Tag Archives: Autodesk

Autodesk not listening? The response, part 1.

While attending the AutoCAD 2010 launch today, I took the opportunity to interview three Autodesk people: Eric Stover, Jon Page and Shaan Hurley. I raised the issue of Autodesk being seen as not listening to its customers, and was given a very comprehensive response. Here is the first of two parts of that interview.

YouTube link.

Disclosure: Transport, accommodation and some meals were provided by Autodesk.

Why do you think Autodesk isn’t listening?

I frequently see people remark that Autodesk doesn’t listen to its customers. I’ve made that remark myself in relation to certain specific items, most recently the botched discussion group update. Of the six Rate Autodesk polls, the Listening to its customers poll shows easily the biggest bias towards the wrong end of the graph.

Now I happen to know that Autodesk goes to some lengths to find out what its customers are thinking (more on that later), but still this feeling of being ignored persists among its customers. Why is this so? Why do so many of you hold this view? I have my own thoughts about this, but right now I’m more interested in yours.

I’d like to see some examples that make you think that Autodesk doesn’t care about your viewpoints, wishes and desires. If you can suggest ways in which Autodesk could do things better, let’s hear them. On the other hand, if you believe that Autodesk is listening, please provide examples that show that to be the case.

I will be asking some Autodesk people the same question very soon, in addition to any questions you pose in my Ask Autodesk a question post (more questions, please!). I will report back on the answers, so it will be interesting to compare your comments with what the Autodesk people have to say.

(Don’t) Ask Autodesk a question

If you had a real live Autodesk development person standing in front of you right now (an AutoCAD Product Manager, for example) and were allowed to ask one question, what would it be?

Please add a comment here with your question. I would ask that you keep your question civil and reasonably concise (one or two sentences), and bear in mind that the development person in front of you isn’t going to have a useful answer to policy questions about pricing, license agreements, customer service and so on. Other than that, anything goes, so let’s have ’em.

I can’t promise that your question will get answered, but I’ll see what I can do.

Note: comments are now closed, as this post keeps getting mistaken for an ongoing mechanism for asking Autodesk questions.

Adding Heidi

Although I want to keep my list of links reasonably compact, it should not have taken until now to add the AutoCAD Insider blog of Autodesk’s Heidi Hewett to the list. Heidi’s idea of going through the AutoCAD alphabet is a great one, and I wish I had thought of it.

blog nauseam has been light on for AutoCAD tips and information lately. Although that’s going to change for the better soon, there’s plenty of that kind of stuff on Heidi’s blog to keep you amused in the meantime. It’s useful stuff for all AutoCAD users, explained well.

Oh, and Heidi, the Boundary command was (kind of) added in Release 12, except it was called Bpoly at the time. It was renamed to Boundary in Release 13. The Bpoly command lives on to this day, doing exactly the same as Boundary.

Has Carol left the building?

We all know Carol Bartz has taken on the challenge of leading Yahoo!, but does that mean she’s no longer with Autodesk? I would have thought she would have had her hands more than full with her new job, but I haven’t seen any mention of her giving up her Autodesk position as Executive Chairman of the Board. The Autodesk web site still has her listed in that position, so I guess she’s still there. She’s on various other boards and councils too, so maybe she’s sticking around at Autodesk long-term?

How well cooked is the average major new AutoCAD feature these days?

I’ve now closed the poll that asks this question, and the results show a typical bell-curve shape with the peak clearly on “Half-baked”. There is a slight bias to the bottom end, but not a significant one.

This result doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve seen and heard a lot of user comments to that effect, and I’ve made such comments myself.  I’m not saying that this poll is definitive proof of anything, but it sits pretty well with my perception of what AutoCAD users generally think.

Now I’d like you to consider a related question. If we accept for the sake of argument that the average major new AutoCAD feature is half-baked, is that necessarily a bad thing? There are some valid arguments that can be made for pushing out features before they are complete. I’ll examine the pros and cons from my perspective later, but for now I’d like to hear from you.  What do you think?

Leech marketing by IMSI – Part 2 – A/CAD

The IMSI free CAD product that it is putting up against AutoCAD LT has a very interesting name: A/CAD LT*. Does A/CAD sound familiar to anyone? I vaguely seem to remember some other CAD product with a very similar name. Hmm, let me think, it has a main program file called acad.exe and many other support files called acad.something, it has had its name abbreviated to ACAD by its users for decades… No, sorry, the name somehow eludes me.

