Category Archives: Web Stuff

CAD on the Cloud according to Autodesk’s Jim Quanci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links to part 1 and part 3.

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links to part 2 and part 3.

Cloud discussions generating interest

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This is one of those self-indulgent posts you probably hate, so feel free to skip it and just read the more interesting stuff.

Last month, my site statistics went through the roof. Here’s a graph that shows the number of unique visitors and the number of visits per month since I started the blog in February 2008. Page views, hits (a pretty useless statistic) and bandwidth all spiked in a similar fashion.

I remember being very surprised when over 1,500 people visited my blog in the first month, as I would have been very happy with a few hundred readers. I was astonished when more than 5,000 people visited here on the second month. Last month, there were 30,921 unique visitors who visited 58,342 times, viewing 129,206 pages. I’m sure there are other CAD blogs with many times the traffic, but for this blog, October’s numbers were crazy. The mentions on upFront.eZine didn’t hurt, but the daily statistics were already high and didn’t show a huge leap afterwards.

So what’s going on? Well, just posting anything rather than little or nothing (as has happened here from time to time) obviously helps a lot, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s the Cloud generating interest. While it might be tempting for Cloud proponents to associate interest with excitement, that would be a mistake. Judging from the comments and poll responses here and elsewhere, I’m convinced that many more people are interested in CAD in the Cloud because they are concerned about it, they fear it, they even hate it. Given that atmosphere, I think CAD in the Cloud is going to be a very hard sell.

All major Autodesk products on the Cloud by 2014?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud concerns – tie-in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Wikipedia)

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

Cloud benefits – collaboration, with Autodesk’s Tal Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud concerns – security

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OK, this one’s a biggie. For many, security is the biggest Cloud turn-off. Drawings are valuable property, and the thought of putting them up on the Internet is enough to give some people nervous twitches. I see two major worries:

Is my property safe from destruction?
Is it safe from unauthorised access (copying, modification, theft)?

There are at least a couple of ways of looking at this:

If you’re worried about data destruction, back up! You should be doing that anyway, regardless of where you store your stuff. Most people are comfortable enough with Internet banking, or at least using a credit card to make Internet purchases. The security of a major Cloud infrastructure provider is likely to be better than that of your own in-house infrastructure. It’s certainly a lot better than email, and almost everybody emails drawings about the place without even thinking about it. Plus, you can use Cloud security features to restrict access to your drawings in ways that you have no hope of doing if you’re emailing your drawings to other parties. So what are you worried about?
Isn’t one of the supposed benefits of Cloud storage that backups are all taken care of for me? Putting my designs in the Cloud doesn’t remove any risk if I also need to store my own backups. However, it adds extra and unnecessary risk. Amazon (Autodesk’s Cloud infrastructure provider) irretrievably lost some of its customers’ Cloud data just a few months ago. There are many, many instances of supposedly secure sites being infiltrated by hackers. You’d have to be very unlucky to have somebody that wants your designs intercept your email, but a static site that is known to contain millions of dollars worth of drawings is a huge and tempting target. Putting your designs on the Internet isn’t like locking your diamonds in a bank vault, it’s like putting them on the dashboard of your car, parking it in the seediest part of town, then hoping nobody breaks a window. Sure, you might be lucky, but why take the risk?

Which side do you fall on? Is Cloud security a dealbreaker or no big deal?

Cloud benefits – processing power

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud concerns – downtime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud benefits – collaboration

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

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

This blog is just wonderful, apparently

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One of the more interesting things about running a blog that is visited by a reasonable number of people is the fan mail. My immense modesty prevents me from keeping visible the thousands of positive comments that are posted here, but I thought I would give you an idea of the sort of praise I receive (and Akismet hides) on a daily basis. This small sample is all from the past 48 hours, with my comments in blue:

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Autodesk Cloud – don’t panic, business as usual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Move along, people, nothing to see here.

Rearranging the deckchairs

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As you have probably noticed, I have changed the theme used on this blog. You may see some more minor changes to the layout over the next few days. If there’s anything you don’t like about the new theme, please say so.

AutoCAD 2012 – Downloading the trial is a trial

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Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.

Let’s say you’re trying to download some software and it insists on first installing some intermediary download manager. Do you think, “Great, this will make my life easier, things are bound to go quickly and smoothly now”? No, didn’t think so. How about when it’s by Akamai? Does that make you feel more confident? No, nor me.

If I download stuff without a manager, it just works. Sometimes it’s slow, but it works. If I use a general-purpose download manager that’s part of my browser, or one I chose to install and use (e.g. Free Download Manager), things generally go very well. If there’s a direct download link to use, success and a very quick download are almost guaranteed. But it seems that every time some company wants to force a download manager on me, something bad happens. Now maybe I’m only remembering the failures and forgetting the successes, but I’m absolutely sure that download reliability is way, way poorer when companies insist on inflicting their download managers on me. I’ve had issues with them at home with a straightforward ADSL connection, and I’ve had no end of problems with them at work in a proxy server environment. Even when they work, the download speed is generally significantly poorer than when I use something like Free Download Manager.

