Tag Archives: Upgrades

So what’s actually new in BricsCAD V17?

A big problem I have in communicating the improvements to BricsCAD in V17 is that there are such a huge number of them. This isn’t an AutoCAD 201x-style touch-up masquerading as serious progress, this is a real upgrade. You know, an AutoCAD V12-style upgrade that veteran AutoCAD users will remember from the good old days before Autodesk got bored and distracted. Dozens upon dozens of new features, improvements to existing features, performance improvements and bug fixes. Lots of stuff that’s genuinely useful.

I could write three posts a week on the changes and not be finished by this time next year. So I’m going to be lazy. I’ll pick out a few features for future posts but for the big picture I’ll point you to the official list. This isn’t a marketing document, it’s a technical list of terse descriptions of changes (to the Windows version only – remember BricsCAD supports Mac and Linux too), and it’s large. To give you some idea of the scale of changes, there are 3,200 words describing new V17 features, for example:

DMDISTANCE3D Specific measuring modes for cylinders, circles, and spheres have been introduced. Distance can be specified between boundaries (nearest points), central points or axes of the corresponding geometries.

There are 1,600 words describing improvements, such as:

IMAGEATTACH Multiple selection of images from a single folder is supported now so multiple images can be attached in one go. This is especially useful for images with geo-information attached.

There are 1,450 words describing fixes, like:

MATCHPROP When the source entity was non-annotative and the target annotative, the target undesiredly remained annotative.

There are 1,100 words describing API changes and fixes, e.g.:

BRX/LISP/SDS wcmatch() now supports the (undocumented) space character as a pattern key to match any contiguous sequence of whitespace characters (space, tab)

That last one is a fix for a bug that I reported in V16. Within ten days of submitting my report, I was informed directly by the developer that the fix had been done and would be available in V17. Here’s another one of mine:

BRX/LISP Improved sds_getFiled() / (getfiled) behavior during a Save operation when default filename argument is empty.

Elapsed time between my report and acknowledgement by the developer that a fix would be forthcoming? Just under 12 hours. Less than 3.5 hours after that, I was informed that the fix had been implemented. Hands up all those people who have had similar experiences with Autodesk?

Trebling upgrade prices was not enough for Autodesk

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A blog post from BIM person Gregory Arkin contains a number of confidently-made statements about what Autodesk intends to do with its upgrade and Subscription pricing model. If the information is correct, the news is all bad for customers. The prices for both upgrade and Subscription are getting jacked up substantially. In fact, for upgraders the pricing (70% of full whack for the cheapest upgrade) will be completely non-viable and you’ll effectively be forced onto Subscription. This goes beyond the trebling of upgrade prices that Autodesk’s Callan Carpenter spent some time defending here two years ago. The link in that post to the relevant Autodesk page doesn’t contain any pricing specifics other than the vague statement “save up to 20%”, but I’ll take Gregory’s word for it.

Gregory sees this business of upgraders being hunted to extinction as something that Subscription customers should have a good laugh about, but he’s wrong. Resellers can have a chuckle, but Subscription customers should mourn the lack of choice for customers. It means customers are no longer able to compare Subscription with any kind of sane upgrade pricing and make a decision about the best option for them. This lack of internal ‘competition’ is not even worth a snigger, because it inevitably means Subscription prices shooting up. Autodesk has racked up Subscription prices already and will do so again next year. For those customers who have fallen for the ‘free’ upgrade-to-suite offers, their Subscription prices will be higher again. With everyone on Subscription, Autodesk will just keep pushing up prices indefinitely. From Autodesk’s point of view, there is no down side to this; tie people in and the gravy train goes on for ever.

There are various terms in common use for this kind of thing. One is price gouging. Anybody who has ever booked a hotel near a big sporting event or bought drinks at a nightclub will be familiar with the realities of businesses doing this whenever they can get away with it. It’s part of the free market and generally perfectly legal, no matter how unpopular it makes the business. However, it only works when competition is effectively absent and customers are left with no realistic alternative but to pay up. Autodesk obviously thinks it is in such a position. Is it right? Sadly, history says it probably is.

