Tag Archives: Cloud failure

Logitech demonstrates the power of the cloud and cops a bloody nose

I’ve been a pretty satisfied customer of Logitech products for some years. The mice, keyboards, webcams and 3D controllers (branded as 3DConnexion) I’ve used have generally been well designed, well built and long-term software support has usually been very good (with an exception or two). So it’s with some regret that I have to report them as an example of what not to do in customer service.

Logitech recently sent this email to customers of its Harmony Link universal remote control:

This is an important update regarding your Harmony Link. On March 16, 2018,

Logitech will discontinue service and support for Harmony Link. Your Harmony Link will no longer function after this date.

Although your Harmony Link is no longer under warranty, we are offering you a 35% discount on a new Harmony Hub. Harmony Hub offers app-based remote control features similar to Harmony Link, but with the added benefit of the ability to control many popular connected home devices. To receive your discounted Harmony Hub, go to logitech.com, add Harmony Hub to your cart, and use your personal one-time promotional code […] during checkout.

Thank you for being a Logitech customer and we hope you will take advantage of this offer to upgrade to a new Harmony Hub. If you have any questions or concerns about Harmony Link, please email the Harmony customer care team.

Regards,

Logitech Harmony Team

This isn’t just a matter of no longer supporting an old product (and it’s not that old, anyway – it was still sold directly 2 years ago and old retail stock has been sold until a few months ago). It’s a matter of actively disabling all instances of a product from afar, world-wide.

That’s right, Logitech has demonstrated the (destructive) power of the cloud by using it to remotely kill your perfectly functional device. If it’s out of warranty, send Logitech more money for a newer one. No guarantees on how long it will be before the replacement gets the remote kill-switch treatment.

As you might expect, customers weren’t overjoyed at being treated in this way. Threads popped up on the Logitech forums (where the words “class action lawsuit” were auto-censored), Reddit, Twitter, and as comments on various IT news sites that reported on Logitech’s move.

The supposed reason for Logitech’s decision seemed to make no sense:

We made the business decision to end the support and services of the Harmony Link when the encryption certificate expires in the spring of 2018 – we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability. Our system shows this product, which was last sold by Logitech in fall of 2015, had a small active user base.

Such certificates are commonly purchased and renewed by hardware and software companies for relatively tiny amounts of money. It would have cost Logitech less to renew a certificate than it would to have someone write the explanation about why they weren’t doing it. Very odd. As a business decision, it sucks. It also exposes Logitech management as utterly out of touch with the reality in which their customers live.

In a reaction that should have come as a surprise to nobody (but apparently did to Logitech), pretty much everybody gave the company a major roasting. Many people pointed out that such a move would be considered illegal in their countries (including mine), or at best (for Logitech) it would entitle the customer to a full refund from the retailer. Many people promised to never buy anything from Logitech in particular, and any device capable of being remote-bricked in general.

Once it became apparent that this was a major PR disaster, Logitech did a belated partial U-turn and extended the offer of a free replacement to customers with units that were out of warranty.

“I made a mistake,” head of Logitech Harmony Rory Dooley explains to Wired. “Mea culpa. We’re going to do right by our customers, and do the right thing.”

This reminds me of those politicians who get caught out misusing expenses who then say sorry and offer to pay back the ill-gotten gains, as if that’s enough to get them off the hook. Nope. Too little, too late.

Logitech, you just destroyed a whole bunch of customer trust. How valuable is that to you? How much is it going to cost you in sales? How much will it cost you in marketing to try to regain it? It stands to be a fair bit more than the cost of updating a certificate, I would guess. And you’re still bricking a whole bunch of perfectly functional devices. How is that environmentally responsible?

The idea of any product that can be remote-disabled or even reduced in functionality by anybody should be anathema to all of us. Any product. Not just gadgets. (How’s your internet-reliant juicer going? Oops.) Oven, garage door, fridge, car (Tesla can do this), hardware, firmware, software. Yes, software.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t do CAD in the cloud. I’ve explained years ago how cloudy CAD adds multiple points of failure. I’m still not wrong about that. One of those additional points of failure is when the vendor decides to stop offering the service. And, of course, the same applies to subscription software, even when it’s not cloudy. The vendor loses interest and you’re left high and dry.

