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IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2

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Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the second part of David’s interview which covers his involvement in AUGI, the controversy over how it was managed, and how that ended his involvement.

Steve: What was your first involvement with AUGI or NAAUG? At what stage did you get involved?

David: I think it was NAAUG in Philadelphia. Paul Jackson came up to me and said, “We would like you to get involved with the board. He asked me to attend the board meeting right there. So I started hanging out. That may have been the first time I met Lynn Allen. David Harrington was there, Dave Espinosa-Aguilar, Donnia Tabor-Hanson… that was kind of the formation of a very early AUGI Board. They had a board, but they were looking for different people.

I first ran for the AUGI board and was elected in 1996. I was on the Board from 1996 to 2002. We didn’t have a web site in 96, not many small organizations did yet, so I was involved in the first AUGI website ever. It was pretty crude! I remember we just kind of talked about it, Carol Bartz waved her hands, and we had money! She would sit in for a couple of hours every time we met in San Rafael. We would spend three or four days at Autodesk and that’s when we would develop our annual plan and funding requirements.

They were throwing a lot of money at us – $150,000, $200,000 a year just to support the user community. So we had a pretty healthy budget. A lot of people bungled it though. I remember one year we had budgeted $80,000 for something. It was what became the Exchange, where everybody traded their apps. We were supposed to develop that and we completely failed. We directly experienced the wrath of Carol Bartz for that.

The AUGI Board was a really difficult thing to make work because everyone was a volunteer, and they were all over the country, and there were no consequences for failure. People would sometimes just blow stuff off and wouldn’t do things. We were unable to accomplish things. They lacked the skills, or desire, or didn’t have the time, so there were some really rough years there where we were supposed to get things done and we didn’t. We had a couple people who openly stated they were just there to get NFR software.

That was when Rich Uphus and SolidVapor became involved. I believe Carol Bartz set us up with them to give us some kind of essential management. That was when AUGIWorld magazine came out. When we got involved with them, Uphus rebranded his “A” magazine as AUGIWorld and started to plan all of the CAD Camps. At that point, Autodesk ceased funding AUGI directly.

Steve: Is this the quarterly CAD Camps?

David: Yes, but I think there were 40 of them one year. Yoshi Honda and I were kind of the key AUGI people who negotiated that with Rich Uphus. We did most of the conceptual development and business arrangement between AUGI and Uphus. SV put together the first workable AUGI website with our input. All of that happened because of SolidVapor.

The plan was that AUGI provided the technical content and SV built and maintained the infrastructure – the website, the magazine, the organization behind the CAD Camps. When you start to think about the expense of that – If you went up to some hotel and said, “I’d like to have five breakout rooms, I’d like to serve lunch to 200 people, for a day and a half,” they would say, “Well, put down $200,000 and we’ll reserve a spot for you.”

For one or more years, CAD Camps had more attendees per year than Autodesk University. So SolidVapor had to come up with a lot of capital – millions of dollars. SV was going through $2.5 to $3 million a year. I’m sure they were making a profit; that’s what businesses are about. But they were pretty much backed by Autodesk.

AUGI generated no revenue at all. They were actually an expense. Autodesk flew us out to San Rafael for a week twice a year and we just partied! They took us out to nice restaurants. But we also provided a lot of good information from the user community, so we were the mouthpiece of the user community to Autodesk.

Later on there was a faction within the AUGI board that didn’t like the arrangement that we had with SolidVapor. They felt that AUGI was no longer in control – that SolidVapor was doing all the stuff that AUGI should be doing. There was a real split. My position was that it became that way because the model we had earlier didn’t work. Autodesk was giving us money and we were failing, so they put a real organization, an experienced business, in place to accomplish what they wanted. We were in a position where we drove that organization but we didn’t manage the money, we didn’t really manage the projects.

AUGI chose to terminate the contract with SolidVapor. Some may say otherwise, but the fact is they offered SV a deal they could not accept. I tried and tried to make sense with them, tried to tell them early on that… first of all, where is your money going to come from? Autodesk has told us they will not fund AUGI like they did before, they will only be another ad buying customer. All of this cash flow is going to go away when you end this relationship. Don’t tell me that you’re going to come up with $2.5 to $3 million a year, it’s just not going to happen. You guys don’t know how to do it, you’re working full time jobs, and you’re already unable to fulfill many of your responsibilities to AUGI. You expect to, all of a sudden, on a part-time basis, raise $2.5 to $3 million a year and put together a dozen CAD Camps, publish a magazine and keep a website running. It’s just isn’t going to happen.

But they went ahead and did it anyways. That’s when I left AUGI. I didn’t want to be involved with what was going to happen. I don’t have any personal grudges against people but there were a couple of people I really bumped heads with. Let’s just say we didn’t talk to one another after that.

I remember going to Autodesk University after they had terminated the relationship with SolidVapor and I knew they were in serious financial trouble. They had relatively no financial backing or sales, they had no viable plan. That’s when CAD Camps ended, AUGI World magazine ended, and the website stumbled really badly for a couple of years. It was in pretty bad shape. AUGI has pretty much gotten themselves back on track now, but at a much smaller scale than it could have been.

Steve: Wasn’t there some legal wrangle over who had rights to the forums and the contents?