I’m not a trademark lawyer (or any other sort), but here’s what I can tell from a quick glance at the USPTO site. It appears that Autodesk had ACAD registered as a trademark in 1986 with a first use in 1983, and that the registration was abandoned in 1987. It was registered again in 1988 and abandoned again in 1992. That may be an unfortunate lapse. I wonder what else may have slipped through the cracks?

Now there is an ACAD logo design registered to a certain ACAD Corporation of California (possibly unrelated), and a trademark application from IMSI, not yet approved. IMSI owns, and is actively using, the acadnow.com domain name. The IMSI advertising materials show the word A/CAD with a little TM after it, which indicates that they are claiming that they own the trademark, but it is not registered. The A/CAD packaging is, to me, rather too close to the style of the AutoCAD packaging. There’s even a Big Red A. Oh, sorry, it’s actually a big white A on a red background. That makes all the difference.

Given Autodesk’s history in using the courts to chase quarry as elusive as an unregisterable file extension that it never actually owned, and having a legal prod at competitors who dare to use orange rectangles in their marketing, what do you think are the chances that Autodesk’s hyperactive legal department is going to let this one slip by without a fight?

IMSI, if you’re going to compete, great. All power to you. But compete, don’t leech; it looks awful. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

While you might get some cheap** publicity (including from me), I’m afraid you miss out on the underdog sympathy factor when it looks like you’re actively trying to get sued. Finally, did you consider what happens when somebody tries to find your A/CAD product using Google? Didn’t think so.

* A/CAD LT Express is the full name of the currently marketed version.
** Excluding legal fees.

Leech marketing by IMSI – Part 1 – AU

A while back, I received an email from IMSI, makers of TurboCAD. The information I gained from that email is now public knowledge thanks to an advertisement in AUGI World and other exposure, so I guess I can let you all in on it. Here it is:

Everyone knows AutoCAD is a fixture in our industry.

But is AutoCAD LT? When is the last time AutoCAD LT has really been pushed?

And how about working with Google SketchUp? Doesn’t seem like Autodesk is too keen on that.

Please join us for a special FIRST LOOK of a new CAD application — that is sure to surprise.

Email for appointment [removed]@imsidesign.com or call 1.415.[removed].

FIRST LOOK slots on Tuesday Dec 2nd through Thursday Dec 4th at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Regards,
Bob Mayer
Chief Operating Officer, IMSI/Design, LLC
Tel: 415-[removed]
Cell: 415-[removed]

P.S. For those that can participate, there will be a business card drawing for a Dell laptop — of course, loaded with our new CAD application. For all others, evaluation copies will be provided.

The date and location may seem strangely familar to those of you planning to attend Autodesk University in a week or so. So an Autodesk competitor is using the biggest Autodesk event of the year to market its wares.

In one way, this idea makes perfect sense. There will be a lot of Autodesk customers at that event, so that’s the place to be if you want to steal some.

In another way, it makes no sense at all. The Autodesk customers at AU are likely to be the most loyal customers there are. They have just invested a decent slab of money in attending a training event, one which is very well run, very enjoyable and generally likely to make them feel good about Autodesk. Yes, some of those customers may be disgruntled about some things, but I would wager that the average Autodesk customer is about as gruntled while attending AU as they are ever likely to be. Also, the average AU attendee has a very full calendar and is going to be struggling to find the time to visit a hotel room or whatever to look at something they can download anyway.

There’s another way in which this kind of thing makes no sense; tagging onto somebody else’s event is not a good look. It’s tacky when Bentley does it, it’s tacky when Autodesk does it, and it’s tacky when IMSI does it. Tacky, tacky, tacky. I’m happy to see competition for Autodesk from anybody; ultimately it can only be a good thing for Autodesk customers. But leech marketing? No thanks.

What a crock!

Just when I thought it wasn’t possible for my Autodesk discussion group experience to get any worse, it has. Much worse.

I stated before that in the 15 November update, some Einstein decided it would be fun to copy my private work email address over the top of my public user ID, automatically making it visible to all and sundry in many places. I should note at this point that publishing somebody’s email address without consent is illegal in some locations, including here in Australia. So to the best of my knowledge (not that I’m a lawyer), Autodesk is not only perpetrating a grossly irresponsible breach of privacy, it’s also breaking the law.

