Tag Archives: Andrew Anagnost

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1

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Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the first part of David’s interview, which covers his career.

It’s a long career, so this is a loooong post! Strap in tight for a candid discussion of solar plants, a couple of US Presidents, primeval Autodesk University, Autodesk before and after Lynn Allen, a personal opinion of the current CEO, sailing on an America’s Cup yacht, the Hubble telescope and an inappropriate discussion of hard nipples.

Steve: You’re retired now, right?

David: I’m 67 soon and pretty much retired, but I’m still keeping up with AutoCAD and Inventor, my two primary things. I use Inventor pretty regularly. We’re going to build an addition on the house and I’m still up to speed on it. I’ve been on ADN (Autodesk Developer Network) for years and years; I’m still doing that. But yeah, I’m retired. I say I’ve become unemployable!

Steve: Can you give me a brief outline of the main things you’ve done during your long career?

David: I started out on a drafting board in 1970 and had 10 or 11 years of experience with that. I grew up West of Detroit; the whole southern part of Michigan is automotive industry. You know, Detroit iron. I worked a lot in automotive tooling, all on paper and pencil.

Then in ’78 I moved from Detroit to Denver, Colorado and was there for 40 years until just last month. In 1976, then-President Carter commissioned a Solar Energy Research Institute and I went around and visited all of the candidate cities for this new Institute and it ended up in Denver. I had visited and interviewed with the company there, and this was even before the Institute had been officially commissioned and opened. So this company called me back and moved me all the way across the country and I went to work for them. They built equipment, so the Institute is like a think-tank and they contracted out to manufacturers around the area. We built a lot of hardware. So I was building solar energy R&D stuff back in 1980/81.

Then Regan got elected and he was anti-solar and he cut all of those programs so I ended up being out of a job after a couple of years. So I ended up in aerospace. There were two or three big aerospace companies in Denver. Long story short, I ended up working on the Hubble telescope. That was still working on paper and pencil!

In ’81 we got CAD training, they brought in a big CAD system. I got pretty adept at that. It was about ’84 or ’85, AutoCAD started to pop up and PCs were just starting to appear. Literally showing up on people’s desks. I immediately took off on that; I could see that was where everything was headed.

I hooked up with my first Autodesk University in, was it 92? One of the really very first AUs, and I remember it was in the parking lot, there on McInnis Street. They had a little tent; there were only a couple of hundred people there.

Steve: Sorry David, which city was this?

David: This is in San Rafael, right at the Autodesk headquarters, there on McInnis Street [Parkway]. Ever been out there?

Steve: Yes.

David: And everybody stays at that Embassy…?

Steve: Embassy Suites, yes. Good breakfasts!

David: Yes, and this was in that parking lot. They had a tent and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and ten classes. I don’t think Lynn Allen worked there yet. I can’t remember her being there.

Steve: Wow!

David: I remember Autodesk before Lynn Allen! Now we’re in a world with an Autodesk without Lynn Allen.

Steve: Yes, it’s bizarre, isn’t it?

David: Yes. It’s like the company’s got a whole different… have you spoken with Lynn? Chatted with Lynn about any of this?

Steve: I’ve been in touch. I haven’t spoken to her personally but we’ve sent messages back and forth.

David: It’s pretty ugly. There are a bunch of people who are pretty pissed off. This Anagnost, the new CEO, a lot of people think there’s a vendetta going on. There’s a lot of people he… I don’t know if you know anything about this Anagnost or have met him before, but I worked with him over the years. He was an OK guy but he was just a real cold… you know, I don’t know how to describe him. But a lot of people think there was a lot of animosity, that he’s kind of venting, getting rid of people he didn’t like. Because he came up through the ranks, he’s been there many years.

So anyway, back about me!

Steve: So you went to the first AU at San Rafael?

David: The very first or one of the first. I also remember going to the one in San Francisco, and Phil Kreiker was the President. I remember him making a bunch of rude remarks: an inappropriate monologue! I guess you had to be there. It was the kind of stuff you wouldn’t have expected to hear from somebody…

Steve: I may have actually been there. I went to the ‘95 one in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.

