Monthly Archives: September 2012

Autodesk is firing. No, wait! Hiring.

August 2012: Autodesk increases profits, but not as much as expected, and gets rid of 500 people. This sort of thing has happened before, resulting in the loss of good, skilled people, some with many years of priceless and irreplacable experience.

September 2012: Autodesk goes on a recruiting drive.

So, if you want to work for a company that will put you out with the trash the next time reality doesn’t quite match some financial analyst’s estimate, you know where to go. Good luck with that.

AutoCAD Help suckage to continue – confirmed

In a recent post on Between the Lines, Shaan passed on the following response from the AutoCAD Team:

There has been some recent discussions about the built-in help system in AutoCAD 2013, both positive and some criticism.  As our longtime users know, AutoCAD help has been through many evolutions.

We are particularly proud of the new AutoCAD 2013 online learning environment we recently released (AutoCAD Online Help Mid-Year Updates.) This update addressed several user requested fixes and changes, and we will continue to take our direction from our user’s feedback.

We do recognize that the online learning environment may not be the solution for every user, so while we are focused on creating a rich and personalized online experience, we will continue to maintain our current basic offline experience.

(The emphasis is mine). This statement, although couched in marketingspeak, confirms what I’ve had to say on the subject. Here’s my translation into plain English:

AutoCAD 2013 Help sucked, the customers said so, the recent update improved matters somewhat for online users, but the awful old system stays in place for offline users. The offline system is in maintenance mode, and the experience will continue to remain basic (i.e. it will suck long-term).

There’s no mention of correcting this situation; it’s clearly a matter of policy rather than some unfortunate accident.

Today, I was using Autodesk Navisworks Manage 2013. As you might expect from an Autodesk product, it’s powerful but unstable. In addition to the lockups and crashes, it has various bugs and annoyances. In looking for a way of working around one of the annoyances, I delved into the Help system. Strangely enough, this product (much younger than AutoCAD) uses something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned CHM-based Help system. It worked offline. It was quick. It had contents, search and index tabs, and they worked on a Windows 7 64-bit system. It had a hierarchical structure and a breadcrumb bar that helped me understand the context of what I was reading. Using it was, in short, a breath of fresh air.

Memo to Autodesk: if you’re going to try to make online Help look good by mangling offline help, you’re going to have to do this to all your products at once to make it remotely convincing.

I was wrong about AutoCAD 2013 Help, it still sucks

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.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AutoCAD explained

Following my comments on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AutoCAD, Autodesk’s Dieter Schlapfer has sought to explain the reasoning behind it. Here’s what he has to say:

As mentioned previously, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AutoCAD is designed for occasional AutoCAD users and those coming back from their initial training. These are people who just need a base level of knowledge in 2D AutoCAD to get things done, and who don’t necessarily want to become experts. To make future versions more effective, I really want to get some input on the 42 AutoCAD commands, and any descriptions or illustrations that are not clear. Especially valuable to me is feedback coming from occasional users.

Here’s some history. Believe it or not, the 42 commands came first! I kept flaunting this number, which was based on an internal AutoCAD overview class that I taught a while back, in response to people who complained about how hard it is to learn AutoCAD. Based on that interesting number, two of my colleagues made the connection to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the title of which was based on Ken Welch’s book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe (I have the 1986 edition).

Creating a hitchhiker’s guide to AutoCAD was a terrific idea and the next thing I knew, I was writing it. Most of the 42 commands were no-brainer choices, but there were several that I knew would be controversial among experienced AutoCAD users. Based on internal feedback and CIP popularity, I made a number of revisions to my original list but I’m open to being persuaded to make additional changes.

My biggest challenge was handling scaling and layouts. As you know, there are four primary ways to annotate drawings. It was tough, but I ended up choosing the one that was easiest to learn, the trans-spatial method, while giving a nod to the others.

Again, I’m looking for feedback from relatively new and occasional users. Where exactly is the guide weak or confusing, including any illustrations? I already have some things that I definitely want to change moving forward, but if any of you find someone willing to try it out, or if you have strong opinions about something in the guide, please let me know either here or email me directly at dieters@youknowwho.com (for the bots).

AutoCAD 2013 Help shock – it no longer sucks

Some months ago, I gave Autodesk several damn good (and thoroughly well-deserved) thrashings over its hopelessly inadequate AutoCAD 2013 Help system. When Autodesk’s Dieter Schlaepfer responded and asked for feedback, he sure got it. There are 142 comments on that one post to date, most of them leaving nobody under any illusions about how short of the mark the new system was.

There is now an updated version of the AutoCAD 2013 Help system. It has been an interminably long time coming, a fact made far worse by Autodesk’s stubborn refusal to provide a CHM stopgap (which could have easily been done on the ship date with minimal resources if the will had been there), but at least an update is here now. Is it any good, though?

I’ve seen fit to give the online version of the updated system a few minutes of my time and I have to say that it’s now way, way better than it was before. In a remarkable turnaround from current standard Autodesk practice, it would appear that customer feedback has not just been listened to, but actually acted on. Honest! Search results make sense. Performance is generally way better than I expected from an online system. There are links to useful things like lists of commands. Things like forward/back mouse buttons work as expected. Various things I expected to suck, simply didn’t. Huh? What’s going on here?

It’s not all brilliant. There are occasional unexpected pauses, but not to excess. A Douglas Adams fan (Dieter?) is clearly responsible for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AutoCAD. It’s fun, but I’m not convinced it’s particularly useful. The layout is confusing and the content has me somewhat baffled. Is DRAWORDER really one of the first things a beginner needs to know about AutoCAD? Or were there 41 things in someone’s list and that one was thrown in there to make the number up to 42?

That aside, this thing is looking good. Unlike the last effort, I don’t think it deserves Total Existence Failure. But does it just look good in comparison with what went before? Have I been so shocked by apparent adequacy that I have missed some glaring problem? You tell me. Please, give it a fair go and report back on what you think.

If you want to try the offline version, here it is. It’s not immediately obvious, but you’ll need to uninstall the old one first before the new one will install, don’t bother. It’s still the horrible old thing. See I was wrong about AutoCAD 2013 Help, it still sucks for what I think about that.