Attempting to fix this myself failed, because of some new introduced bug in the login system. When changing my user ID from my email address to “Steve Johnson”, the screen falsely claimed that the data entered was invalid. I have reported that here, on the newsgroups themselves, and as an official top-priority Subscription support call.

During one of my user ID fix-up attempts, a popup screen asked if I was changing the password (I wasn’t, I was trying to change the user ID) for user “Steve Johnson” or user “my email address”. I tried both in turn, but neither worked. That got me thinking that maybe the update may have created two versions of me; one with the correct name and one with my email address, with the latter being associated with my discussion group messages. So I tried changing the email address one to a name that wasn’t my email address and wasn’t Steve Johnson (SteveJohnson-blognauseam), in the hope that this would at least remove my email address from public view.

I was pleasantly surprised when this change was accepted, but my elation was short-lived. The change process logged me off automatically, and then refused to let me log back on. I can’t log on as SteveJohnson-blognauseam, I can’t log on as Steve Johnson, and I can’t log on as my email address. All attempts are refused as invalid. I can’t log on to chase up my Subscription support call. I can’t log on to erase my email address from the body of a discussion group message, which was automatically infected with my full-text email address when I edited it in an attempt to fix up some of the new formatting issues introduced to the awful editor by the recent changes. Not only that, but after all that, the change of my user ID didn’t “take” in the discussion groups themselves! It was all in vain! Strewth.

I’m stuck in the worst of all worlds. My Subscription access is broken. My email address is still visible. If anyone replies to any of my messages, that email address is likely to be reproduced in plain text in their message, and I’m not going to be able to edit it. I can’t even log on and complain about it on the discussion groups themselves. I don’t have access to my work email account for another 36 hours so I can’t chase up the Subscription people that way, and if they email me with instructions or a request for information I won’t see it. So the chances of this being fixed in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. before the spambots do their harvesting) are slim, to say the least.

Would the dolt or dolts responsible for this SNAFU care to come forward? No, I didn’t think so.

I am struggling to find words that adequately express my displeasure at Autodesk right now. It wouldn’t be quite so abysmal if it wasn’t a repeat of the exact same situation just a few weeks ago, for which I and many others roundly and justly slammed Autodesk at the time.

Autodesk is listening? Yeah, right. In this case, Autodesk is doing a great impersonation of a fence post.

Edit: overnight, my name change to SteveJohnson-blognauseam did actually “take”, so most of the email address instances are gone. Unfortunately, a spambot only needs one instance, and I’m still left with at least one message containing my email address in plain text. I still can’t log on using any of my 3 possible user IDs, so I can’t fix it up myself.

Edit 2: an Autodesk person kindly emailed me (which must have taken significant intestinal fortitude) to inform me they had reset my password, which allowed me to log on and remove what I hope is the only plain text instance of my email address. Other than a few marginal technicalities I described to the Autodesk person, that’s my email address hidden again. Now, what about everybody else in the same boat?

Autodesk discussion group maintenance failure

I must admit that I wasn’t really expecting the November 15 Autodesk discussion group maintenance effort to come up with the goods and make everything all better again. However, it appears that even my lowly expectations were nothing but naive optimism.

Here are the changes I see:

  • The old messages and Plain Text new messages that had their paragraphs stripped out have had them returned. This is the end of the good news, as far as I can tell. If you only ever like reading positive things, particularly about Autodesk, I suggest you stop reading now.
  • Rich Text messages have had superfluous paragraphs introduced, and other formatting issues. The more you edit a message, the worse it gets. Try switching back and forth between Rich Text and Plain Text a few times, it’s a crock.
  • My email address has been newly exposed to the spambots as my user ID, and I’m not alone. WTF? Totally unforgivable! Heads should have rolled the first time this happened. Doing it again is way, way beyond endurance.
  • The Edit Account page refuses to allow me to make changes, falsely claiming that several fields contain incorrect data. This means I can’t fix the email exposure problem myself, and have to wait for Autodesk to fix it. Never mind, I’ve done a lot of waiting for Autodesk over the past few months, so I’m kind of used to it.