David: I remember one being at the Bill Graham Center. The one where he said he was so excited his nipples were hard! I always remember that.
Was that the one where they brought him in, in a straitjacket?

Steve: Ah, great. No, I didn’t see that, that sounds fun!

David: So you’ve been around this stuff for a long time too?

Steve: Yeah, Version 1.4 was my first AutoCAD. I worked for an AutoCAD dealer, the first AutoCAD dealer, here in Western Australia as the demo jock and sales support and specialist and so on. Yeah, that was ’85.

David: I bought AutoCAD 11. I’d been working on a big mainframe system. Computervision was the big player at the beginning, and they had a model space/paper space paradigm and that was the first thing I worked on in 3D, and it was model space/paper space and AutoCAD was just a flat 2D tool. When they came out with 11, that was when they first came out with paper space. That was a paradigm I was comfortable with, so I ended up buying 11 and left my cushy aerospace job.

I had been there ten years and I had the same job the day I left as the day I got there. It was a big company and it was really difficult to move forward. At that time the IT guys were managing the CAD system. Because it was a computer, you know? And they weren’t figuring out that a CAD Manager and an IT Manager were not the same thing. There were no CAD Managers, they didn’t understand the whole business yet.

So I proposed that I become the first CAD Manager in the place because I saw the job and everybody else kind of saw it, too. So I had to politic for that job for about three years. We were really struggling, we had these IT guys who didn’t know… they just couldn’t support us. We were just floating around, trying to figure out our methods and operations and the IT guys weren’t any help at all.

So finally after three years, my boss got a promotion and I got a new boss and he immediately said, “I know what you’re talking about and I’m going to go to Human Resources and fight for this position.” So they posted it, interviewed three people and gave the job to somebody else!

So I just threw up my hands, went and bought AutoCAD 11 and struck out on my own. We had some guys who spun off from the company earlier and one of them at the time was… the company I worked for, their speciality was optical sensing. They built a lot of Earth observation satellites. They built (and still) some of the most advanced satellite on the planet. As a matter of fact, right now every instrument on the Hubble telescope was built by this company. So the last four or five contracts they have won every contract to replace every instrument. Ball Aerospace.

Anyway, a couple of people had spun off that company and I went to work for them. Half a dozen consultants, you know, a small company. This one guy won a contract with the Italian America’s Cup sailing team. His specialty was wind shear detection. He developed a system where the vector and velocity of the wind could be mapped up to 2 km ahead of the craft, and he sold it to the Italians. We were trying to build this thing and put it on the Italian boat. This was in San Diego in ’92 or ’93.

Shortly before the race, the sanctioning body ruled it out. We spent all this money and they said, “Nah, you can’t do that.” Apparently the rule was, you couldn’t communicate with the boat. So they couldn’t communicate ship to shore. What I remember is that we were gathering our own data autonomously. But they said, “Nah, you still have such an advantage.” I actually got on the boat for a short time. I learned very quickly that if you’re not part of the racing team you’re just in the way. There’s no place for you to be.

So after that I ended up hooking up with the dealer network in Denver, the Rocky Mountain region. This is in the 90s. I would go around and do training with the dealer network. On several occasions I would go in on a long term contract. They would have a big sale, a big installation of a dozen or so seats, and I would go in and be an employee on a contract basis. I would go in and be there like everybody else for three or four months. I’d get them up to speed.

That was always bizarre. There would be a political nightmare. There would be people who didn’t want to be on CAD, or didn’t like this software, they would rather have SolidWorks or something else, and they fought tooth and nail, and it was crazy. There were people who really didn’t like me, just because I represented, I was trying to teach them this software. I told them, “This is not about me! Your management made this decision. If you want to work here you’re going to have to live with it! I’m not the cause of your problems.”

That’s pretty much how I ended my career. I just got tired of that, I didn’t need to work any more and my wife’s career bloomed later in her life, about 45 or 50 and she had a great career from 45 on, so for about 20 years she was really the breadwinner, so I was really the playboy.

Steve: You were a “kept man”!

David: Yeah, I really said that. But I was still working.