David: Yeah. AUGI didn’t have any direct revenue. They had not invested anything. SolidVapor managed all the money, and the agreement was that SolidVapor would provide the infrastructure. So SV built the website, invested all the time, they were paying for the servers, paying the programmers, all that stuff. I tried to tell the AUGI board that they had no power whatsoever. Sorry, but power is money. You don’t control any money. You haven’t invested in this so you really don’t have a right to it. You provided the content for the forums, yes. The position of SolidVapor was, if you sue us for the forums and win, you’ll take responsibility for the whole thing. You’ll be totally responsible for funding and operating the website, the servers, the programmers.

AUGI was never restricted about what we could publish or what we could do, other than technical limitations. They would do pretty much whatever we wanted to, within reason. But we never paid for anything so we never had any power there.

I was pretty much against the whole AUGI position at that point, I thought they were unrealistic. They all had full time jobs, some of them were highly placed in engineering departments, but no one really had any business experience.

A lot of the things they wanted to do were just not practical or cost-effective. So we had some real head-butting with SolidVapor about what AUGI wanted to do. SV said, “We can’t do that, we can’t afford it,” or “Come up with a budget for it.” AUGI was just kind of waving their hands around and asking for things and they didn’t think about how much it was going to cost or how it was going to get paid for.

So they struggled for a while. I’ve been out of touch – I’ve really not been involved with AUGI since 2008 when they terminated the SV relationship. That’s when I said adios.

Steve: I still have the document that you produced with all your record of that I can now refer to. It’s still on my blog!

David: Oh really? I think it would pretty much corroborate what I just said.

Steve: If you remember, you published that on the AUGI forums and that was removed and so I published it on my blog for people that wanted to read what you had to say. I don’t know if you remember that or not but it’s still there!

David: Yeah, yeah!

Steve: I just downloaded it for my own blog to read it!

David: I think there are a few people who can remember those days. I had very few supporters. I actually got some hate mail. I was amazed at the lack of understanding in the community at what was going on. Nobody got it. I had a few communications with people shortly afterward but not many. It was surprising.

AUGI survived, it just went to a much smaller scale. You’re probably pretty familiar with that whole scenario then?

Steve: Yeah, I came on it fairly late and I didn’t really understand what was going on either, except that there was there was a bit of a constitutional crisis with the board and who was supposed to be on the board, and who gets to say who’s on the board. There was an election and the election was cancelled or postponed or moved and people weren’t allowed to put themselves up for election and all sorts of stuff happened.

David: Yeah. I kind of went over the edge a little bit with some stuff at that point. I did have a really serious discussion with the board, because I’d been off the board for a number of years and I decided to go back and put myself up as a candidate. They wouldn’t even allow me to run as a candidate. It might have been ’08 or ’09. I said I’d like to run and they said no. That didn’t really get any press. That was kind of a private thing between me and…

Mark Kiker and Richard Binning were the two people I really butted heads with. They were the two that really spearheaded this transition, so they told me flat out, you’re not running. You’re not going to get on the board. That was where the noise about who gets to be on the board came from. They were pretty dictatorial. It was pretty interesting to watch.

Steve: Within AUGI, when you were actively involved in it, who are you dealing with at Autodesk? I know you mentioned Carol came to the meetings. Were there other people that you were interacting with?

David: We dealt directly with a lot of the engineering department there. I dealt with Buzz Kross a lot. During the weeks that we spent at Autodesk, we would work directly with the engineering people. It was timed such that they could talk to us directly about what was coming up and we were tasked with thinking about how to introduce that to the user community. We were tasked to provide feedback to them, that’s where the wish list originated. We were tasked to become the mouthpiece of the user community.

Carl Bass was still in engineering management, so we dealt with him a lot. Then there was Lynn. We worked with her a lot. Lynn was the one who worked the internal politics and made things happen for us. We gave her the official title of “AUGI Sweetheart”.

I just thought about this a couple of days ago. I lived in Denver, very close to Columbine High School where there was that big mass shooting where two kids shot up the High School and killed 19 people. A couple of kids on my street went to that school, but we didn’t have any children there. I remember sitting down in Carol Bartz’ office; I’d asked for a private meeting with her. I talked to her about the effects of violent video games and what influence Autodesk might have on that. We actually came to know one another at a more personal level at that point. It was an interesting relationship after that.

We used to sit down with all of the top management people. There would be a formal meeting every time the AUGI board met. All of the big kids would show up and all of the AUGI kids were round the other side of the table. We’d sit there for two, three or four hours and have a really nice long discussion about the product and the future. They’d tell us about future developments, what was coming up and we all had NDAs so we couldn’t talk about anything outside.

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

Autodesk acquires Angry Birds developer Rovio (repost)

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This post, originally published on 1 April 2012, brings back fond memories. That’s mainly because of this tweet from Carl Bass:

Autodesk announced today that it had welcomed Rovio Entertainment into the Autodesk fold. Following a US$2.6 billion acquisition, the publisher of mega hit video game Angry Birds is now Autodesk’s Mobile Entertainment division based in Espoo, Finland. “This is a tremendously exciting development for Autodesk going forward,” said Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. “Rovio is the world leader in mobile entertainment software,” he added, “so for Autodesk to have access to that market and that technology opens up a whole new world for us.”

Bass was effusive about the synergistic benefits of the merger and the benefits it will bring to the user interfaces of all Autodesk products. “When a kid starts playing Angry Birds, they don’t need to read a huge mass of documentation. Just show them a few cartoons and they’re away, instantly productive. This is the essence of the democratization of design; it’s not dumbing down, it’s funning up.” This potential ease of use is excellent news for AutoCAD users, because the documentation is now so terrible that it will be wonderful if we no longer have to try to use it.

