and-white contradiction here. Autodesk either intends to move all its applications online and away from the desktop, or it doesn’t.
Two men say they’re Jesus
One of ’em must be wrong
Dire Straits – Industrial Disease
So who do we believe? Last time I looked at an org chart, the CEO trumped the lot. The buck stops with Carl. So why is he letting his underlings go around undermining his Cloudy Vision? I see the following possibilities:
None of these options makes Autodesk look good. Is there an option 4? Feel free to speculate. Ultimately, the only chance of sorting this out is by Carl Bass himself coming out with a definitive and spin-free statement. Even then, will anyone believe him?
I have lost all trust I had in you
Opeth – To Rid The Disease
I can agree with one thing Clay (or Andrew) had to say; you will get the best idea of what’s to come by looking at Autodesk’s history. So if you’re concerned about Autodesk pushing you onto the Cloud against your will, don’t be. Instead, be afraid. Very afraid.
As I indicated in May, Autodesk will be increasing the cost of upgrades to 70% of the full retail cost of a new license. This renders it totally pointless upgrading Autodesk software at all, which is obviously Autodesk’s intention. This change probably won’t affect many people, as those who have chosen to stick with Autodesk despite everything have already been effectively forced onto Subscription. Anyway, here’s the confirmation from Autodesk:
In early 2013 Autodesk will simplify the current upgrade pricing model, which may affect pricing and/or eligibility for upgrades. Autodesk is providing advance notice to help ease the transition and ensure that customers have enough time to plan and budget for any impact to your organization.
As part of this change, Autodesk will be simplifying upgrades into a single offering available for licenses that are 1-6 versions old at a discount of 30% off new license SRP*. Under the new upgrade program, product versions 2007-2012 are eligible for upgrade pricing and product versions older than 2007 will no longer be eligible for upgrade pricing on our standard pricelists. Our records show you may have one or more licenses that may be impacted by these changes.
Autodesk is making this policy change to better align with the needs and buying behaviors of our customers. Many Autodesk customers choose to use Autodesk Subscription as their preferred method of maintaining their Autodesk Software.
That last paragraph is just embarrassing. It steps over the line that separates spin from total bullshit. The person who wrote it must have been either cringing (if they have any kind of ethical values) or laughing (if they don’t). The time of Autodesk being straight with its customers is now so far in the past that few customers will be able to remember those days. Those of us who do can only sadly shake our heads.
Following up on its acquisition of Socialcam (which was then abandoned by 50 million users), Autodesk has acquired social media platform Qontext from Indian company Pramati. What exactly is this? I have no idea. I tried to find out by reading the Pramati site, but it’s so heavily obscured in trendy but vague corporatespeak it’s hard to work out anything firm. I played Buzzword Bingo while reading the site and won within seconds. Maybe the Autodesk statement clarifies things?
“Mobile, cloud and social computing are dramatically changing the way engineers, designers and architects work. The addition of the Qontext technology to the Autodesk portfolio will lead to new technology innovations that help our customers embrace these disruptive technologies and leverage them for competitive advantage,” said Amar Hanspal, Autodesk senior vice president of information modeling and platform products. “It was great to work with the team at Pramati who have demonstrated a great capability in incubating disruptive businesses.”
Well, that’s cleared that up, then. Apparently, Autodesk has bought a bunch of buzzwords. Must have been running short of them or something. I hope it was worth it.
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.
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.
Autodesk has produced a 2-minute video explaining the features of the new Help system in AutoCAD 2013 that I recently panned. As you might expect, it’s kind of upbeat and chirpy, but the fact that Autodesk feels the need to provide a tutorial on how to use Help says it all, really. Whatever, it may be useful to you, so here it is. It’s hosted on the Autodesk site, unlike many other Autodesk videos (and my own, to be fair), so those of you who have YouTube blocked at work may still be able to watch it.
If you’re having trouble watching the tutorial, don’t panic. I expect Autodesk will soon produce another tutorial explaining how to use the tutorial explaining how to use Help explaining how to use the product to actually do work.
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?”
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.