Edit: This post originally stated that Gregory is a reseller. He has informed me that this is no longer the case and I have edited the post accordingly. My apologies to Gregory for the misstatement.

Callan Carpenter interview 5 – the 12 month cycle

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This 5th post concludes the Callan Carpenter interview series. For the record, this interview was done in real time over the phone, with no prior notice of the questions.

SJ: The 12-month cycle that you have for most of your software has come under some criticism from all sorts of people, especially me. Once you have your customer base practically all on Subscription, what’s the incentive for the 12-month cycle to persist?

CC: In what way have you criticised the 12 month cycle?

SJ: In that it damages the product. In that there’s not enough time to release a properly developed product within that 12-month cycle. This is an observation that many people have made going back many years. That’s the basis of the criticism; not that, “Oh no, you’re giving me more software”. Well, there are people who complain about that but I don’t think that’s a valid criticism. I think the valid criticism is that it damages the product. A poll that I ran on my blog asked that question: is the 12-month cycle damaging the product? The answer was a very emphatic yes from the readers of my blog. I know that’s not a scientific survey but it fits in with other viewpoints I’ve seen expressed in various places.

CC: The question was, do we intend to continue to do that?

SJ: Yes. Once you have effectively have your customers on the Subscription model, so that you’re no longer internally competing with the upgrade model, do you really have to have a 12-month release cycle?

CC: Well, I think it’s a very interesting and valid question, do we need to have a 12-month upgrade cycle? I know there are customers who simply cannot absorb technology at that rate. But it’s a bit of a two-edged sword, in that if we go to a 24-month cycle, for example, do we get criticism for not providing enough value for the Subscription dollar or is it going to be viewed as a positive because it’s improved overall software quality? If we stay at the 12 months, we get the reverse argument. Maybe we’re providing the value that customers are paying for with Subscription, but what are we doing to software quality? I think that one of the things we have to look at over time is alternative delivery mechanisms. You’re going to start to see, for example, software delivered (as we have started to) with things available as Software as a Service. That obviates a lot of the issues associated with those release cycles you’re talking about. Your quality can go up, it’s a lot more controlled environment, and the customer doesn’t have to deal with an install, then another install and another install. So I would imagine you would see augmentation of our desktop products with products like that, that sort of move away from the complexities of the constant need to try and absorb new technology.

I think that it would be a very interesting thing to do on a scientific basis to understand whether customers prefer us to go a 24-month or an 18-month, or you-pick-the cycle. I think internally, your question about is it motivated by some kind of internal competition with upgrades, absolutely not. Upgrades, just look at the numbers, that battle’s over, so there’s no internal competition in that regard. The thing that we do have to deal with, which I think is endemic to any engineering creative group, is software engineers like to write software. They’re not motivated by issues of Subscription, or upgrade, or anything else. What they do is create product. We would literally have to rein those guys back if we wanted to go to a longer cycle. They’re the ones leading the charge on that, not the Subscription program.

SJ: So you’re saying that the development teams like the 12-month cycle?

CC: They do. It brings a certain discipline to them on the one hand; on the other hand, it’s kind of what software writers do, they write software.

SJ: Right, but they can write software that takes 12 months and isn’t finished or they can write software that takes 18 months and is finished. If I were a developer I know which I’d prefer.

CC: I hear your point. I think something we have to always look at is what’s the right balance between functionality and trying to build a bridge too far and to get it released. That’s something I know the product division managers are looking at constantly. Again, it’s absolutely not motivated by Subscription. Like you, I’ve heard customers say, “Would you go to 24 months?”, so I’d be happy to deliver that for them in some cases. But it’s really up to the product divisions.

Callan Carpenter interview 4 – enhancing the program

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Part 4 of 5 in this series.

SJ: There is always the fear that once you have all of your customer base on Subscription, you’re not going to need to offer those benefits any more. Can you assure people that that’s not going to be the case, that you are going to keep being “nice” to your customers?