The latest in a long line of download manager difficulties is this morning’s attempted download of the AutoCAD 2012 trial. Why, as a Subscription customer, am I downloading the trial? Why don’t I just get it from the Subscription Center? Because Autodesk hasn’t got around to putting 2012 on there yet. Paying customers come some way down the priority list, apparently. I hope it’s just a temporary delay, because last year here in Australia the delivery of AutoCAD 2011 software to customers was a complete debacle that took some weeks to sort out.

I went to the AutoCAD 2012 Trial page yesterday. At the time, it said 2012 wasn’t available to me, but by this morning that has been fixed. So I went through the fill-in-your-details stuff, and was told to Click “run” or “open” to start the installer. There was no “run” available, so I clicked on the link that said Don’t see the installer? Try reopening it. I got a Security Warning dialog with the option to Run something called installer.exe from client.akamai.com.

Now at this point I’m getting pretty dubious about this process, as I’m being asked to put faith in an undocumented and generically named executable that does who-knows-what, from a company that has messed things up on numerous past occasions. Call me an inveterate optimist, but I crossed my fingers and picked Run anyway. Then I got another Security Warning dialog to run Akamai Installer. Fingers still crossed, I hit Run again. A small Connecting… progress panel appeared, which almost immediately got a quarter of the way though, then threw up an Install Error. Can’t say I was surprised, really. I went through the process several times and couldn’t find a simple download link anywhere. I gave up on this and decided to try later at home.

At home, free of any proxy server complications, I had another go at it. This time, running installer.exe seemed to work, the installing-the-installer-to-download-the-installer-installer progress bar got all the way to the end, and the download allegedly started. A progress bar appeared on Autodesk’s download page, purporting to show the progress. Unlike a proper download manager, there is no mention anywhere of the size of the file, the amount downloaded so far, or the rate at which data is being transferred, so this bar is all I have to go on. In the past, a large AutoCAD download has taken 20 to 30 minutes using Free Download Manager. As I type, 32 minutes into the alleged download, have a guess at how far the progress bar has moved. Half way, perhaps? A bit less? Nope, it hasn’t moved at all. Not one pixel. My browser is sitting there, alternating between saying Waiting for 127.0.0.1 and Transferring data from 127.0.0.1, but otherwise appearing to do nothing. A brief speed test tells me that my ADSL is running at pretty normal speed while this is going on, so it’s my guess that nothing useful is really happening.

Akamai download manger fail. Again.

Autodesk isn’t the only culprit here. There are other companies who insist on throwing this sort of unnecessary complication into the lives of their customers and potential customers. For example, Adobe is doing its best to make Flash unpopular by inflicting unpopular and bloated download managers on its users.

I know Autodesk will say that it has to use a content delivery network like that provided by Akamai in order to prevent server bottlenecks when providing large files to lots of people. I can see that is a legitimate problem, but these download managers are a clumsy and inappropriate solution. There are countless other places on the Internet that don’t do this. Most downloads I perform just use a simple link. Guess what? They just work.

Companies, don’t leverage your technology to simplify and enhance my seamlessly integrated user experience with your intrusive download managers. Just provide a simple link to the file the downloader is trying to download. It’s not rocket science, so don’t try to make it overcomplicated. If you really, really insist on offering a download manager, make sure it’s optional and there’s a real link available. Please.

Edit: Thanks to a comment from Helper, I have successfully downloaded AutoCAD 2012 using Opera. Downloading and installing Opera was very quick, and Autodesk/Akamai doesn’t support it, so a real link is provided instead. Opera’s built-in download features are showed me exactly what was going on, and it took about 45 minutes to download the 64-bit version. Doing the same initial steps again with the 32-bit version, I copied and pasted the link into Free Download Manager, rather than letting Opera do the download. This time, it took about 14 minutes. Awesome!

AutoCAD WS contest poll added

2 Replies

Thanks to all entrants in the AutoCAD WS contest. I have now closed the entries and added a poll (see right). Although I did state that there would be no prize for this contest, I have some exciting news! I am happy to announce that thanks to an exclusive* arrangement with Autodesk, the winner of this contest will receive a free** copy of AutoCAD!*** I will keep the poll open until I feel like closing it or the entry I like best is winning, whichever is the most convenient.

* Exclusive to people with Internet access.
Excluding any Internet access expenses the winner may incur.
* AutoCAD WS. If the winner is unable to use AutoCAD WS due to iThing insufficiency, browser-based access to Project Butterfly will be provided instead.

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Category Archives: Web Stuff

CAD on the Cloud according to Autodesk’s Jim Quanci

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AutoCAD 2012 – Downloading the trial is a trial

AutoCAD WS contest poll added

* Exclusive to people with Internet access.
Excluding any Internet access expenses the winner may incur.
* AutoCAD WS. If the winner is unable to use AutoCAD WS due to iThing insufficiency, browser-based access to Project Butterfly will be provided instead.

* Exclusive to people with Internet access. ** Excluding any Internet access expenses the winner may incur. *** AutoCAD WS. If the winner is unable to use AutoCAD WS due to iThing insufficiency, browser-based access to Project Butterfly will be provided instead.

* Exclusive to people with Internet access.
Excluding any Internet access expenses the winner may incur.
* AutoCAD WS. If the winner is unable to use AutoCAD WS due to iThing insufficiency, browser-based access to Project Butterfly will be provided instead.