Former Rovio CEO, Taikke Monniennren, now Autodesk Vice President in charge of Mobile Entertainment, is equally excited about the future. “We have already been given access to the Autodesk code base and my developers can see the potential there. By copying and pasting some code modules, we hope to be able to piece together the Angry Birds 3D Max Suite in a few short years,” said Monniennren. “The main challenge will be in keeping the download size manageable, but with a bit of luck we will be able to keep it down to just a few gigabytes.” In comparison, the original Angry Birds game was just over a megabyte.

“Do not underestimate the strategic importance of this announcement,” said Bass. “Although it may come as an unpleasant surprise to our competitors, our customers are well aware that this is the direction we have been moving for some time now.” This is true. Autodesk is doing whatever it can to appear young, hip, cool, trendy, mobile, social and just totally with it, man. It has been talking and sometimes acting big on Cloud and mobile computing for a while. Clearly, acquiring Visual Tao (now AutoCAD WS) was just the beginning.

Who would dare to call Autodesk antisocial? Autodesk videos are all over YouTube. On Twitter, many key Autodesk people tweet many times a day. The recent AutoCAD 2013 launch in San Francisco was done entirely via Facebook (which enhanced Autodesk’s green credentials by allowing a reduction in the number of press and bloggers flown in from around the world to only 120). The first thing a new AutoCAD 2013 user sees on installation is a Welcome screen that is largely dedicated to Autodesk pushing its app store and Facebook and Twitter pages. Because the Welcome screen phones home on each use, Autodesk can easily slip in new links to any other sites it wishes to promote. I expect your AutoCAD 2013 Welcome screen will sport Angry Birds gaming links within a few days. Angry Birds gaming plug-ins for AutoCAD and related products are likely to appear in the app store soon, but I expect we will have to wait for AutoCAD 2014 until the games become part of the core product.

Clearly for Autodesk, kids are the new adults. But is what spoiled teenagers do on their iPhones really a sound basis for the needs of professional CAD users in a corporate environment? How well does this concept work in practice? Bass answered that by showing a prototype user interface for AutoCAD that uses the new technology. He demonstrated it on a 48″ touch-screen, but it is believed that it will be at least partly functional using old-fashioned mouse-based technology.

Bass started by selecting a red bird from the Ribbon, which sported a snazzy new flouro theme. He dragged the bird down into the drawing area (which had a beautiful animated background with kittens, rainbows and unicorns; let’s hope that makes into production). While this was going on, the system was providing haptic feedback, with the screen vibrating and the bird squawking when dragged close enough to an existing object. By dropping the bird close to the end of a line, Bass was able to start drawing a line from exactly that point. He then drew back the bird and released it such that it was launched in the direction he wanted the line to go. As the bird shot forward, Bass touched it just as it crossed another line and it snapped on to the midpoint with a happy chirp. Perfect!

He then demonstrated other birds in action. To draw a polyline you use the yellow bird and touch it at each vertex as it flings itself along your desired path. To explode a block you use the black bird, triggering a loud explosion which I think will have to be toned down for office use. Ellipse? That white chicken thing that lays an egg. Multileader? The little grey one that splits up when you touch it. And so on. Bass already has his Finnish developers hard at work devising hundreds of new birds that cover most of AutoCAD’s key functionality. Some unimportant features, such as plotting and xrefs, are difficult to translate into birds and will be deprecated into command-line-only versions before being dropped completely in a future release.

The demonstration had to be curtailed after a few minutes when Bass’s arms became too tired for him to continue, but it provided an enticing view of a future where CAD is fun, fun, fun! Addicted users are productive users, according to Bass. “If you’ve ever seen kids playing Angry Birds, you know that they will happily sit there playing it all day every day without complaint. They don’t even stop to eat. The only time they take a break is when they’re forced to visit the bathroom. Even when they’re in there they will probably photograph themselves in the mirror and post it on Facebook. CAD Managers, don’t you wish you could tap that astronomical productivity resource?”

According to Bass, those managers will soon be able to do exactly that. His advice is, “Fire the old fuddy-duddy naysaying Luddites who are allergic to change and replace them with a bunch of kids off the streets. Give them Autodesk software they can’t resist using and they’ll soon be flinging pixels around like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll have an instant office full of the cheapest engineers you’ll ever find, and they’ll be begging you to take their work home with them. With the literally infinite anytime anywhere power of Autodesk 360, they’ll be able to do exactly that. In a few years, the kids in hoodies you see hanging around shopping malls won’t be waiting to snatch your bag, they’ll be leeching wi-fi so they can design your next car on their phones. And they’ll be doing it using Autodesk software.”

Bass refused to be drawn on leaked details about the upcoming iPod Shuffle version of AutoCAD or its supposed marketing slogan Shake to Design, though. “We have a very strict policy of never discussing our plans for future products,” he explained, “except when it suits us.”

The marketing gurus at Autodesk have written an independent productivity report that shows that AutoCAD with the new interface improves productivity by 632.7%. On Windows only, that is. This productivity phenomenon will not apply to AutoCAD for Mac, because there are no plans to provide the Angry Birds interface on OS X. Autodesk believes that this won’t concern Apple users, because Macs are shiny and look really nice.

