Tag Archives: Industry collections

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

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I reported in January that, “The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.”

Thanks to a policy reversal from Autodesk, this is no longer true. Felice on the Autodesk forums shared the good news:

Hi all, I have an update to share on this topic… we are removing the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limitation. Here are some more details/background:

Overview:
Currently, the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limits the number of collection products that can be used at the same time to two. The terms and conditions related to Industry Collection concurrent title access stated:

2.1.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the applicable Autodesk License and Services Agreement relating to any Industry Collection software program Benefit, the maximum number of Concurrent Access Titles that You or Your Named User may Access concurrently shall not exceed two (2) Concurrent Access Titles, at any one time.

Effective immediately we are removing this restriction and allowing customers to use as many products concurrently within the collection as they need to support their workflows.

Why we have removed this restriction:
The Industry Collections continue to evolve and are increasingly focused on the support of multi-product workflows. The restrictive nature of the concurrent usage policy does not support this progression.

The Autodesk Knowledge Network page on this has been updated accordingly:

This also applies for license borrowing, but only for 2019 products and later.

While this restriction should never have existed in the first place, it’s good to see it gone now.

Moving when prodded is alive at Autodesk.

Autodesk subscription offer – the first cracks appear in the all-rental wall

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Thanks to a comment by Fabien, I recently learned of a new offer from Autodesk to convert perpetual licenses to subscription (rental). It turns out that this is a global offer from 7 February to 20 April 2018.

Such offers come and go from time to time and most are not particularly interesting. This one is. Not because you’ll want to take it up (you probably won’t), but because of what it represents.

Here’s how it appears on Autodesk’s site:

What’s really interesting about this offer is this sentence:

If you are not satisfied, you can switch back to your perpetual license.

With that, we see the first solid acknowledgement from Autodesk of the reason so many existing customers are stubbornly refusing to put themselves in rental chains, despite the cracking of price whips. Customers like their perpetual licenses and are unwilling to give them away. This offer holds out the promise that they can be returned. There’s a lot of fine print that severely restricts the utility of the offer and I can’t see many savvy customers falling for it, but at least an attempt (however weak) is being made to placate perpetual license holders.

The offer is explained in the FAQs and more detail is available in the Terms & Conditions page. Here’s an overview of how it works.

  1. You trade in your perpetual license of AutoCAD, LT, Suites or several other products using this link. These can be out of maintenance and could date back to Release 14 from 20 years ago*.
  2. You sign up for subscription of an Industry Collection for 1 or 3 years. Of course, the subscription cost of an Industry Collection is pretty substantial and way more than the maintenance costs of, say, AutoCAD – even with Autodesk’s promised price hikes. For example, the AEC Collection is USD $2,018 a year under this offer, down from $2,690.
  3. The subscription cost is 25% less than it is without this offer. It’s still pretty expensive, particularly as you can’t use more than two applications in the Collection at once, but it is a bit less than is would be,
  4. You are given the option of backing out of the deal (“switch back” is the Autodesk term) within a specific 30-day window if not satisfied. That window is at the end of the full 3-year period, or after 2 years if you sign up for 1-year increments. You get your perpetual license back. You don’t get your money back.
  5. If you switch back, it’s up to you to make sure you have the media and necessary details to reinstall the old release.
  6. If you switch back, you don’t get to resume maintenance if you had it. If you didn’t already have your product under maintenance, this is fair enough.
  7. If you switch back, your perpetual license is reverted to its original release. Oh, except if you started at 2017 or 2018. In that case, you are reverted to 2016.

That last part is a nasty, petty detail. Somebody at Autodesk actually thought that up, presented it at a meeting and had it accepted as a good idea. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with here. It’s not so much “How can we better serve customers so they want to give us more money?”, it’s more “How can we hurt customers who don’t do what we want?”

If you take up this offer, the idea is to get you using the new software because there’s a bit less finality about the decision. You might be so impressed by it that you forget you’ve discarded your escape plan and signed yourself up for perpetual payment of large amounts. You might also find that you’ve saved all your files in new formats and can’t go back without losing data, particularly if you’ve used the vertical products that really, really don’t like having their drawings saved back to earlier releases, even within the same nominal DWG format. So maybe there’s a bit more finality than first appears, but by the time you’ve got to that stage it will be too late.