Other than that, the discussion group system looks like the same old pile of garbage that it has been for weeks. For example, Search is still broken. Paste is still arcane. Using the indent or bullet items in Rich Text results in text above the selection being indented too. The question evaluation system (of dubious value in any case) causes threads to start with such nonsense as “This question is not answered. Helpful answers available: 2. Correct answers available: 1.” Er, OK then…

Even the Help page hasn’t been updated to reflect any alleged new fixes or to correct any of the errors I pointed out weeks ago.

All in all, I’d say it’s not exactly a major triumph as a maintenance effort.

Autodesk, please give up trying to maintain this steaming pile of pus. It’s not going to work. If the people at Jive Software can’t help you get their forum software working (and there has been plenty of time in which that could have happened), then bite the bullet and throw it away. Really.

Autodesk discussion group maintenance this weekend

According to a notice on the Autodesk discussion groups, they will be down for maintenance for a while this wekend. The scheduled downtime period (in terms of GMT/UTC) is 7 AM Saturday, 15 November 2008 to 5 AM Sunday, 16 November 2008. Fingers crossed for some big improvements, they are desperately overdue!

Autodesk discussion groups – signs of life?

After an extraordinarily long period of total silence about the dreadful state of the appallingly-updated Autodesk discussion groups, it seems that the sleeping monster has raised an eyelid. Although it unfortunately indicates that Autodesk intends to try to patch up the new system rather than throwing it away, there is now a “sticky” post at the top of each forum containing the following text:

Your continued patience is appreciated as we work to resolve the discussion group issues you have been reporting. We understand the impact these issues have on your productivity, and want to assure you we are continuing to troubleshoot and resolve. We’ve posted an update under “Help” to provide awareness and status of the issues we are working on. We’ll regularly update this as improvements are made.

Never mind the glacial nature of the response, it’s good to see that an acknowledgment has finally been made of the problems. However, picking on the Help link reveals that there’s a long way to go yet before all the problems are even fully understood by the team responsible, let alone fixed. Only three “Known Issues” are listed, and four issues are allegedly resolved. At least one of those, shown as resolved on 7 October, is still very much broken right now. At least one of the FAQ items, “Why can’t I stay signed in?”, gives false information.

Discussion group team, you will find a lot more than seven issues listed on this blog alone. To see them, just click on the Newsgroups link in the Tags section on the right. Alternatively, you could use the Search box at the top and enter something like “discussion groups”. A search that actually finds everything? There’s a novel idea.

Rate Autodesk, vote once

I’ve added some new polls that ask you to rate Autodesk in five specific areas. I’ve seen some criticism of Autodesk in these and other areas, but that doesn’t mean the criticism is valid. I’d like to know what you think. Please be fair, and base your votes on your own experiences. If you have suggestions for similar polls, add a comment.

I have closed several other polls, and will be discussing the results later.

Poll abuse

On the subject of polls, I have noticed that more than one person has been voting multiple times. While this is technically possible for people who have access to the Internet via multiple IP addresses, it’s obviously not desirable. Like the forthcoming US elections, the idea is that you have one vote each. While you might be able to work around that restriction to give yourself a little extra influence on the result, doing so is less than honest and is likely to get you in trouble.

I accept that people who have access via home and work might accidentally vote twice on occasions, but if I perceive a continued pattern of deliberate abuse I will remove the offenders’ access rights to this site. As I respect everybody’s privacy I will not reveal any identities, drop any hints or make any announcements about this, I will just do it.

Just to make the privacy issue completely clear, I will not, under any circumstances in public or private, reveal to anybody who has voted for what. Similarly, I will not reveal to any party any identifying information behind any of the users of this site.

Fortunately, the influence of dodgy votes on poll results has so far been small and in most cases statistically insignificant. That is, it does not invalidate the conclusions that can be drawn from the overall poll results. The more valid votes there are, the less influence the multi-voters will have, so go to it and have your say. Once, please!

Ways in which the crash could be good for Autodesk

No, I don’t mean the sort of crash where AutoCAD stops working. The current financial crisis, I mean. I must preface these comments with a disclaimer. I have no qualifications in finance and make no claim of financial expertise. These are purely a layman’s thoughts. Don’t buy or sell stock based on what I have to say here. Toss a coin instead.