I had a couple of really bad experiences at the end. Just a bad employer. We had a solar company that established their North American engineering center in Denver. They built the world’s biggest solar power plant in Arizona. A Spanish company with a North American engineering office. They built several really big solar power plants, but that was a really horrible place to work. We were micromanaged from Spain and they had some of the worst CAD implementations I’ve ever seen. I tried to turn them around, and it was just unbelievable what they were doing. You’re familiar with the technology. Are you civil, or electrical, or…

Steve: Mostly mechanical. I have worked for an architect but my background is in mechanical engineering. I actually started my career at a drop forging company that made a lot of automotive parts, so fairly similar to your start.

David: In my really early days, I worked in a General Motors plant. It had been a bomber plant during World War II, making bomber aircraft. Right underneath my office was a drop forge. It just sat there all day, just WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! My cup of coffee was always wiggling! It was never still, it always had a wave in it.

Back to this company, they were managing Inventor files like AutoCAD files, with the revision letter changing the file name. That broke the assembly in Inventor, but they couldn’t get that concept. There was this confrontation thing and they quietly walked me out the door. They gave me a really nice letter that basically said, “Just go away.”

I said, “I really don’t want to do this any more” so I stopped working. That was about 2011.

There was one more job I had after that. I worked in a company that was using Inventor and made ambulance helicopters. They would take a standard helicopter, fully fitted, with every component certified, and tear it apart, strip it out. We would build new panels and fit all this medical equipment. That was probably the best paying job I ever had! But that’s when I got tired of it. That was a young man’s job and I was 62 or 63. They wanted me to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and I just couldn’t do it.

So I gave it up!

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

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Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on.  That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

Why One AutoCAD is smart strategy

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OK, so Autodesk may have blown the AutoCAD 2019 rollout, triggering an apology from CEO Andrew Anagnost.

OK, AutoCAD 2019 may have the smallest set of significant advances in the history of AutoCAD releases. If you’re wondering, I give it 1/10. The “there can be only one” hype could easily refer to meaningful improvements to the product per year. This year’s improvement is… drawing compare!

Still, AutoCAD 2019 is a significant release for reasons beyond the content of the core product. An examination of the One AutoCAD strategy reveals a collective corporate mind that’s smarter than it’s being given credit for.

In case you’ve missed it, the idea behind One AutoCAD is that if you subscribe to AutoCAD, you can now also get a bunch of vertical variants of AutoCAD thrown in, renamed as “Toolsets”. You need to ask for it, and it’s for renters only, no perpetual license owners need apply. Oh, and Civil 3D isn’t part of the deal.

This concept has been received less than enthusiastically among respected independent observers such as Ralph Grabowski and Robert Green. I’m going to go against the trend a little and point out several ways in which this is a smart move for Autodesk.

  • It represents the first time Autodesk has had anything of substance to positively differentiate between maintenance and subscription. Until now, it’s all been negative: give away your perpetual licenses to avoid forthcoming maintenance price increases.
  • It provides some substance to Dr Anagnost’s “give us a year to show the value of subscription” request to customers. OK, it may have taken a lot more than a year, but at least it’s now possible to point to something that customers can gain by subscribing, rather than having the embarrassment of an empty promise hanging around.
  • It acts as an effective distraction from yet another price rise (7% on top of Autodesk’s already sky-high subscription costs). Yes, this new price still applies even if you don’t use the toolsets. Yes, it still applies even if you’re a Mac user who doesn’t have these toolsets available.
  • It will almost certainly be used as justification for future subscription price rises. How can you complain about a few more dollars when you get all those products included in the price?
  • This stuff has already been developed to a point that Autodesk considers mature (web apps excluded), and it isn’t costing Autodesk anything to “give it away”.
  • It means that the glacial or non-existent rate of improvement of AutoCAD and its variants suddenly appears less important. How can you complain that nothing worthwhile has been added to your AutoCAD variant this year when you now have access to hundreds more commands than you used to have? This line has already been tried with me on Twitter.
  • It provides a marketing counter-argument against competitors who sell DWG-based AutoCAD-compatible products that provide above-AutoCAD standards of functionality (e.g. BricsCAD).
  • If an increased number of users start using the vertical variants, there will be increased pressure on those competitors to handle the custom objects created using those variants. This will act as a distraction and reduce the ability of those competitors to out-develop Autodesk at the rate that has been occurring for the past few years.