The impressive productivity figure was generated by performing carefully selected tasks on AutoCAD 2013 using the prototype interface, when using the latest, fastest and most expensive hardware. This was then compared with completely different tasks performed using AutoCAD 1.4. On a twin-floppy IBM PC. With a 12″ monochrome monitor driven by CGA. But without an 8087. The resultant percentage was then multiplied by the number of years since Autodesk produced an AutoCAD feature that wasn’t half-baked on release.

In related news, Autodesk’s legal department has lodged applications to register the words ‘Angry’, ‘Birds’ and all images of feathered flying creatures as Autodesk trademarks. Cease-and-desist notices have already been sent to publishers of ornithologist guide books. Also in Autodesk’s legal sights is Disney Corporation, which clearly violates Autodesk’s intellectual property rights with its depiction of Donald Duck as not just a bird, but frequently as an angry one who goes around smashing things up.

The last word goes to Bass. “Look, the trend is irresistible, and those who can’t keep up will be left behind. Here at Autodesk we believe in freedom of choice. You can either choose to follow our vision of the future, or take to the streets with a cardboard sign and a chipped enamel mug. What could be more democratic than that?”

Carl cashing in his chips

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Here’s an interesting Carl Bass exit interview with Roopinder Tara at engineering.com. If you’re wondering just how much stock Carl offloaded in those planned sales, here are his reported sales of Autodesk stock in the weeks leading up to the resignation:

  • 11 Jan 2017 $7,894,150
  • 9 Jan 2017 $7,888,768
  • 5 Jan 2017 $7,694,038
  • 23 Dec 2016 $1,971,715
  • 22 Dec 2016 $1,968,935

That’s $27m, give or take. Carl’s reported as having sold over $49m of Autodesk stock over the last three years.

While Carl still has tens of millions of Autodesk stock, dumping that much of it before leaving doesn’t strike me as the actions of someone as supremely confident in the future of Autodesk’s ailing cloud push and rent-or-go-away business model as his words would suggest.

Here, have some fun by voting in these polls. Idea shamelessly stolen from Paul Munford on Twitter.

Who do you want to be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (18%, 32 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (12%, 21 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (7%, 13 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 4 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 8 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (28%, 50 Votes)
  • Other outsider (27%, 48 Votes)

Total Voters: 176

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Who do you think will be the next Autodesk CEO?

  • Amar Hanspal (41%, 53 Votes)
  • Andrew Anagnost (8%, 11 Votes)
  • Jeff Kowalski (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Amy Bunzel (2%, 2 Votes)
  • Other Autodesk person (5%, 7 Votes)
  • Elon Musk (11%, 14 Votes)
  • Other outsider (22%, 29 Votes)

Total Voters: 130

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Carl Bass resigns

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I only met Carl Bass once, and that was when I gatecrashed his party in 2006. Seemed like a nice guy. Didn’t kick me out.

So now one of the worst-kept secrets in the CAD industry, Carl Bass’s impending departure from Autodesk, has now come to pass.


At the Bricsys Conference in Munich last October, industry observers and Carl’s former colleagues were all aware Carl’s departure was looming. They were pondering only the timing of the announcement and the identity of his replacement; we now know one of those things. The wisdom (not the accuracy) of this sort of Trump-baiting by a major public company’s CEO was questioned, but I guess if you know you’re on the way out you can say what the heck you like:


Carl has worked hard in this industry for decades and set himself up very nicely for his retirement with a large bucketload of cash and his own little hobby factory. Good luck to him; I wish him many happy years tinkering and making things.

What happens next is vitally important to Autodesk and its customers. More on that later.

Why Autodesk’s rental won’t make big money from pirates

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One argument I’ve seen in support of the all-rental software model is that it will rake in lots of cash from those users who aren’t currently customers, i.e. pirates. Here’s an example (Carl Bass, November 2016):

We believe some of these people were previously pirating the software and now have a much more affordable option with product subscriptions. This is consistent with the fact that emerging countries are some of the fastest growing areas for product subscriptions. In other cases, these new users have been using an alternative design tool and could now afford software from Autodesk.

Putting aside the correlation-does-not-imply-causation thing, rental simply isn’t a much more affordable option than perpetual licenses. On the contrary, it’s much more expensive (except for short term use). Repeating an #AlternativeFact doesn’t make it any more true.

The idea that people who had been using non-Autodesk software have switched over to Autodesk in bulk because of rental is silly for that very reason; it’s much more expensive now than before. The fact that Autodesk’s previous attempts at rental both failed miserably will tell you all you need to know about its effectiveness at attracting new customers from the competition.

There’s an unspoken assumption that Autodesk software is the best available, therefore everybody would be paying for it if they could. Having spent some time examining AutoCAD-competing products recently, I can assure Carl that such an assumption is not remotely justified.

Back to the anti-piracy theme. The idea that rental will win significant amounts of business from pirates is unlikely for the following reasons:

  1. Pirates are largely cheapskates. They want to pay nothing at all; only a minority will be attracted by software with any  cost associated with it.
  2. The cost of Autodesk’s rental is way too high to attract pirates. It’s too high for most of us who were used to paying Autodesk’s already-high maintenance fees, let alone those who are accustomed to paying nothing at all. Adobe’s rental prices may be low enough to tempt some pirates; Autodesk’s aren’t.
  3. There’s another unspoken assumption here: that rental software won’t/can’t be pirated. The best that can be said about that is that it is charmingly optimistic. Try a Google search on, say, Adobe Cloud Cracked  for a reality check on that score.