So, what on earth am I thinking? I’m thinking that although Autodesk (along with most other companies) will undoubtedly suffer greatly from the coming economic conditions, it’s not all dark cloud. Here are some potential silver linings.

Autodesk is cashed up. If its competitors aren’t all carrying enough fat to survive the lean times, Autodesk could come out of the post-crash period with greater market share than before. Of course, this is contingent on Autodesk having products, customer service and a customer-friendly outlook that are attractive enough to win over any orphans. Some serious reversal of neglect in these areas will be needed, which involves spending more, not less. So it really is a very good thing that Autodesk has large wads of your money lying around for use in times like this.

Companies with useful technology might become available cheaply. Some smart acquisitions could give Autodesk products some advantages over the competition. (Edit – Between writing this post and publishing it, I see Autodesk has just done exactly that with Softimage).

Autodesk can buy its own shares back while they are cheap. If it needs cash in a few years, it can sell them again at what will undoubtedly be much higher prices.

I don’t really care whether Autodesk does any of the above, but I do care about the next one. Autodesk has been living in a Soviet Russia-style fool’s paradise for years with its yearly product cycles. Practically everybody who knows anything about the software knows that the 12-month cycle is unsustainable because of the significant harm that it is inflicting on the products. But it has been an undoubted financial success, so far. Autodesk is addicted to it, but like any unhealthy addiction it will ultimately be fatal. What to do?

This financial crisis represents a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Autodesk board. Announce the long-overdue death of the annual cycle now, while Autodesk shares are already undervalued. Any negative reaction from a share market that doesn’t know or care about product quality will be hard to identify as having a specific cause while the share price is being flushed down the toilet anyway. Announce it in conjunction with something that will save Autodesk money, like abandoning some of its sillier legal adventures, and it will be even harder for shareholders to apportion blame to any particular measure. In a month or two, nobody will be able to identify specific causes of the stock being at whatever level it happens to be at that time.

Such a great opportunity for Autodesk break out of the yearly rut and rescue its products from a sad slide into semi-permanent sub-mediocrity is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. It’s a nettle; it’s going to sting, but it must be grasped.

Can Carl Bass be Autodesk’s Gorbachev?

The Autodesk discussion groups are awful

Yes, the Autodesk discussion groups are still awful. In other breaking news, the Pacific Ocean continues to be wet.

I seldom visit them any more, but I just hopped on to the Autodesk discussion groups to see what progress had been made in fixing the many problems that have been pointed out here, on the groups themselves, in official problem reports, and elsewhere. Little or none, it seems.

Search? There are still apparently only 188 uses of the word “autocad” in the tens of thousands of posts in the AutoCAD groups, ever. Editor? It not only still vacuums, when I just tried it out it vacuumed even harder than before, with delays of over a minute when switching between tabs and nasty screen formatting issues when the switch eventually occurred. Attachments that can’t be viewed? Check. Visible email addresses? Yup, still there. Everything I looked at was just as bad as it was last time I looked. Maybe something has been improved somewhere, but I gave up looking.

I know there’s an Autodesk cultural tendency to pretend problems don’t exist for the sake of saving face, but that just doesn’t cut it here. (Actually, it doesn’t cut it anywhere, but that’s another story). What kind of face does this debacle present to the world? What does it make Autodesk look like?

  • A company that doesn’t understand the Internet.
  • A company that doesn’t know how to write software that works.
  • A company that fails to seek user feedback on changes until it is too late.
  • A company that can’t fix things that are broken.
  • A company that doesn’t care about its customers’ privacy.
  • A company that refuses to listen to customers who point out problems.

Now I happen to know that this is not a fair and accurate representation of everyone and everything at Autodesk. Nothing like it. Nevertheless, that is the face that is being presented by this utter disaster of an “upgrade” and the failure to fix or even acknowledge the problems introduced by it. The people at Autodesk who really do care about the customer (yes, there are many such people) must be sickened when this sort of thing happens, particularly when it happens in such a public way. It reflects badly on everybody in the company, even the majority who are well-meaning and innocent of customer-harming activities.

It is now over a month since the old (and perfectly functional) discussion groups were killed. It does not appear to be possible to make the new ones work adequately. Autodesk, please bite the bullet and end this failed experiment now.