There are a couple of flies in Autodesk’s One AutoCAD ointment:

  • Critical mass – it has yet to be seen how many customers are so won over by this concept that they sign up for it. Remember that it’s only available to a minority of customers anyway, and if the bulk of customers remain reluctant to give up their perpetual licenses then all this is moot. If the move-to-rental numbers are small, then the anti-competitive nature of this move is negated. The marketing gains still apply, though.
  • Interoperability – traditionally, the AutoCAD-based verticals add custom objects to the core AutoCAD objects, which when opened in vanilla AutoCAD or another vertical, appear as proxy objects that either don’t appear or will provide very limited access. Improved but still limited access can be provided if Object Enablers are installed. Object Enablers are not always available for the AutoCAD variant you want to use. LT? Mac? Old releases? Forget it.This has always been a highly unsatisfactory arrangement. I have worked for a company that explicitly prohibits drawings containing proxy objects and rejects any it receives, and that has proven to be a smart policy. Also, the vertical variants of AutoCAD have always had hidden DWG incompatibilities built in. AutoCAD 2015 user? Try to use a DWG file that has been created in a 2017 vertical variant. Good luck with that, even though all those releases supposedly use 2013 format DWG. Paradoxically, you can expect to experience much better DWG interoperability with non-Autodesk products and their add-ons than you will with AutoCAD and its verticals, because the non-Autodesk products are forced to work with AutoCAD native objects. It remains to be seen how, when, or even if Autodesk addresses these issues.

In summary, this strategy has potential to significantly benefit Autodesk. Will it work? That will largely depend on how many customers are prepared to put aside their mistrust enough to hand over their perpetual licenses to Autodesk. That mistrust is mighty large (Autodesk’s been working hard for years on building it up) and recent sorry-we-broke-your-rental-software events have reiterated just how valuable those perpetual licenses are.

Autodesk has produced what it considers to be a very attractive carrot. Is it big and juicy enough to attract you?

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has sent an email to customers affected by the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster that acted as a remote kill-switch for users of earlier releases of subscription software. The email’s subject is We Missed the Mark:

Image credit: R.K. McSwain

Readers of this blog will be aware that Andrew and I have fundamental disagreements on where he has taken the company, but credit where credit is due. An apology was appropriate in this case, and Andrew stepped up and made one.

He has also stated on Twitter that it won’t happen again. I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

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.

ADSK bubble trouble

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Autodesk has now recorded ten successive quarters of losses totaling $1.289 billion.

Autodesk’s share price had been rapidly rising during the previous nine lossy quarters. If last quarter’s $119.8 million loss was business as usual, why did the ADSK share price plummet? At the time of writing, it’s $23.65 down on its pre-Q3-results high.

Alongside the usual we’re-doing-great stuff in the Q3 announcement, Autodesk announced big layoffs, with another 13% of the workforce to go. Merry Christmas, employees. This follows on from another 10% who were axed last year. Don’t think I’m gloating about this. I’m not; these are real people with real jobs, many of them undoubtedly very good people, and they have my sympathy.

But doesn’t the market love companies cutting jobs? Maybe not when the bill is going to be $135 to $149 million when the CEO states it’s not going to cut costs anyway:

Every penny generated reinvested back in the company – just in different areas: digital infrastructure and construction products. We’ll hire at least that number back. Not cost cutting. Rebalancing.

It may not have helped if traders noticed the Autodesk CFO selling stock on 24 November, a few days before the 2018 Q3 financials were out? This was smart, because he made about $113,000 more on that transaction than he would have if he had sold on 29 November. I’m not suggesting there was anything improper about this, but it was hardly a confidence-inspiring move.

Edit: From R. Scott Herren via Twitter: “…that sale was a 10b5-1 planned sale setup more than 6 months ago. You can find that info on the SEC filing.”

But I suspect it’s just Autodesk’s ongoing failure to pull itself out of the loss trough and desperate-looking need to shed workers that has started to erode confidence in the veracity of its repetitive “Another Great Quarter!” narrative. Maybe the market has started to look a bit deeper than just giving Autodesk a simplistic “it’s OK, revenue always dips when moving to subscription” free kick? Maybe the oft-quoted “new subscriptions” metric has lost its shine as it becomes apparent that subscription numbers aren’t directly proportional to income?