Even if it’s impossible to pirate Autodesk’s rental software (it won’t be), it still doesn’t follow that pirates will rush cash-in-hand to Autodesk. Here’s what they would be much more likely to do:

  1. Pirate non-rental releases of Autodesk software.
  2. Pirate non-Autodesk software.
  3. Use free non-Autodesk software.
  4. Pay for low-cost non-Autodesk software.

There might be a small trickle of ex-pirates among Autodesk’s new renters. More than that? Dreaming.

Autodesk’s big Cloud failure

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Back in 2011, Autodesk, some other vendors and many industry pundits were utterly convinced of the inevitable and near-imminent victory of Cloud-based CAD over standalone software. I wasn’t. I wanted to get a feel for how isolated my viewpoint was, so I started a poll and let it run for a while. Here’s how that turned out:
 

As you can see, this blog’s readers were less than convinced about the inevitability of that Cloudy future. Not so Carl Bass, who had this to say in an April 2012 TechCrunch interview:

I’d say two to three years from now, every one of our products will be used online. The only way to use them will be online.

 
Here’s what I had to say about that:

So let’s say you’re an AutoCAD user. A successful Cloud push by Autodesk will mean that you and very large numbers of people just like you be using AutoCAD or an equivalent Autodesk product on the Cloud by 2014 or 2015. If that doesn’t happen for you and all the other users of Autodesk products, then that’s failure by definition. Autodesk will have failed to meet its own publicly stated goal, and that’s exactly what I’m expecting to happen …. I am convinced there is a dichotomy between the expectations of Autodesk and those of its customers, and that spells trouble. Autodesk is either going to succeed in pushing its customers into a future they are not expecting, or it is going to fail and be forced to revise its expectations. I predict that the latter will happen…

 
It’s now way past Carl’s predicted online-only timeframe. A successful strategy by Autodesk would mean we Autodesk customers would have all have been exclusively CloudyCADing for a couple of years by now. Is that what happened?
 

Knock me down with a feather, it turns out that Autodesk’s big Cloud-only push has worked out just as predicted, not by Carl but by the readers of this blog. Take a bow, Nostradamuses!

Yes, there are now Cloud-saving options in a lot of Autodesk’s software, as there are in most competitive products. Yes, Autodesk is still attempting (often astonishingly badly) to online-tie-in desktop CAD users. Yes, Autodesk has a lot of Cloud-only software products, even if many of them don’t generate revenue and some of them are headed for the chopping block. Yes, some of Autodesk’s online offerings now have utility. Yes, there are many students and hobbyists out there, often isolated from commercial and production realities, having fun tinkering with Autodesk’s largely free online software and in some cases producing some seriously cool stuff that looks great in Autodesk publicity material.

Real paying customers, using Autodesk Cloud-based products as their primary mission-critical CAD software in a production environment? Not so much. People are still using that terribly old-fashioned desktop software for that. Autodesk has failed to make reality conform with Carl’s prediction.

Why should I care? I care because Autodesk has taken vast sums of money from AutoCAD customers, and is trying hard to extract even larger sums via its compulsory rental scheme. Instead of spending that cash on genuinely useful improvements to the product that is the source of that income and the basis for many of its vertical products generating further income, Autodesk has left AutoCAD to wither on the vine. It has been some years since an AutoCAD upgrade was anywhere near good enough to be worth the amount Autodesk currently charges for maintenance, let alone the trebled(?) amount it likes to think it can get away with charging in a couple of years.

It’s not because there’s no potential for improvement, either. Autodesk gets a lot of feedback about what could be improved in AutoCAD, but ignores most of it, sometimes choosing to do dumb things instead that make things worse. In contrast, Bricsys has proven that it’s possible to make huge strides in improving a straightforward 2D/3D DWG-based desktop CAD application in a single year; Autodesk’s efforts are woefully inadequate in comparison. Meanwhile, by chasing an elusive exclusive Cloudy cornucopia, Autodesk has frittered away a fair fortune on a plethora of production-pointless products.

Autodesk perpetual license owners to get screwed big-time

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Hidden in amongst a bunch of the usual highly dubious subscription statements from Carl Bass is an announcement that spells doom for Autodesk perpetual license owners. I will resist the temptation to skewer Carl’s spin (for now) because this announcement is much more important:

Bass also confirmed that the company plans to converge the two existing subscription models — maintenance and product subscriptions — into a single offering over the next two years. “If you look out to fiscal year 2020, we want to be in a place where, first of all, we have a single kind of offering with a single back office and infrastructure to support it, one that will be a combination of product subscriptions as you see them plus a consumption model on top of it. That’s where we see the business heading.

“Along the way, it’s how do we motivate customers to move from one model to another in the program, what are the price points, and how does that transition work? In our mind, getting to a single model is really important. It will give the best service to our customers, it will be the most affordable for us to have, [and] we can start getting rid of some of the systems that were designed for a different era and concentrate on giving a world-class experience to users.”

Translation: Autodesk is going to drive up prices of maintenance subscription (perpetual license keeping-up-to-date fee) to match the much higher prices of product subscription (rental). Maintenance subscription will then be merged into oblivion. Your return on your long-term investment in Autodesk software will be zero. Your reward for decades of loyalty to Autodesk will be to have your software costs blown through the roof.

If you’re not already making plans to abandon the Autodesk ship, you really need to do so now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t say Carl  didn’t warn you.

Get out or get screwed big-time. I mean, get out or get motivated to transition into a world-class experience.

Carl Bass confirms Cloud-only future for Autodesk – or does he?

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As reported by Joe Francica (via WorldCAD Access), Carl Bass has confirmed, in a somewhat ambiguous way, that his Cloud-only vision rules at Autodesk.

I do believe that everything is moving to the cloud.

But…

There are a lot of applications that will [still] be done on the desktop. Whether Autodesk does it or not, I can’t think of a single function that won’t necessarily be done in the cloud.

Still a bit confused? Me too. It’s not clear where this leaves his underlings who have been rushing to contradict Carl’s earlier statements by unambiguously reassuring customers that Autodesk would continue to provide desktop software. Will they now come out with “clarifying” statements that fall into line with whatever it is Carl’s saying here? I doubt it, that would be just too embarrassing. I suspect we’ll see things go very quiet on this subject for a while.

Now we know (or do we?) it’s full steam ahead with desktop dismantlement, what about all those Cloud concerns? Carl does the standard Cloud PR thing of “addressing” that question by restating some of the concerns, ignoring others, but not coming up with answers for any of them other than expressing a vague hope that some of them will go away:

Foremost in people’s mind is security, privacy, reliability, confidential information. Some of those concerns will fall by the wayside.

Asked to come up with a compelling reason for customers to embrace the Cloud, he didn’t:

In many cases, for anyone to move to any technology platform you have to do more than what people have today. So what’s the compelling event? I think what you will see in the cloud is that it will look like every other disruptive technology. Some people will downplay it. Some will poo poo it.

More of the same, then. It’s disruptive, but people with legitimate concerns about that disruption are just naysayers to ignore. With an attitude like that, the chances of Autodesk taking its dubious customer base with it into Cloudy Heaven are slim indeed.

Caveat: I do not have access to the entire interview, so the opinions expressed here are based only on what I do have. It’s quite possible that Carl had something useful to say that didn’t appear in the article.

Why Autodesk’s Cloud push will fail, part 1 – failure defined

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It’s probably unwise to make predictions about what is going to happen in technology. If so, I’m about to be unwise. So be it; if I’m wrong you can taunt me about this post in a few years. Here’s my prediction:

Autodesk’s attempt to move CAD users onto the Cloud is doomed to failure.

This is the first of a series of posts that will examine what I mean by that and the reasons behind it. The first thing that’s important to lay out is what I mean by failure. What I mean is that reality will not match Autodesk’s expectation of what will happen with its products moving to the Cloud. What expectation is that?

I’d say two to three years from now, every one of our products will be used online. The only way to use them will be online.

Carl Bass, April 2012, TechCrunch interview

So let’s say you’re an AutoCAD user. A successful Cloud push by Autodesk will mean that you and very large numbers of people just like you be using AutoCAD or an equivalent Autodesk product on the Cloud by 2014 or 2015. If that doesn’t happen for you and all the other users of Autodesk products, then that’s failure by definition. Autodesk will have failed to meet its own publicly stated goal, and that’s exactly what I’m expecting to happen. While it might look to a Cloudophile that I’m swimming against the tide of inevitability, I’m not alone here. Let’s examine what this blog’s poll respondents think about the chances of them using CAD in the Cloud:

Cloud chances poll results

(Snapshot taken a couple of weeks ago; more votes but no percentage change since then).

The poll has been running for nearly a year and attracted a sizeable number of votes. More than half of the respondents are convinced that there is absolutely no chance – zero – that they will be using a public Cloud-based application as their primary CAD software in the next five years (by 2016 or 2017, two years beyond Carl Bass’s stated target of universal Autodesk online operation). There is a group of respondents equally convinced that they definitely will be using such an application. However, with only 10% of votes, this group is outnumbered 5:1 among those who feel certain about what is going to happen. If we split all the votes into those who think there’s a better than even chance of a Cloudy future (21%) and those who think there’s a less than even chance of that happening (79%), you can see that the doubters again have a very clear majority, nearly 4:1.

While the usual caveats about polls apply, it would be a very foolish Autodesk executive who believed this poll to be some kind of an aberration that does not reflect the broad views of the CAD community. I am convinced there is a dichotomy between the expectations of Autodesk and those of its customers, and that spells trouble. Autodesk is either going to succeed in pushing its customers into a future they are not expecting, or it is going to fail and be forced to revise its expectations. I predict that the latter will happen, and I will explain my reasoning in future posts.

I was wrong about AutoCAD 2013 Help, it still sucks

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In my effusive welcome of AutoCAD 2013’s updated Help system, I wondered if I had been shocked into missing some glaring problem. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. In my enthusiasm, I managed to totally miss the fact that the new system has not been introduced for offline users.

If you use the new system, there’s a link on the front page to the offline files. I got as far as downloading and installing what I thought was the offline version of the new system and discovered that it didn’t want to install because the old one was already installed. What I should have then done, and didn’t, was to uninstall the old and install the new, before running it in offline mode. I intended to get around to that to check the performance and responsiveness of the respective versions, but didn’t have the time right then. If I had done so, I would have noticed that my download, uninstall and reinstall would have been in vain, because the offline version pointed to by the new system is still the old version. My apologies to anybody who wasted their time because of what I originally wrote.