Don’t think it won’t happen. It happens repeatedly and will continue to happen. Don’t be a victim when it does.

The cloud broke
And teardrops fell
On the desks
Of those who fell
For the lure
Of a cloudy hell.

The landlord laughs
To see such fun
Collects his rent
From web he spun
He still gets paid
When things don’t run.

I said t’would be
It’s come to pass
Surprised? Not me
With or without Bass
Autodesk’s cloud
Can kiss this SaaS.

Video lulz with AutoCAD 360

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Thanks to Hans Lammerts on Twitter for pointing out this amusingly cringeworthy AutoCAD 360 YouTube ad:

The guy spilling his coffee and falling over reminds me of the people in those infomercials that can never get the simplest things right:

https://youtu.be/3eMCURWpNAg

OK, so the ad’s bad, but how’s the product? I had a look for myself at the browser version of AutoCAD 360, which is the current name for what has been Visual Tau, Project Butterfly and AutoCAD WS in previous iterations dating back before Autodesk’s acquisition of the Israeli technology in 2009.

It’s a while since I tried it, so I was interested to see the progress that had been made. After all, CAD in the Cloud has been Autodesk’s focus for a long time now, and as this is likely the first product people try out, you’d expect it to be pretty dazzlingly good after all those years of development, right?

Interestingly, it’s still called a Beta, which hardly inspires confidence. Nevertheless, it didn’t misbehave for me, at least to begin with. It didn’t do very much at all for me, though.

On opening a very simple small 2D drawing, the first thing I noticed was the white background. As the drawing contained yellow text, that was no good so I looked for the settings to change the background to black. Couldn’t find any settings. I guess I didn’t really want to read that text anyway.

Nevertheless, I could zoom and pan around OK with tolerable performance. When I tried to select some objects to edit them, nothing happened. I looked around for buttons to press to do things. There was very little to see, and nothing I could find for doing anything much other than redlining over the top of what’s already there.

The second time I tried to open the same drawing, it just hung there, displaying a blue propeller thingy:

I gave up and tried again. This time, things were different! It locked slightly differently:

Now I see why it’s still called Beta.

To be fair, it hasn’t locked like this for me in the past so maybe it’s a one-off. Assuming it’s working, it’s a useful enough viewer. It has some limited markup functionality. That’s it. It’s free, and you get what you pay for.

Calling it AutoCAD 360 is highly dubious. It’s not AutoCAD or anything remotely close to it. It’s not even CAD. It’s a simple online product with capabilities that fall well short of the weakest CAD application back in the bad old days, when people could only dream of something as advanced as the dumb guy’s Nokia in the embarrassing Autodesk 360 ad.

There are also mobile versions of the software for iOS and Android. Haven’t tried them recently, but when I did they were acceptable viewers. Apparently you can pay for versions that actually let you do things. Go for it if you feel confident in Autodesk’s ability to provide a quality product. Me, I’m out.

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.

Dear Autodesk Recap 360 team…

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…your software (3.0.0.52, came with AutoCAD 2017) fails to allow sign-in (a prerequisite to connection to the cloud) in a secure proxy server environment. This happens (see picture):

I am online. I did try to inform you about this problem using the feedback mechanism in the product. This allowed me to type my problem report, but on hitting the send feedback button, I got this (see picture):

I am connected. In fact, I’m so connected I’m typing this post online while reproducing the problem. While this is going on, I’m able to sign in to Autodesk Account, A360 Drive, AutoCAD Beta forums, the Autodesk public forums and so on. What’s happening is your software is trying to do something our firewall doesn’t like. Autodesk has an unfortunate history of doing this sort of thing. Often, things that worked in one release will stop working in the next, and vice-versa, because somebody tinkered under the hood. For example, Application Manager works, desktop app doesn’t. There have been many other examples going back over a decade.

No, please don’t direct me to the knowledgebase article that expects me to drill a bunch of holes in the firewall. That’s not happening. Instead, make your software work nicely, please. Find the bits of code that work, make them standard, and insist your developers use the standards.

Just thought I’d let you know. Other people in the same situation would probably just give up, and you would never know it was happening.

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.