I’ve said it before, but ADSK ain’t ADBE. Different products, different customers, different history, different pricing strategies, different results.

Autodesk’s high-price strategy with poor customer acceptance and big losses differs markedly from Adobe’s low-price strategy with reasonable customer acceptance and merely reduced profits during the transition. Here is Adobe’s record, before and after giving up selling perpetual software licenses. Note the lack of red ink.

All is not well with Autodesk’s subscribe-or-GTFO plan, and it looks like people other than customers have started to notice. Autodesk’s bubble has been pricked and some rapid deflation has occurred. Time will tell whether this is a blip or a trend.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial analyst. This is not financial advice. Make your own decisions.

AutoCAD 2018.1 released, but only for some

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Autodesk has released the AutoCAD (and LT) 2018.1 Update, not to be confused with the earlier ill-fated 2018.0.1 Update. It’s only available for currently-paying subscription and maintenance customers. The “non critical” bug fixes in this Update (by Autodesk’s definition) are being withheld from Autodesk’s other customers.

Those of you who have allowed your maintenance to expire due to Autodesk’s development inaction and unjustified price increases can consider yourselves duly punished for failing to fall into line.

If you have the execrable Autodesk desktop app installed (not recommended) and it works as expected, this update will present itself to you. Otherwise, get it from your Autodesk Account page. Go to Management > AutoCAD > 2018 Downloads > Updates & Add-ons and then pick the appropriate AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download.

It has yet to be seen whether this update will break things, so if you’re feeling nervous you might want to hold off for a while and let others find out for you. (Edit: it broke one person’s AutoCAD, see comment from R.K. below).

Weighing in at well over 400 MB, the AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download is about twice the size of a complete BricsCAD download, even before expansion. So it must contain a pretty impressive amount of stuff, right? Or is it all bloat? Well, it includes 2018.0.1 and 2018.0.2 and adds this:

  • Xref Layers Override – Improvements to Xref Layers make it easier to identify overrides and restore them to their default values.
  • Views and Viewports – A new Named Views panel is added to the View tab to make it easy to create and restore named views from the ribbon, and to create scaled views and viewports for your layouts. The new layout viewports are automatically assigned a standard scale that can easily be changed from a new scale grip on the viewport. Viewport grips have been enhanced.
  • High Resolution Monitor Support – Supports additional dialog boxes. Palettes and icons are correctly adjusted to the Windows setting for the display scale.
  • 3D Graphics Performance – Work on performance continues to optimize the speed of 3D display for the Wireframe, Realistic, and Shaded visual styles.

The user interface has been touched up to support the above changes. The Preview Guide has been prepared to the usual excellent standard.

That’s all useful stuff, and most welcome. Work has gone into providing some genuinely useful adjustments. But there’s not a lot of it. Autodesk is still just tinkering at the edges.

Overall, AutoCAD 2018.1 is a pretty minor mid-term update, falling a long way short of, say, Release 13c4. That update was shipped on CD to all customers. Free. No maintenance or subscription required.

Bricsys does much more significant and worthwhile mid-term updates than this, and doesn’t charge for them. Perpetual license owners, even those not on maintenance, get them for nothing. Along with the bug fixes. Which are properly documented.

Autodesk used to do all that too, but its customer service has since regressed to the point that the standards of the Release 13 days are something to yearn for. Long-term Autodesk customers will know just how damning that state of affairs is. Autodesk lags a long way behind not only the competition, but also its former self.

Autodesk CEO and all-rental architect Andrew Anagnost has asked Autodesk customers to give him a year to prove that his business model will provide them with better value. It’s not clear when that year was supposed to start, but the all-subscription start date of 1 August 2016 seems reasonable. However you reckon it, a big slab of that year is gone and there’s very little to show for it.

Time to get your finger out, Andrew.

Autodesk now has only one CEO

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The speculation is over. Autodesk no longer has Schrödinger’s CEO. Elon Musk has missed out, the winner is…

Andrew “Baked Beans” Anagnost!