My autodesk.com site survey experience

I just tried out the new discussion groups to see if anything has been fixed. After entering my password (yet again), instead of placing me back in the discussion groups with my 100-topics-per-page settings, I was transported to the main Autodesk page and given the chance to provide feedback. I was informed that a new browser window would be opened, and then… nothing. I waited a while, but still nothing. Or so it seemed. Actually, the new browser window appeared behind my existing browser window, so I found it eventually. I clicked on it, it opened another, bigger window and the survey started. Here are the questions and my responses:

Which of the following best describes your primary purpose for today’s visit?
. Other
To see if the discussion groups are still broken

How often have you visited Autodesk.com in the past 6 months?
. 6 times or more

A question about my industry group that didn’t want to copy and paste…
. Other
Question is not relevant

Do you currently own an Autodesk product?
. Yes

Are you planning to make a purchase decision related to an Autodesk product?
(I don’t know what choice to make here, none of them really fit. I’m on Subscription but that doesn’t mean I’m not involved in purchasing decisions; I am. I don’t know when the next purchasing decision will be, though. I picked:)
. No.

Which of the following titles best describes your role in your company?
. IT Manager

From which region are you accessing this site?
(Can’t you tell?)
. Australia / New Zealand / South Pacific

How would you rate your overall experience with Autodesk.com today?
. Very bad
(Actually, I don’t really know because because I haven’t yet got to the discussion groups I asked for, so I’m taking a wild guess based on recent experiences. I later checked the discussion groups and found that this was an accurate guess.)

Based on your best online experience, how would you rate www.Autodesk.com as a site that…

(Now, notice that is’s asking about my best online experience. I assume that would be best ever? Going back years, right? Before the recent update, then? OK, I’ll answer fairly based on that assumption.)

…is a reliable source of information that you trust?
9 Very Good

…leaves you feeling that your time was well spent?
8 Very Good

…helps you make well-informed decisions?
9 Very Good

…is easy for you to navigate?
5 Fair

…allows you to move rapidly to the information you need?
6 Good

…enables you to find what you’re looking for?
7 Good

…encourages you to return?
7 Good

…meets or exceeds your expectations?
6 Good

…you would refer to others?
7 Good

…has content that is relevant to the purpose of your visit?
6 Good

…gives you the amount of detail you need?
6 Good

…covers the range of information you need?
7 Good

…enables you to identify and contact the right people?
0 Very bad

…provides a positive interactive experience?
8 Very Good

…enables you to help yourself?
7 Very Good

That’s the end of that section, the progress bar is half-way though, so I go to the next section, which I assume is going to ask the same questions based on my worst experience. Oops, no it’s not! The survey is over! Thanks for playing.

Now you know. So, if in a few weeks somebody from Autodesk refers to “survey results” that supposedly show how well the recent update went down with users, point them at this post. I gave high marks for some of my responses, but I wasn’t being asked about my experiences after the recent update. I was being asked about my best experiences, which is altogether different.

This sort of thing is why I never take survey results from anyone at face value. I always insist on seeing the full details, otherwise I will give such results no credit at all. No details, no point.

50 years of LISP

It is difficult to find an exact date for LISP’s birthday. It wasn’t so much born in an instant as it was gradually dragged out of the primordial slime during the heady days of late 50s computer research. What is known is that John McCarthy, LISP’s “father”, published a report in October 1958 about his new programming language aimed at providing artificial intelligence capabilities on the IBM 704 mainframe computer. That report, one of a series, was the first one to use the name LISP.

OOPSLA, a major annual conference on object-oriented programming, has decided to celebrate LISP’s 50th birthday on 20 October 2008. Practically everyone at that event is likely to be smarter, geekier and possibly even more pedantic than me. So for now I’m going to go with that date and raise a glass to LISP and John McCarthy in one week’s time.

John Walker’s almost-accidental but still inspired decision to add LISP to AutoCAD was, in my opinion, the most significant feature addition in AutoCAD’s history. There were many other feature additions without which AutoCAD would be a joke (e.g. blocks, undo/redo, dimensioning, polylines) but they were always going to happen anyway.

Adding LISP wasn’t like that. It wasn’t inevitable. It was an excellent example of Walker thinking outside the box, and it was the one thing that raised AutoCAD significantly above its competitors (yes, it had serious competitors once) at a time when the PC CAD market was still up for grabs.