CC: Absolutely. I think my team and I spend as much time and brain energy trying to figure out how to enhance the program as anything else. Our goal is to make Subscription a compelling value proposition; to make it not only cost-effective but valuable in other ways. An example would be the Advantage Pack program. We had a history of Subscription including extensions and other little technology bonuses for subscribers. But last year, we said we’re going to do something different with that. One of the problems with our historical technical Extensions program is that it was optional for product line managers to either participate or not. It was optional for product line managers to localise those Extensions in languages other than English. It was optional to make those Extensions incremental install as opposed to requiring a full reinstallation of a product.

So last year, we turned a lot of our product development upside down and produced the Advantage Pack with a whole new set of requirements. A product had to be localised, it had to be incremental install, and the top 26 or 27 product lines all had to participate in delivering that value. We saw the impact in the form of a 150% increase in the downloads of that Advantage Pack. That’s an example of trying to improve the value, and you’re going to see some additional fairly significant moves on our part on the Advantage Pack this year that are going to have a lasting impact on Subscription and how people look at it. Next year, we plan to improve it yet more, and so on. I don’t see any end in sight. It’s a competitive world out there and the only way you survive is by continuing to improve and grow and add value, otherwise you get replaced, and nobody’s immune to that. No company, no market.

SJ: You said that there was a 150% increase in Advantage Pack downloads. What was increasing over what?

CC: Prior to Advantage Pack, we had the Extensions program. If you took all the Extensions for the various products for the prior year, the last year we had Extensions (2008), and you compare that to the number of downloads of the Advantage Pack, it’s a 150% increase of Advantage Pack downloads over Extensions.

SJ: But there had been no Extensions for AutoCAD since the very early years, right?

CC: No, there were Extensions for AutoCAD. For example, there was an AutoCAD Extension 2 years ago for PDF writing. This year, I don’t want to give the cat away, but you’re going to see some very interesting technology that is being made exclusively available to subscribers for no additional charge, that I think they will find quite interesting.

SJ: I was scratching my head to think of Extensions; after the initial burst when they first came out there was practically nothing. There was a trickle of them that came through for the various verticals, but I’m struggling to think of AutoCAD ones between, say, 2002 and 2007.

CC: I think you’re highlighting a potential example of a challenge that we had with the old Extensions program in that it was optional for product line managers to participate or not. Today, that’s not the case and that includes AutoCAD. They do participate in the Advantage Pack program and will continue to do so, along with Revit, Inventor and 20-odd other products that are our biggest sellers.

SJ: So that’s a permanent fixture as far as you’re concerned? The Advantage Packs aren’t going to disappear?

CC: Not unless we can come up with something better.

SJ: So there are no other nasties you have planned for customers? You’re not going to, for example, change the EULA so that Subscription is going to have to be paid otherwise your licenses don’t work any more?

CC: No, at this stage we don’t see any change to the perpetual license model if that’s what you’re referring to. We have a hybrid model, which is different from some industries. Some industries are all perpetual, some industries are all term-based licensing, we are still perpetual, plus Subscription or maintenance. I don’t see that changing. It’s hard to predict 50 years into the future, but we have no plans for that.

Callan Carpenter interview 3 – the cost of complexity

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Part 3 of 5 in this series.

SJ: In one of my blog posts, I was pretty cynical about one of the phrases used in the press release: “the streamlining of upgrade pricing based on feedback from customers and resellers”. Was I wrong to be cynical about that? Did your customers really ask for upgrade prices to be increased to some nice round number?

CC: What our customers have asked for is simplified purchasing. We have a very complex price book and it leads to thousands of prices items, maybe tens of thousands when you have all the permutations across all the different geographies in which we sell software. A lot of that complexity came from having multiple-step upgrades, multiple-step crossgrades. There is a cost to maintaining that kind of a system. So our resellers certainly were asking for simplification and streamlining explicitly. Our customers were asking to find ways to make it easier to do business with Autodesk; can it be less expensive? One of the costs of doing business is maintaining a very complex pricing scheme as we have in the past. So while we may not have a customer say, “Gosh, I wish you would simplify your upgrade pricing” explicitly, it is implicit in trying to offer an easier path to buying and less cost in the long run because we’re not maintaining a very complex system that only serves a very small percentage of our customer base.