 
Here’s the press release and here’s a letter from Andrew.

The other obvious internal candidate, Amar Hanspal, has decided to leave the company. Resigned on the spot, so I’m told. As the financial rewards for winning the CEO race are akin to winning the lottery, coming second must have been a major disappointment to product guy Amar, who I first met when he was helping to drive the hugely successful Release 14 program. Best wishes to Amar for the future and congratulations to Andrew.

In this welcome video, Andrew talks a lot about products; he seems to be trying to shake off the “marketing guy” image.

Unsurprisingly, he makes it clear that he’s still very keen on the troubled cloud and subscription strategies he has been instrumental in pushing within Autodesk. Expect no respite there, then.

Andrew wants to hear from you, though:

And to our partners and our customers, I’m looking forward to listening to all of you as well, and understanding what you love and what you would like to improve about Autodesk.

 
I know Andrew reads this blog, so go ahead and let him know what you love and what you would like to improve.

ADSK celebrates two full years of losses

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Autodesk Reports Strong First Quarter Results, says the press release.

Autodesk co-CEO Amar Hanspal:

Broad-based strength across all subscription types and geographies led to another record quarter for total subscription additions and a fantastic start of the new fiscal year. Customers continue to embrace the subscription model, and we’re expanding our market opportunity with continued momentum of our cloud-based offerings, such as BIM 360 and Fusion 360.

 
Autodesk co-CEO Andrew Anagnost:

We’re executing well and making significant progress on our business model transition as evidenced by our first quarter results. We’re starting the year from a position of strength and are excited to kick off the next phase of our transition when we offer our maintenance customers a simple, cost effective path to product subscription starting next month.

Thanks to this fantastic progress into the exciting new customer-embraced rental-only business model, Autodesk has now recorded eight successive strong quarters of losses totalling $969 million. Another strong quarter like this one will see those losses exceed a billion dollars, and then it will really be time to crack open the champagne.

Here’s how those results look. Green shows profit; red shows loss. The black lines are trend lines. The thick one is linear, the thin one is a 4-quarter moving average.

Here’s an Adobe graph for comparison; it covers a wider date range. The linear trend line is not directly comparable because the Adobe graph includes a recovery phase which Autodesk has yet to enter.

Both graphs represent GAAP results that do not reflect deferred revenue (money that is received but not counted immediately). Autodesk is still making a loss in non-GAAP terms, but a smaller one than shown in the graph. Full details of Autodesk’s financials are available here. Make your own financial decisions based on your own interpretations and/or using the advice of parties better qualified than myself.

Teresa from Autodesk in subscription interview

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As a follow-up to the Pixel Fondue video I posted about earlier, Greg from Pixel Fondue conducted a follow-up interview with Teresa Anania, Autodesk’s Senior Director, Subscription Success.

Greg and I asked for your questions for Teresa and I passed on several of my own to him. A word of warning: don’t do as I did and watch through all 54 minutes waiting increasingly impatiently for those questions to come up. They don’t. Anyway, thanks to Greg for conducting this interview and to Teresa for participating.

Greg has now posted the video. Here’s the TL;DW (too long; didn’t watch) version:

  • Greg came up with some suggestions for making subscription more attractive (mainly to entertainment and media customers) and Teresa seemed open to those suggestions.
  • Teresa doubled down on a bunch of the spin that has been thoroughly skewered by myself and many others.
  • There was a rehash of the pricing information we already had a couple of months ago using the same figures Teresa provided in this blog post.
  • The one new piece of information was that somebody who switches from maintenance to subscription will be able to retain access to all prior versions held during perpetual license ownership. This could be interpreted in several different ways and it wasn’t clarified, so I guess we’ll have to wait for something in writing.
  • Despite what Teresa has apparently told some customers on the phone, there was no mention of a less unattractive subscription offer that involves keeping your perpetual license. Indeed, Teresa made it clear that trading in your perpetual license was very much still part of the deal.
  • Future costs for maintenance and subscription were as vague as ever but Teresa thinks it’s pretty impressive that Autodesk put out three years of pricing when asking customers to make a decision with decades-long implications.
  • Teresa wants you to give Autodesk a year to prove how wonderful subscription will be, and is very confident that subscription is for “the greater good”. (Andrew Anagnost also did the “give us a year” thing on Twitter so I guess we’ll see that theme repeated in an attempt to buy more time).
  • She has solemnly stated that Autodesk is never going to gouge its customers and wants to start building better relationships.
  • Teresa wants to hear from you and suggests the Autodesk Moving to Subscription forum as one way of getting in touch.

Here’s the video:

Welcome to the new bosses…

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…same as the old Bass.

If you’re hoping the change at the top of Autodesk is going to result in a change to the all-rental business model, abandon that hope now. In this nodding-heavy video, temporary co-CEOs Amar Hanspal (product guy) and Andrew “Baked Beans” Anagnost (marketing guy) confirm it’s full steam ahead. Not unexpected, really.

If either of these guys is selected as CEO (my money’s on Amar), the rental push will continue. Don’t expect to be saved by an incoming CEO, either. The Autodesk board won’t appoint a non-believer.

If you won’t abandon your perpetual licenses, you’ll need to abandon Autodesk.

Return of the bullshit – baked beans edition

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In an October 2015 post I’ve only just noticed, snappily titled No More Software Like a Can of Baked Beans: Why Software Subscription Serves It Up Fresh, Autodesk VP (edit – now CEO) Andrew Anagnost bravely attempts to sell Autodesk’s move to all-rental software. This is a rather belated response, but fortunately there is no statute of limitations on skewering spin so let’s get started.

How does he go? On a positive note, top marks for creative writing! The general theme is a strained and somewhat Californian analogy in which perpetual licenses are like canned goods (bad), and rental is like fresh produce (good). However, it’s presented well and professionally written. Among the highlights are:

  • Perpetual software licenses are like high-fructose corn syrup – no, I’m not making this up. Stop laughing at the back there!
  • This is a change that is simply a better experience for everyone – everyone who likes the experience of paying more for less, that is.
  • It’s to create a better product, something tailored to customers – creating a better product seems beyond Autodesk, at least where AutoCAD is concerned. Actually, it’s to create a more expensive product. Tailoring is something we customers been doing for over 30 years without the use of rental software, thanks.
  • There will be less disruption – except a) how we pay for the product is independent of how/when the product is updated and the disruptions inherent in that, and b) even ignoring the erroneous conflation, it’s a mistake to assume that continuous updates are less disruptive. Recent history proves otherwise.
  • Companies (e.g. Autodesk) will work even harder to keep you happy as a rental customer – history gives the lie to this one, too; the closer Autodesk has got to this model and the more people have been locked into annual subscription/maintenance payments, the worse the value for money has become. It also ignores the various alternative ways Autodesk will use to try to keep you tied in. What do you think all that Cloud investment has been for?
  • Autodesk is focusing on helping customers succeed with its products and services – I don’t think so. Autodesk is focusing on trying to keep its shareholders happy.
  • Serial numbers are a terrible dehumanizing thing, rental will make them go away and relying on Autodesk’s internet expertise for Cloud-based licensing is a much more attractive proposition – serial numbers are fine, that’s just silly. There are a host of unnecessary problems introduced by Cloud-based licensing, even when dealing with companies that aren’t as crap at the Internet as Autodesk (e.g. the Redshift site won’t even let me scroll back up once I’ve scrolled past the end of the post). The idea of Autodesk disposing of serial numbers and implementing a phone-home scheme instead is pretty terrifying, and I can only hope that technical issues prevent it from ever reaching production. Mind you, the fact that some new thing is clearly unfinished to the point of uselessness doesn’t seem to prevent Autodesk releasing it these days, so who knows? Hmm, I feel another post coming on about this…
  • Autodesk will make all your customization work for you on all computers and other devices wherever you go – let’s put aside for a moment Autodesk’s total failure to even provide a usable vanilla AutoCAD on the Cloud so far. CAD Managers, would any of you care to hop in and let Andrew know what’s wrong with this picture?
  • Constant automatic incremental updates are like reading news articles daily and much more convenient than larger upgrades which are like getting a whole year’s worth of news at once – again, this makes the fatal error of conflating payment and upgrade delivery methods. Putting that aside, if we’re talking about virus definitions and OS or browser security hole fixes, then yes, automatic updates are the way to go. CAD software, not so much. Particularly software from Autodesk, given the incompetence shown to date in its attempts to make this model work. Even putting aside the practicalities, I could do a whole long post on why this concept is all wrong. Maybe I will later. Meantime, Andrew needs to talk to some CAD Managers to get some idea of how the real world works.
  • “OK, so there’s still the major elephant in the room: What about the cost?” – good of you to mention that elephant, tell me more.
  • For customers, there is real financial advantage by eliminating that huge upfront payment. – For some customers, yes. Not so many, though. Short-term customers are the minority. What about the millions of long-term users who would have their annual costs blown sky-high by falling into your rental trap? Andrew, I see you mentioned the elephant in the room and then tried to avoid meaningful discussion of it, giving the impression you had addressed the issue without actually doing so. Sorry, but I noticed. Care to try again? Tell me more about how you expect either a) customers to be better off by paying more, or b) Autodesk to be better off despite customers paying less. Pick either one of those and run with it, I’m sure it will be entertaining.
  • “And if you don’t need a product for months at a time, switch it off, and then switch it back on. It will be there ready and waiting for you” – strange, that kind of flexibility seems to work for perpetual licenses too, at a fraction of the long-term cost of rental. No guarantee that flexibility is a reality for rental products, though, because the vendor may not provide that product when I need it, or may have racked up the prices to exorbitant levels, or may have introduced new incompatibilities or other technical problems. Oh dear, the boot is very much on the other foot with that argument.
  • “After three years, software becomes obsolete…” – er, no. Many people (myself included) are happily productive using at least some software more than three years old. Some of it works better than the newer stuff. Hands up all those people who couldn’t possibly live without the latest version of Word or Excel, for example. Anyone? Didn’t think so.
  • “…and the pace of obsolescence is rapidly increasing” – if we’re talking Autodesk software, then the pace of obsolescence is doing the opposite. AutoCAD improvement has slowed almost to a halt, for example. There is little in any of the last few releases that gives an AutoCAD 2017 user a significant productivity advantage over an AutoCAD 2013 user, say. And anyone using AutoCAD 2010 or earlier has a much more efficient Help system than that provided in any of the last 7 releases. I guess that’s the kind of anti-progress that happens when you sack a bunch of knowledgeable people every few years and divert too many of the remaining resources to trendier projects that you end up junking anyway.
  • Customers of Autodesk can continue to renew their maintenance contracts for as long as they want – except that Carl Bass has now indicated otherwise. Andrew, maybe have a word with your boss and get back to me on that one?
  • “The company is always listening to how to improve the transition and setting out for the long road, not the short win” – except rental is all about the opposite: short term savings that cost big in the long term. And don’t get me started on the irony of claiming Autodesk is “always listening” while promoting an all-rental scheme that goes against the very clearly expressed wishes of customers.
  • “It’s this beautiful kind of world where things are connected and work together better” – does it have rainbows and unicorns, too? Strewth. Come off it, Autodesk is rubbish at CAD interoperability, even among the AutoCAD-based products. Why should anyone who’s been struggling with poxy proxy objects for a couple of decades believe that paying differently is going to act as some kind of magic spell to make everything exquisite in CAD Connectivity Kingdom?

Here’s the TL;DR version of my response to Andrew’s arguments if you can’t be bothered reading all that:

Bullshit.

 
What are the real reasons Autodesk is going all-rental?

  • Autodesk wants to charge us long-term users three times as much money for the same thing and leave us with nothing at the end of it.
  • Autodesk thinks we’re all stupid and don’t own calculators.
  • Adobe did this and made it work, and Autodesk thinks it can do likewise despite significant business differences, much higher prices and an untrusting customer base.
  • Autodesk has run out of motivation and/or ideas to improve its traditional cash-cow flagship products, to the extent that customers increasingly no longer see value in upgrades or maintenance.
  • Increasing income by product improvement is way too difficult; price gouging and spin is much cheaper.

I’ll conclude with my own strained analogy:

Autodesk spin is like a tin of baked beans. No matter how attractive the packaging, the end result is just a bad smell.