There are many legitimate reasons why Autodesk customers want or need to use their software, including the documentation, entirely in offline mode. For example, the users I manage can’t access the online Help system from AutoCAD because Autodesk writes its software in such a way as to fail in a secure proxy server environment (yes, this has been reported as a bug, repeatedly). So for my users and many others, it’s true to say that despite the best efforts of Dieter and his team, AutoCAD 2013’s Help still sucks.

Look at this from the point of view of such offline AutoCAD 2013 Help users. We pay large amounts of money for software and Subscription. No “entitled” 99-cent users here.  We’ve provided extensive feedback on the woeful system that was inflicted on us at release time. We’ve hung out for half a release cycle with no adequate stopgap, even though one could easily have been provided. A small team has finally wrought an outstanding improvement and deserves congratulations for doing so. The improved system is dangled in front of our faces, and then we discover that we’re not allowed to have it. Not for any plausible technical or resourcing reason, but because Autodesk simply doesn’t want us to have it. How are we supposed to feel about that?

That’s right. Autodesk has managed to snatch a crushing defeat from the jaws of what should have been a stunning victory. I guess I should have expected something like this; for Autodesk, the half-baked job is de rigeur. But this goes beyond the usual problem of countless features that would have been great if they had been finished. This isn’t a matter of a product team struggling to develop features adequately within an impossible timeframe imposed by the yearly release cycle. This is a matter of policy. Some Pointy Haired Boss at Autodesk has decided to deliberately disenfranchise a significant group of its paying customers, by refusing to make available something that already exists and could easily be provided. This adds insult to the injury of having to wait 6 months for a CHM stopgap that was clearly the right thing to do, but which never came.

Why? What on earth would lead anyone to even contemplate the possibility that this might be a good idea? Lack of resources? While I’m quite aware that individual parts of Autodesk have their own budgets and limited resources, I don’t buy that as an excuse for the organisation as a whole. A multi-billion-dollar corporation that pays its executives millions? One that just threw away $60M on a dud social media buyout? Crying poor over something that would have cost maybe a few thousand? Sure, sounds legit.

No, a lack of resources is not the reason. It’s a policy issue. “There’s no reason for it, it’s just policy.”  But why would such an anti-customer policy exist? Vision. Autodesk is currently led by a Cloudy Vision. It’s important to Autodesk that everything Cloudy looks good. It’s clearly not enough to actually make online stuff work well. For one thing, that’s obviously pretty difficult, judging from Autodesk’s offerings to date. No, anything that’s offline has to be made to work badly, so the comparison looks as favourable as it possibly can. That’s much easier to arrange.

That’s why there was no CHM solution on the release date, despite Autodesk having a set of unpaid volunteers ready to put the thing together. That’s why there was no CHM solution provided a week later, or a month later, or six months later. Don’t think that it wasn’t provided because of a lack of resources; that excuse is entirely specious. It wasn’t provided because it would have made the online version look bad in comparison. The online version already looked abysmal, but an offline CHM solution would have just made the comparison so ridiculously one-sided that nobody would have been in any doubt about what a terrible idea on-line Help was. The Cloudy Vision would have looked suspect at best, and we can’t have that, can we?

What Autodesk wants is for people to think “Cloud good, non-Cloud bad”. If the Cloud can’t be made good, then making non-Cloud bad will have to act as substitute. Loading the dice in this way might stand a chance of working if customers were as clueless as some Autodesk decision-makers, but most of us aren’t total idiots. We notice these things.

This is a line-in-the-sand issue. This is about Autodesk pushing its vision at the expense of customers. No news there then, but from my point of view, this is one step too far. This is the tipping point where the not-convinced-about-the-Cloud phase could well turn into a full-scale take-your-Cloud-and-shove-it customer revolt. Me? I’m quite prepared to hand out the pitchforks and torches.

Carl of Arc

Source images: Hermann Anton (public domain) / Carl Bass (creative commons)

Carl Bass, you need to pull your troops into line. Let them know that while your Vision is important, implementing it must never come at the expense of common sense. It must definitely, never, ever come at the expense of your customers’ needs.  Blindly following a Cloudy Vision didn’t end well for Joan of Arc, and it’s unlikely to end well for Autodesk either. Please remember the source of Autodesk’s income. Without customers, you are nothing. You are treating your customers badly, and worse, treating us as idiots. Please, give it up before we give you up.

Autodesk Cloud-based structural engineering software review

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As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point.

OK, that sounds promising, but how does it pan out in real life? One problem dissuading me from finding out is that Autodesk is being very restrictive with access to many of its Autodesk Cloud products (I’d probably throw a few sample render jobs into the Cloud and compare the performance, but I’m not the right kind of Subscription customer so I’m not allowed). Another problem is that I’m not qualified to review things like structural engineering software where the greatest computational potential appears to lie. Fortunately, Alex Bausk is qualified, so it was interesting to read his review of Autodesk’s Project Storm software.

It’s important to point out here that anything Autodesk with ‘Project’ in the name is not a finished product. It’s an Autodesk Labs thing, designed to attract feedback rather than use in production. I very much approve of this process. It’s one area in which I’m happy to endorse the way Autodesk is approaching the whole Cloud thing, and has several benefits over the flawed private Beta process that Autodesk uses for its mainstream products such as AutoCAD.