SJ: So there’s a real cost associated with this. Can you put a number on that as a percentage of the cost of the upgrade? Is it 1%? 10%? Is a big amount that customers need to be worried about?

CC: You know, I’ve never tried to put it as a percentage of the cost of an upgrade and tried to figure it out. Some of these things are a little difficult to untangle, but you can look at the complexity of your back office software, the staff that it takes to maintain it, the cost of the releases; our customers are simply aware of our releases of our software products, but they’re not aware of the fact that of course we have numerous releases of our internal systems for tracking and matching assets, price books, things like this. All of those have a cost associated with them. People, software, systems and so on. I haven’t ever tried to calculate that as a percentage of the cost of an upgrade, but it’s certainly a real cost nonetheless.

SJ: So let’s say it was costing people 5%. Why didn’t you reduce the prices by 5% instead of trebling them?

CC: Well, we didn’t really treble the prices. What we did was we said, remember for 3 or more versions back, the price is essentially unchanged. It may be a couple of hundred dollars more expensive or less expensive depending on the product and the market for the third version back. The big change was really in 1 or 2 back, a very small percentage of our customer base, less than 2% of our customer base that was buying those upgrades. It didn’t really make sense to us to maintain the complexity for that small percentage of our customer base.

I think that it’s an interesting point that we’re in because if you go back far enough in time, and you don’t have to go back that far, about 8 or 9 years I guess, with Subscription we could have been arguing the other extreme. We could have been arguing that, “My goodness, why are you making me pay for upgrades?”, and this Subscription thing either didn’t exist or it was very, very expensive. And then we designed Subscription to actually be very cost-effective, to be the most cost-effective to get access to this technology. So it’s an interesting inversion. I think it would be an interesting mind-experiment to wonder what would happen if we took away our Subscription pricing tomorrow, which is typically somewhere between 10% and 18% of list price of the product, depending on the product and the market. If we took that option away tomorrow, I think we actually would create tremendous havoc in the marketplace, because that’s really where the majority of our customers are today in terms of buying our software.

SJ: There are people who do still want to buy upgrades, those who want to have that choice. Do you understand the mindset of people who say, “I want to see what the product is before I pay for it”?

CC: I can appreciate that sentiment. I’d like to believe that our 25+ years of history has generally shown that our pace of advancement is generally up and to the right. Certainly there have been hiccups along the way; some releases have more functionality than others, but generally it’s up and to the right. But the customers who wish to do that, I certainly can appreciate that and that’s as good a reason as any for why we’ve kept upgrade and Subscription pricing as opposed to one or the other, because it gives customers a choice. For those customers who tend to want to wait and see, again the vast majority of them are doing it 3 or more versions back. If they’re doing it less than that, they’re on Subscription, by and large. So they still have that option. Even with the simplified upgrade pricing, I think it’s important to point out that we announced it over a year ago, and even today, if a customer goes off Subscription, they have up to a year to retroactively attach it. So the hope is with that timeframe, questions of, “Is the economy going to turn back up?”, those sort of things will be answered. If it takes 2 years for those questions to be answered, well then you’re back to 3 versions back pricing or more, and that has hardly changed, if at all. So I think that those kind of customers that want to wait and see what the product is going to be before they buy it, they have that option.

You have to also realise that there are also other benefits that come from Subscription in addition to the upgrade. Access to our product support teams, access to prior version usage, home use licenses, the prerequisite to global floating network licenses and other types of benefits, those are a very significant proportion of the value.

Callan Carpenter interview 2 – upgrades a tiny minority

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Part 2 of 5 in this series.

SJ: Is there anything specific you want to say about what I have written in my blog?

CC: There are a number of things we can do to put Subscription questions and Simplified Upgrade Pricing into context. I think the first thing we need to recognise is that there is a very small fraction of our revenue that comes from upgrades at this point in time. For the last 8 years or so, our customers have fairly well self-selected to either prefer to be on Subscription and have the latest version and technology available to them, or to not do that, in which case they tend to upgrade 3 years or more after the current release. We’re down to very low single digits of customers who upgrade, and of those only half of those upgrade 1 or 2 years back. So we’re talking about approximately 1.5% of our revenue that comes from customers upgrading 1 and 2 versions back. And so I think there’s clearly been a natural selection, a natural fallout over time of customers choosing; do I prefer to be on Subscription or do I prefer to pay for an upgrade?