Is this an attractive offer? Only if you were going to subscribe to an Industry Collection anyway and have an old dormant license hanging around. In that case, go for it, save 25% of a large amount. Other than that, it’s really not an offer that will have widespread appeal and I suspect most customers will give it a miss.

Autodesk is getting increasingly desperate to get its long-term customers on the rental gravy train, and the cracks have started to appear in the subscription-only facade. This offer’s not great but I suspect the offers are only going to get better as the “Another great quarter!” patter wears thinner and thinner. The offers will have to get much better than this effort to persuade your average perpetual license owner to get on board.

* Pedantic historical point: in multiple places, this promotion associates Release 14 with the year 1998, implying this is the earliest year you could have bought an eligible product. This is incorrect. Release 14 was released in February 1997 and was replaced by AutoCAD 2000 in March 1999.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off

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Autodesk not only wants to move its customers from perpetual licenses to subscription (rental), it wants to move them from individual products to Industry Collections. Why? Because the rental cost of Collections is higher and more money can be extracted from each customer.

There’s nothing conspiracy-theorist about the above statement, it has been explicitly laid out by now-CEO Andrew Anagnost at an Investor Day, and the cunning plan has been placed on the public record. Have a good read of that document, it’s very revealing. AutoCAD LT users are going to be “encouraged” into full AutoCAD, AutoCAD users are are going to be “encouraged” into AutoCAD-based verticals, and so on, into Collections. Onwards and upwards.

Collections, you may remember, are groups of applications sold together. They’re just like Suites used to be, only bigger and rental-only. They’re expensive, but they contain a lot of products. For example, the AEC Collection rents at $2,690 PA (single-user US price). It contains the following products (individual product US annual rental cost shown in [brackets]):

  • Advance Steel [not stated]
  • AutoCAD [$1,176]
  • AutoCAD Architecture [$1,575]
  • AutoCAD Civil 3D [$2,100]
  • AutoCAD Electrical [$1,575]
  • AutoCAD Map 3D [$1,575]
  • AutoCAD MEP [$1,575]
  • AutoCAD Plant 3D [$1,575]
  • AutoCAD Raster Design [$840]
  • AutoCAD mobile app [free]
  • Cloud storage (25 GB) [free]
  • Dynamo Studio [$300]
  • Fabrication CADmep [$900]
  • FormIt Pro [not stated – Collection only]
  • InfraWorks [$1,575]
  • Insight [not stated – cloud credits]
  • Navisworks Manage [$2,070]
  • ReCap Pro [$300]
  • Autodesk Rendering [not stated – cloud credits]
  • Revit [$2,200]
  • Revit Live [$250]
  • Robot Structural Analysis Professional [not stated – Collection only]
  • 3ds Max [$1,470]
  • Structural Analysis for Revit [not stated – cloud credits]
  • Structural Bridge Design [not stated – Collection only]
  • Vehicle Tracking [not stated – Collection only]

Note that Autodesk doesn’t make it easy to work out the equivalent total cost, but you can see there’s an impressively large number of products listed. For those products where prices are listed, adding together the above comes to $21,056 PA. So $2,690 PA is a huge bargain, right?

Not really.

First, some of those costs are counted multiple times. For example, AutoCAD Civil 3D also includes AutoCAD Map 3D and AutoCAD, so that’s $2,100 worth, not $4,851. AutoCAD gets counted about five times if you just add up the numbers.

Next, it’s highly unlikely that anybody uses all of the products in a Suite or Collection. How many do get used? On average, two, according to Autodesk. That corresponds with my own experience. But let’s say you do have a need to use more than two? That leads us to…

The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.

You won’t find that prominently displayed among all the marketing blurb that promotes the value for money of Collections. Instead, you’ll find words like these:

Download and install what you want, whenever you like—whether it’s for occasional use, to meet requirements of a particular project or client, or to explore new workflows.