The downside for Autodesk when it comes to doing pre-release things publicly is that the criticism can be public, too. For example, selected from Alex’s review:

…the product is, for reasons unknown, available only in selected countries…

…utterly meaningless popups…

Options for analysis settings are, to put it short, appalling.

Project Storm is nothing more than a web envelope for our good old ARSA package. It is basically the same “Robot link” that reviteers have already had for quite a long time…

But the software’s practical use is extremely tiny, to the point of no use at all. You may surely forfeit all hope to do anything with it that would even remotely be relevant to all the “cloud analysis” hype in videos, intros and announcements.

I was unable to make any use of Storm with the sample models that come packed with Revit Structure and Robot Structural Analysis. To feed these default, Autodesk-made models to Storm, some really disruptive editing had to be made that involved deleting whole parts of the model, rendering it practically useless, only able to demonstrate how the process is meant to work.

Ouch! OK, so far it’s mainly just pointing out how half-baked the product is at this stage. Given that it’s a Project and not a finished product, that’s not so bad. It’s shipping products and features that are half-baked that I object to, and Autodesk has certainly produced a few of those. Anyway, here’s the bit I found particularly interesting:

Analysis speed, to a surprise, isn’t looking any good compared to desktop. The Storm’s cloud web analysis is extremely slow, likely because the server would yield a tiny fraction of its resources to your particular task.

In other words, the cloud speed and resource claim in case of Project Storm is no more than a standard cloud computing mantra.

…cloud calculations took around four minutes for this simple model, compared to fraction of a second using desktop…

What does this all mean? It could mean that Alex forgot to turn on the Ludicrous Speed toggle. It could mean that Autodesk is doing this experiment on the cheap and hasn’t paid for enough resources to make it work well. If so, that would be pretty short-sighted, and if Carl wants this Cloud thing to impress people he should sign off on a bunch more cash for Scott’s server farm budget. It could mean that this type of calculation is unsuited to parallel processing, in which case it’s probably not a great candidate for a Cloud product. Or it could mean that the calculation parts of this software haven’t been done properly yet, and everything will fly like the wind as soon as the developers get the hang of things.

Or maybe, just maybe, it means that the reality of Cloud computing isn’t quite as infinitely powerful as the hype makes out.

It’s not easy being green (and believed)

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I know that some of you out there (unlike me) are pretty cynical about anything that Autodesk says on any subject. So when Autodesk makes a big thing about being environmentally responsible, such as its new Autodesk Sustainable Design Center site, it would be tempting to say “Yeah, right” and assume it’s just more spin to ignore.

That would be wrong. Yes, Autodesk is using its green credentials as a marketing tool. No, that doesn’t mean it’s all bovine excrement. Autodesk is genuine about this stuff. It’s being driven from the top, and it’s being driven hard.

How do I know? In addition to Autodesk backing up its assertions with a reasonable level of detail and independent scrutiny, I have a little first-hand knowledge. When I was attending the AutoCAD 2010 launch bloggers’ event last year, I was able to chat casually with quite a few non-marketing people. During those conversations, Autodesk’s move towards green issues was mentioned by more than one person, and in unscripted ways. It was clear to me that Carl Bass was serious about this and was strongly pushing a green culture within the company.

Disclosure: when attending the AutoCAD 2010 launch in February 2009, Autodesk provided transport, accommodation and some meals. Yes, I am fully aware of the irony of learning about Autodesk’s green culture only because it flew me half way round the world and back again.

Carl Bass on TV

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Autodesk big cheese Carl Bass gets a friendly interview on NBC’s Press:Here (amusing name, “press colon here”). It’s kind of funny seeing CAD described by non-CAD people (the presenters, not Carl). Among other things, he discusses being fired by Carol Bartz, Autodesk’s role in Avatar, the benefits of piracy, iPhones, 3D printing, open source and Autodesk being green. I’ve embedded the two Bassy bits here for convenience; these embeds will display ads that are not under my control.

Edit: I’ve removed the embedded clips as they were slowing down this whole site for some users and even disabling some features. If you want to view the interview, please go to Press:Here and look at Episode 46 Autodesk Part 1 and Episode 46 Autodesk Part 2.

Ways in which the crash could be good for Autodesk

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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?

I like Bill Gates a little more now

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I recently enjoyed reading what appears to be a genuine and not at all atypical internal Microsoft email from Bill Gates. I always enjoy seeing an honest opinion expressed in a way that cuts through the glossy corporate PR image, and this one certainly does that. Actually, it reminds me of the sort of thing I write in MyFeedback when evaluating pre-release versions of AutoCAD. It’s honest, it’s negative or even cutting where it needs to be, it represents a real user’s viewpoint, and most of all, it’s useful.

I don’t think this sort of exposure does any harm at all to a company. It’s unlikely to change anybody’s opinion. Microsoft haters will still hate Microsoft, fanboys will still be fanboys. People like me who sit in the middle somewhere are likely to admire the honest self-evaluation shown here. Here’s the Big Cheese looking at things like a user. Great! I’m sure the spin merchants wince when something like this makes it into public view, but that can only be a good thing, right?

I’d like to think Carl Bass fires off this sort of email within Autodesk from time to time. If such a thing went public, would it hurt Autodesk? Absolutely not. Autodesk haters will still hate, fanboys will still, er, fan, but there will be no lasting measurable effect on Autodesk. I bet a lot of real world users would like Carl Bass a little more, though. Frustrated users would probably like him a lot more.