If you look at the real impact of upgrade pricing, the real impact is the customers who prefer to upgrade from 1 or 2 versions back, that’s a very very small percentage of our business. For those who are 3 versions back or more, there’s really no change at all. For subscribers, which is the majority of the customer base, there is no change at all either. I just wanted to start by kind of putting that in perspective.

I think the other thing we should look at is that the history of the Subscription program is one of actually creating more value over time. It started out as simply an upgrade path, a cheaper path to upgrade than buying upgrades. Over time we’ve added more value in terms of additional support options, additional licensing benefits that come with Subscription and later on this year you are going to see things like a very enhanced Advantage Pack program, which started last year.

So as I read through a lot of the blogs, I was struck by a kind of lack of perspective on how the program has grown over time and how very few of our customers were actually buying upgrades.

SJ: There are some of your customers that don’t have any option but to be on Subscription, aren’t there? There are some markets and some products where Subscription is compulsory, right?

CC: No, with a few exceptions, I don’t believe we have any compulsory Subscription left. There may be a few in some emerging countries where software piracy is a particular issue, but generally speaking, the vast majority of our customers have the option to either be on Subscription or not.

SJ: For some years here in Australia, if you wanted to upgrade to the latest release, Subscription has been compulsory. Is this unique to Australia or does this happen elsewhere?

In Australia we do have a unique experiment, but that is fairly unusual. No other country comes to the top of my mind.

SJ: Is this experiment going to continue or does the point become moot now that the price of upgrading has been increased?

CC: I don’t think we’re going to be changing the way we do business in Australia.

What would you ask Autodesk about Subscription and upgrades?

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My post on Autodesk’s new upgrade pricing regime attracted a fair amount of comment, much of it critical of Autodesk.

So, let’s follow this up. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that you had an Autodesk high-up in front of you who was willing to answer questions about Subscription and upgrade policy. What would you ask? Please add a comment here with your question. If you want to do so privately, use the Contact link at the top of the page. I would ask that you keep your question civil, relevant and reasonably concise. Other than that, anything goes, so let’s have ‘em.

I’ve done this before and did get some answers. Although not all of you liked the answers, they were better than no answers at all. I can’t promise that all your questions will be answered this time, but I’ll see what I can do.

Why don’t you use the current release?

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While a lot of you are running one of Autodesk’s current-model products, there will be a very large portion of you that are using something older. This post is addressed to the latter group. Even if you’re on Subscription and have the current release available, but have chosen to keep running an older release, this question is still addressed to you. In fact, even if you’re now using the current release but have avoided installing some releases in the past, so at some stage you didn’t use the current release, I’d still be interested to hear your answer to this question.

Here’s the question:

Why?

Autodesk to more than triple upgrade prices

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As reported at Revit3D.com, next March will see a major change to the way Autodesk prices its upgrades. All upgrades will cost 50% of the full retail price rather than the much smaller percentage that is currently charged. If you upgrade yearly, that means the cost of doing so will be about 3.35 times greater than it is now. Clearly, Autodesk doesn’t want you doing that, and would much prefer you to be tied into the Subscription program, and is introducing some subtle encouragement to nudge you in the right direction.

Here is the rationale according to an Autodesk spokesperson:

I can confirm that after March 16, 2010, a streamlined upgrade pricing model will go into effect–all upgrades, cross-grades, and retroactive Subscription fees up to three releases back will be priced at 50 percent of a full license.

We are doing this to better match the needs and buying behaviors of our customers. A significant number of our customers have already moved to Autodesk Subscription. Only a small percentage of customers who do not have Autodesk Subscription purchase upgrades every year. Most of those customers upgrade every three years.

We believe that simple, straightforward pricing will help make it easier to do business with us. We also believe the new policy will make it more convenient and cost-effective for customers to keep their Autodesk software up-to-date.

So now you know, it’s being done for your own good. Happy?

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Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects