Category Archives: Advertising

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.

When is a global offer not a global offer?

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Confusion reigned yesterday when my post on Autodesk’s “FY17 Q3 Global Field Promotion” assumed that Global meant what it said, and the offer made to me in Australia was the same as in other countries. That was a mistaken assumption, and I have updated the post to reflect that; my apologies for the confusion.

That said, it was a not entirely unreasonable assumption given the superficial similarity between offers worldwide and the following in Autodesk’s fine print in multiple global Autodesk sites:

Offer available from 7 August 2016 through 21 October 2016 worldwide with the exception of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria

The situation is not that simple. There are two very different offers that look the same at first glance. People in some countries get a much better offer than others. The offer I discussed in yesterday’s post allows you to continue your ownership and use of the old perpetual license serial number you submit:

Can customers continue to use the perpetual license after they purchase the discounted 3-year subscription?
Yes, customers may continue to use the license they have submitted, however they may not submit the license a second time to receive a promotional discount.

Let’s call this offer A. From the Q&A section of the Australian offer page:
autodeskperpetualoffer01The offer available to most of the world is much weaker. You must trade in your old perpetual license serial number and not use the software any more, even after the rental period is over:

Can customers continue to use the perpetual license after they purchase the discounted 3-year subscription?
No. As part of the terms and conditions of this offer, the customer agrees to trade-in the eligible perpetual license serial number(s) and no longer use any seats associated with that serial number(s).

Let’s call this offer B. From the Q&A section of the Americian offer page:
autodeskperpetualoffer02Who gets which offer?

  • Australia and New Zealand gets offer A. Hong Kong, offer A. The Singapore offer is confusing because the expected “You get to keep your perpetual license” dot point is missing from the top of the page, but if you burrow down a little you will discover it is also offer A.
  • The Americas and Europe (mostly) get offer B.
  • The Russian, South African and Turkish sites have no apparent sign of either offer. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough.

So it looks as if only the Asia Pacific region currently gets offer A. I use the disclaimer “currently” because the Internet is not a fixed resource and things change. If you’re reading this post after October 21, you’ll probably find my links point to some completely different offers and things will get even more confusing.

Why do things differently in different places? In the past, Autodesk has used the Asia Pacific market experimentally for possible new marketing strategies, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here. My guess is that Autodesk is testing the waters in one major market to see if slashing prices and  letting people keep their perpetual licenses is enough to win significant numbers of customers over to rental.

Autodesk is entitled to make whatever offers it likes, wherever it likes. However, two different region-limited offers that look the same, both called a global promotion, and both carrying fine print saying they are available worldwide? That’s going to confuse people, even without my help.

AutoCAD’s ARRAYCLASSIC command is my fault

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Ever wondered why most keep-the-old-version commands in AutoCAD are called CLASSICxxx but the old version of the ARRAY command is called ARRAYCLASSIC? Why can’t Autodesk be consistent for once? Sorry, that’s actually my fault. Here’s a little history.

  • AutoCAD Version 1.4 (1983) introduced the ARRAY command with Rectangular and Circular options.
  • AutoCAD Version 2.5 (1986) added the Polar option and hid the Circular option (but it’s still there).
  • AutoCAD 2005 introduced a dialog box version of the ARRAY command. The command-line version remained available via the -ARRAY command (with a leading hyphen).
  • AutoCAD 2012 introduced many new array features, including associative, path and 3D arrays. However, the dialog box interface was removed and the old command-line interface was back. There were also a bunch of bugs and limitations with the new regime.
  • I created and published the shareware utility ClassicArray™ to restore a familiar dialog box interface to AutoCAD’s array features. Rather than simply reproducing the old interface, I enhanced it to provide support for the new array features. I was also able to provide a workaround for some of AutoCAD’s array bugs and limitations.
  • By producing and selling a product called ClassicArray I established that as my trademark.
  • In AutoCAD 2012 SP1, Autodesk added the old dialog box interface back to AutoCAD and has left it in ever since. The restored interface did not support any of the new features. Calling the new/old command CLASSICARRAY would have infringed my trademark and I made sure Autodesk was aware of that fact in advance. That’s why ARRAYCLASSIC is called what it is.

Anyway, my ClassicArray exists and I still think it’s usefully better than what Autodesk provides. It has been updated to 1.1.0 to install and work smoothly with all AutoCAD releases from 2012 to 2017. Existing license holders can upgrade for free without my involvement and reuse their registration code with the new version. If you’re interested, hop over to classicarray.com.

Autodesk’s social media consultant spills the beans

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Ever wondered why Autodesk is putting so much emphasis on social media these days? Why AutoCAD needs Facebook and Twitter commands? It’s because Autodesk pays social media consultants lots of money to tell them about the importance of social media, and how to be social and media-ish. In this video, one of those consultants explains the process:

Ralph Lauren – genuinely dumb or trying to be clever?

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One of the blogs I read regularly is Photoshop Disasters, which recently posted a picture of a Ralph Lauren ad. In common with many fashion photos, this showed a skinny model that appeared to have been further skinnified on somebody’s computer to the point that the poor waif was ridiculously deformed. Like this:

LOL - Laugh On Lauren

Nothing out of the ordinary there, then. Under normal circumstances it would have received a few dozen comments and scrolled off the front page in a week or so, because there is no shortage of bad image manipulation out there for the blog to snigger at. The image was reposted at Boing Boing, but it would still have been forgotten in a week.

Except this time, Ralph Lauren prodded its lawyers into action and demanded the image be removed from both sites, issuing a DMCA notice. The DMCA request was spurious, as this is a clear case of fair use of an image for the purposes of criticism. Photoshop Disasters is hosted by Blogspot, which automatically complies with such requests. Boing Boing is not, and instead went on the offensive. They refused to take down the picture, instead reposting it with biting sarcasm. Read it, it’s funny. Ralph Lauren, if you’re reading this, please send me a DMCA notice too. I’m feeling left out.

This led to a flurry of comments, reposts and reports all over the Internet, including here. The comments (running at over a hundred an hour right now) are almost universally mocking of Ralph Lauren, its legal team, its models and its image manipulation propensities. The criticism goes way beyond the few snipes at a mangled-body image that would have been the case if Ralph Lauren had done nothing. It has moved on to the fashion designer’s ethical standards and those of the fashion industry as a whole for promoting artificially skinny bodies to eating-disorder-vulnerable people.

Now, is Ralph Lauren really that clueless and out of touch, to think that this kind of suppression would work? Or is this actually a deliberate marketing move, using the Streisand Effect to gain free publicity? Maybe, but it’s a deplorable attack on freedom of speech either way, and a boycott is fully justified. I’m not going to buy any of their stuff, ever, and I encourage you to do likewise. To be fair, I was unlikely to be a rich source of income. Even if I were a female with lots of excess money to throw away on clothes that look really awful, there is no way they would ever fit me. Or any living human, from the look of that photo.

AUGI | AEC EDGE magazine published

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More AUGI news, but good news this time. The first edition of the on-line magazine AUGI | AEC EDGE has been published by Extension Media. It is available in high- and low-res PDF format, plus an on-line reader. The first issue has 82 pages of almost entirely Revit articles and is very light on for advertising. That’s good in the short term for readers who prefer editorial content over advertising, but in the long term the advertising ratio will have to ramp up to ensure this publication’s ongoing survival.

In the meantime, I commend the advertisers who did contribute to making this publication a reality: Contex, Advanced AEC Solutions, CADzation, Autodesk Catalog, Autodesk Seek / Revit Market and HP (although I may not be so kind to HP in future posts on this blog). I also commend Editor (and AUGI Director) Steve Stafford and his big team of volunteer writers for their efforts.

I see no ads

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I have removed the advertisements from this blog. Not because I worried about people not liking them (they were fairly unobtrusive). Not because they were slowing down the page load times (although they did, a bit). Not even because I felt that they were somehow impinging upon my editorial independence.

No, I removed them because they weren’t generating any income. Not a single cent! I pretty much expected any income to be tiny, and certainly not enough to cover my fairly minor running expenses. It wasn’t tiny, it was totally absent. Experiment over.

Bad Photoshop 4

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Pathetic perspective, courtesy of the work experience person doing Clark Rubber‘s brochure images:

Escher would be proud

The same background is used for another table set. The perspective doesn’t match in that one either, but it’s not as bad as this. Maybe it’s just CAD geeks who notice this sort of thing?

One more to come from this brochure, and it’s the worst one of the lot!

Bad Photoshop 1 & 2

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I’ve mentioned before that I love the Photoshop Disasters blog, and I’ve also mentioned that Clark Rubber has provided me with great service.

Here’s the first of a few posts that combine the two. I recently received a Clark Rubber brochure, and from the look of it (and the web site), Clark Rubber is not receiving the same kind of service from its Photoshop people that it provides to its own customers. I could fill this whole blog with disasters from that one brochure, but here are just a couple for a start.

Water cannon defies logic

Putting aside the awful water spray, the cut-and-paste problems, the strange lighting/shadow issues, the unrealistic water edge and the rest of it, how did that picture of the kid in the pool also manage to appear on the water cannon itself (sans pool and with the toy at a different angle)? Eddies in the space-time continuum, perhaps? He probably is.* My head assplode.

Blade Blaster defies geometry

This magic device not only fires oversized lemons, it also emits a strangely unrealistic jet of water of significantly smaller diameter than the inside diameter of the tube. I must have one!

* Joke stolen from Douglas Adams.

Leech marketing by IMSI – Part 1 – AU

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A while back, I received an email from IMSI, makers of TurboCAD. The information I gained from that email is now public knowledge thanks to an advertisement in AUGI World and other exposure, so I guess I can let you all in on it. Here it is:

Everyone knows AutoCAD is a fixture in our industry.

But is AutoCAD LT? When is the last time AutoCAD LT has really been pushed?

And how about working with Google SketchUp? Doesn’t seem like Autodesk is too keen on that.

Please join us for a special FIRST LOOK of a new CAD application — that is sure to surprise.

Email for appointment [removed]@imsidesign.com or call 1.415.[removed].

FIRST LOOK slots on Tuesday Dec 2nd through Thursday Dec 4th at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Regards,
Bob Mayer
Chief Operating Officer, IMSI/Design, LLC
Tel: 415-[removed]
Cell: 415-[removed]

P.S. For those that can participate, there will be a business card drawing for a Dell laptop — of course, loaded with our new CAD application. For all others, evaluation copies will be provided.

The date and location may seem strangely familar to those of you planning to attend Autodesk University in a week or so. So an Autodesk competitor is using the biggest Autodesk event of the year to market its wares.

In one way, this idea makes perfect sense. There will be a lot of Autodesk customers at that event, so that’s the place to be if you want to steal some.

In another way, it makes no sense at all. The Autodesk customers at AU are likely to be the most loyal customers there are. They have just invested a decent slab of money in attending a training event, one which is very well run, very enjoyable and generally likely to make them feel good about Autodesk. Yes, some of those customers may be disgruntled about some things, but I would wager that the average Autodesk customer is about as gruntled while attending AU as they are ever likely to be. Also, the average AU attendee has a very full calendar and is going to be struggling to find the time to visit a hotel room or whatever to look at something they can download anyway.

There’s another way in which this kind of thing makes no sense; tagging onto somebody else’s event is not a good look. It’s tacky when Bentley does it, it’s tacky when Autodesk does it, and it’s tacky when IMSI does it. Tacky, tacky, tacky. I’m happy to see competition for Autodesk from anybody; ultimately it can only be a good thing for Autodesk customers. But leech marketing? No thanks.

Photoshop disasters blog

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I love this blog:

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

OK, some of the “disasters” are a bit nitpicking, but there are some truly awful image manipulation efforts out there, some associated with very big companies. Look back over the archives, there are some real classics. Lesson to large companies: don’t penny-pinch, it’s not worth it.

I can’t remember any Autodesk marketing image disasters, although some of you may remember being bemused by the relevance of the the short-lived Subscription Cow. The BENTLEY BIN image is pretty funny, though. Does anybody have any other CAD-related examples?

Matt Stein’s Blog and Microsoft’s Mojave Marketing

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Thanks to Shaan Hurley for revealing to the wider world the existence of Ribbon Man Matt Stein’s blog. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a blogging n00b like myself to welcome somebody with a blog four years older than his own, but I’m going to do it anyway. Welcome, Matt (no pun intended).

Some of Matt’s blog posts (particularly the early ones) make for, er, interesting reading, so don’t click if you’re easily offended. Please bear in mind that this is a personal blog, not an Autodesk one.

Matt and I generally get on fine, but we have had some frank exchanges of view and often agree to disagree. One subject where we are unlikely to share the same views is the Microsoft Vista marketing exercise The Mojave Experiment. This is something I planned to post about some weeks ago but then something more important came up and I didn’t bother. Here’s what Matt thinks, and here’s what I think:

While this is a cute marketing ploy and might convince the terminally naive, it pretty obviously qualifies as propaganda rather than any kind of meaningful study. Here’s how it’s done:

Find a selection of people with no experience of a product but with ignorance-based negative feelings about it. Make sure the hardware and software you’re going to show them all works well. Fix up the settings for minimal annoyance. Present an expensively prepared, well-choreographed demo that presents all the best features and none of the worst. Result: oh wow, what a surprise, it’s better than they thought.

A marketing company could reproduce the same results with practically anything if they set it up right. I bet I could do it with Linux, OS X, Windows Me, whatever. Give me Microsoft’s resources and open slather to present things as fairly or unfairly as I like and I will hand you whatever results you request.

For the record, I don’t hate Vista. I have Vista and XP available, dual boot, on hardware that can easily cope with the demands. In my tests on that hardware, Vista runs AutoCAD significantly faster than XP. Vista has been reliable and it looks nice, but I use XP about 95% of the time. Why? A few minor annoyances, but mostly it’s because Vista doesn’t support my mouse fully. Is that Microsoft’s fault or Logitech’s? Who cares? It’s something I have to put up with when I use Vista, therefore I generally avoid using Vista. As Matt rightly points out, Vista has a lot of minor “nice to have” touches, but all of them added together don’t make it worth putting up with a partially functional mouse. Neither do they make it worth buying a new mouse.

Back to the marketing campaign, it reminds me of a productivity “study” paid for by Autodesk an age ago to show how much more productive Release 13 was than Release 12. It was released, accompanied by a poorly worded and deceptive press release (unintentionally deceptive, supposedly), to hoots of derision from a cynical AutoCAD user community. It convinced almost nobody and angered many, and was, all in all, a spectacularly bad idea.

Autodesk marketing people, if by any chance you’re thinking of repeating that old mistake, or even “doing a Mojave” with AutoCAD 2009, please don’t. Just don’t.

Advertising, ethics and editorial freedom

In a recent blog post, Roopinder Tara included this throw-away comment:

Pure bloggers don’t do advertising, so no worry about advertising pressure — the secret and unstated fear of us all in the trade press.

I respect Roopinder, but this kind of “pure blogger” label irritates me. I have an ad on my blog for geeky T-shirts, so I’m an impure blogger? Somebody please explain the reasoning behind that distinction, because I don’t understand it. Even if I accepted (say) Autodesk advertising, the idea that it would have any influence on what I choose to write is ridiculous. Yet I see even more extreme viewpoints presented by some bloggers as the absolute truth. For example, how about this from Matt Lombard?

Advertising a product means that you are beholden to that company for cash or other rewards – you have in essence sold your right of free expression about that product. This is why most ‘professional’ journalists that work for ads don’t have much of value to say, they are whores to corporations.

So, if you accept advertising, or you write for somebody who does, you can’t possibly write impartially? Rubbish! Not just rubbish, but downright insulting rubbish. Maybe Matt would find it hard to remain impartial for fear of losing some pocket money, but I don’t. When I’m writing, advertising never even enters my head. Matt, please stop projecting, it’s not a good look.

Back to Roopinder Tara’s comments about advertising pressure in the trade press. As a writer, all I can say is, what pressure? For a dozen years, I’ve been writing a Cadalyst column that has been known to contain uncomplimentary comments about Autodesk (a major advertiser) and its products. I have never been asked to remove or even slightly tone down any such comments. Not once. I’ve somehow survived for about a hundred and fifty articles while writing this stuff under multiple Publishers, multiple Editors-In-Chief and multiple Managing Editors. In all that time I’ve not heard a single peep from anybody. No columns have been pulled, no comments have been censored, no requests have been made for me to state something in a milder way, nothing. Maybe I’m just lucky?

To be fair, there may possibly be advertising pressure being applied and resisted at higher levels that I know nothing about. Maybe that’s the point. If I, the writer, know nothing about any such pressure, then in the written word where it actually matters that pressure simply doesn’t exist.

Advertising Oops!

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I just spotted this image flash up on a banner advertisement on a CAD-related site. At first glance, I thought it was a nasty Autodesk ad promoting Revit (it’s on top, after all) and unkindly suggesting that Bentley software is only fit for disposal.

Bentley Bin

Then I spotted Bentley logos elsewhere on the ad and worked out that it was supposed to say BENTLEY BIM, not BIN. Even if you blow it up, it still looks more like an N than an M.

Bentley Bin

That’s the trouble with trying to fit a meaningful attention-grabbing image into a small space. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work.