The genius of this move was that instead of attempting to fill AutoCAD’s many feature holes, Autodesk could provide the tools that would let the users do that for themselves. The language was an ideal fit for a number of reasons, and users in droves started hole-filling with a vengeance. Without that boost to AutoCAD’s open architecture, the PC CAD market would have been a very different place. Autodesk itself may not even have survived into the 1990s, and I could have been writing this blog about Versacad, Computervision, or some other competitor.

Today, despite an unfortunate history of long periods of neglect from Autodesk, LISP remains the language of choice for most of my AutoCAD-related programming needs. There are exceptions, but I’ll usually first see if a given job can be done in LISP. If it can’t be done easily and well in LISP, then I will consider using one of the other available languages. For the sort of work I usually do, that doesn’t happen very often.

Why? I’ll explain my reasoning in a later post.

Slight improvement in discussion group search

While almost all of the problems with the Autodesk discussion groups remain, there are some signs of movement in one area at least. The search facility, which until recently refused to find anything from before the update, now finds some earlier posts.

It would appear that some kind of search index is very slowly being built, but it’s a long way short of being finished. For example, if I do the standard default search for “autocad” in all the AutoCAD groups, there are 83 found in the last 90 days. This seems plausible, but I don’t trust it. Changing the time option to “All” now does actually return something rather than nothing at all, so I guess that’s an improvement. But 188 messages containing “autocad”? Since 1998? There should surely be thousands. Also, there are apparently no messages at all containing the word “it”. Or “is”. Ever. Some way to go there, then.

If the people fixing the search happen to be reading this, please note that a maximum possible number of 30 results per page is much too low and makes it very hard to work with the search results. 100 would be better.

There are still email addresses being exposed to the spam trawlers, but I guess by now that horse has well and truly bolted. Although I haven’t done a scientific study of post frequency, it looks to me as if the discussion groups are now significantly less active than they were before the update. Given the slightly functional search, the persistence of the awful editor, and the terrible runeverythingintooneline formatting of the existing message database (particularly important for the many posts containing code), I can’t say I’m surprised at the exodus.

AutoCAD performance and productivity

I have closed the performance and productivity polls as described in my posts here and here, and the results can be seen in the Polls Archive. As with most of the other polls I’ve run here, the distribution of votes has not changed greatly after the first few days.

It is clear from the very different voting patterns in the two polls that blog nauseam readers are smart enough understand the difference between the two questions. The performance poll has a very clear skew to the “slower” side. This supports the empirical evidence I’ve seen elsewhere that people perceive AutoCAD as getting slower. This is stuff they’ve noticed for themselves, not a few milliseconds here and there.

On the other hand, the productivity poll results show a much more even distribution. The five options are pretty equally represented, except that “a lot more productive” has suffered at the hands of the most popular choice, “a bit more productive”. If you calculate the mean result, it is almost bang in the middle. It’s actually slightly worse than that, but by such a very small margin that it is not statistically significant.

Overall, we can say that the average viewpoint expressed here is that people clearly see AutoCAD as getting slower, but that its productivity has stayed about the same. So, does this let Autodesk off the performance hook? If a slowing AutoCAD is balanced by productivity-enhancing features, does performance matter? In my opinion, the answers to those questions are no and yes respectively.

It’s not a safe assumption that productivity features are balancing speed issues for everybody across the board. A new feature may help some users’ productivity, maybe even a majority of users, but it won’t help everybody. Some new features even harm some people’s productivity, which is one more reason for being grateful that Autodesk generally lets us turn them off (although it has been forgetful about that in some cases in recent years). Performance is one of the many things that impact productivity, but unlike most new features, is something that impacts the productivity of everybody. Even a first-time user has to sit around waiting for AutoCAD to start up, while a fast power user will be rendered less productive, and certainly more frustrated, by relatively small hesitations.

Furthermore, if AutoCAD is about as productive as it was a few releases back, is that good enough? Or should Autodesk be providing noticeably more productivity in return for our Subscription or upgrade payments? If not, why do we continue to hand over our hard-earned dollars? Why do we go through the upgrade process at all, with all its attendant costs, struggles and inconveniences?

Autodesk, please put much more effort into halting and reversing AutoCAD’s performance slide. It doesn’t have to be a competition between performance and productivity. Improve the former and the latter will also improve.