That’s not actually false; you can indeed download and install all of those products (only one at a time, but that’s a different complaint). You’re just not allowed to use them. Not at once.

Where does it say that? Well, If you know what links to click, you can eventually find this KnowledeBase page that tells you about the restriction and which products it applies to. Which is pretty much all of them:

Individual users of an industry collection may access no more than two (2) of the following desktop titles at any one time.

Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection
Autodesk® Advance Steel
Autodesk® AutoCAD®
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Architecture
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Civil 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Electrical
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Map 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® MEP
Autodesk® AutoCAD® P&ID
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Plant 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Utility Design
Autodesk® Dynamo Studio
Autodesk® Fabrication CADmep
Autodesk® Navisworks Manage
Autodesk® Revit:
Autodesk® Revit Architecture
Autodesk® Revit MEP
Autodesk® Revit Structure
Autodesk® Revit Live
Autodesk® Robot Structural Analysis Professional
Autodesk® Structural Bridge Design
Autodesk® 3ds Max

This is a ludicrous restriction. Imagine not being allowed to have three Office applications open at once. Clippy: “It looks like you’re trying to open a spreadsheet! Sorry, you’re already reading an email and you have a Word document open. Go away.”

Why is Autodesk doing this? To make sure you don’t get good value out of your subscription dollars. Remember, good value for you is less revenue for them. Want to do more stuff? Buy more licenses.

This restriction does not apply to Suites. There is no technical reason it has to apply to Collections, either. It’s just a stealthy cash grab.

This is how it goes with Autodesk subscription. You’ll get sucked in by promising-sounding marketing, then once you’re trapped you’ll get screwed over.

Suites to be replaced by Autodesk industry collections

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I just got this email. Maybe you did too:

Dear Christopher [sic],
 
I have some important information to share with you.
 
As we continue our transition to a fully subscription-based business, we remain committed to providing you greater value, more flexibility, and a simpler way to access the Autodesk software you need.
 
On August 1, 2016, we will introduce Autodesk industry collections and end the sale of Autodesk Design & Creation Suites.
 
Industry collections will provide you access to a wide selection of the essential Autodesk software for your profession. They will offer immediate access to new technology, cloud services, and several licensing options. In short, industry collections will give you the freedom to access the software products you want, when you want them. Learn more about the industry collections here.
 
To make way for industry collections, we will end the sale of new Design & Creation Suite subscriptions and perpetual licenses after July 31, 2016.
 
If you wish to purchase more Design & Creation Suites before August 1, 2016, we encourage you to subscribe now and rest assured that we will provide you with a simple way to switch to an industry collection in the future, if you so choose. If you prefer, you can purchase perpetual licenses of a Design & Creation Suite with a maintenance plan before August 1.
 
If you wish to continue receiving updates, support, and other benefits for your Design & Creation Suites, you can do so for as long as you continue your existing subscription or maintenance plan.
 
To learn more about Autodesk industry collections and options for switching your subscription (if you choose to do so) please read our Frequently Asked Questions. [I fixed the email’s URL which didn’t point to the FAQ].
 
I want to thank you for being an Autodesk customer, and I hope you share my excitement about these important enhancements to our offerings.
 
Yours sincerely,
Jeff Wright
Vice President, Customer Engagement
Autodesk, Inc.

No, I have no idea why I’m Christopher. No, I have no idea why Autodesk is so averse to using initial capitals for its product names. It’s confusing and silly.

As far as I can tell, industry collections are just renamed/combined Suites with a few things shuffled around a bit. If Autodesk were still in the business of selling software I might be interested in examining the pros and cons of moving to industry collections. Autodesk isn’t (or very soon won’t be), so I’m not interested. As it is, the annual cost is out of the question (unless I were actually going to use a decent number of the included products, which I wouldn’t). That’s to be expected, because the whole point of trying to push people onto desktop subscription (Autodeskspeak for rental) is to extract much larger amounts of cash over a given period of time.

Sorry Jeff, I don’t share your excitement. Thanks, but no thanks.