Tag Archives: Cloud

Autodesk founder outraged by Amazon snatch of cloudy purchases

Autodesk co-founder John Walker (it’s not his fault, he relinquished control of the company many years ago) recently posted this on Twitter:

In a move reminiscent of the infamous removal of Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle devices (which Amazon promised a court it would never repeat), John’s Audible.com (owned by Amazon) audio books, purchased in 2009-2010, simply went away.

John’s reaction was to post a video of harmless inanimate objects being blown away by a powerful firearm, so I think it’s safe to say he was not overly pleased about this turn of events. Can’t say I blame him.

This is a variant of the old joke on those cheesy pre-show anti-piracy ads that have annoyed owners of legitimately purchased videos for many years:

“You wouldn’t steal a car.”
– I would if I could download it.

Amazon’s version goes:

“You wouldn’t steal a book.”
– I would if I could delete it from my server.

OK, Amazon is obviously doing evil here, but what can John do about it? Maybe nothing. As pointed out in a series of responses to John’s post, Amazon considers itself fully entitled to do this. Amazon also allows itself permission to change the rules as and when it sees fit.

Does this sound familiar? It should. “What’s yours isn’t really yours, even if you paid for it. It can go away when we feel like it. We can change the rules when we feel like it. No guarantees. Just keep paying and hope for the best.”

This is why we don’t CAD in the cloud. Or subscription CAD, for that matter. Owning stuff is still important.

Cloudy and/or subscription CAD still adds vulnerabilities

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Remember when I skewered the myth of CAD on the Cloud being available anytime, anywhere? Back then, I pointed out that Autodesk’s infinitely powerful cloud services had managed a grand total of 2 problem-free fortnights out of the preceding 25.

But maybe Autodesk just had a bad year or something. How are things in 2017? Thanks to Autodesk’s health check site with its History option, I can see that so far this year, the grand total of 14-day pages that show no problems is…

Zero.

That’s right, there have been no clean 100%-uptime fortnights at all this year. None. Most of the pages show multiple failures in multiple products. To be fair, the number of problems shown on each page is rather lower than this extreme example from 2016:

Even when there are no technical problems preventing the use of cloud or subscription software, there is always the possibility that it will simply go away. For example, NVIDIA has announced End of Life for its formerly Autodesk-integrated, once-best-thing-ever Mental Ray renderer. As of today, you can’t buy a subscription to Mental Ray standalone or the plug-ins for Autodesk products 3DS Max and Maya. As of today, the NVIDIA site still states apparently unironically that Mental Ray…

…remains the rendering solution you’ve come to count on within Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max

Maybe you shouldn’t count on it too much.

Rendering, with its potential for massively parallel remote processing on multiple other people’s computers, is a relatively attractive cloudy CAD-related function. But if that function becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable, that can make life a little difficult.

Aren’t standalone perpetual licenses a thing of beauty?

Logitech demonstrates the power of the cloud and cops a bloody nose

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I’ve been a pretty satisfied customer of Logitech products for some years. The mice, keyboards, webcams and 3D controllers (branded as 3DConnexion) I’ve used have generally been well designed, well built and long-term software support has usually been very good (with an exception or two). So it’s with some regret that I have to report them as an example of what not to do in customer service.

Logitech recently sent this email to customers of its Harmony Link universal remote control:

This is an important update regarding your Harmony Link. On March 16, 2018,

Logitech will discontinue service and support for Harmony Link. Your Harmony Link will no longer function after this date.

Although your Harmony Link is no longer under warranty, we are offering you a 35% discount on a new Harmony Hub. Harmony Hub offers app-based remote control features similar to Harmony Link, but with the added benefit of the ability to control many popular connected home devices. To receive your discounted Harmony Hub, go to logitech.com, add Harmony Hub to your cart, and use your personal one-time promotional code […] during checkout.

Thank you for being a Logitech customer and we hope you will take advantage of this offer to upgrade to a new Harmony Hub. If you have any questions or concerns about Harmony Link, please email the Harmony customer care team.

Regards,

Logitech Harmony Team

This isn’t just a matter of no longer supporting an old product (and it’s not that old, anyway – it was still sold directly 2 years ago and old retail stock has been sold until a few months ago). It’s a matter of actively disabling all instances of a product from afar, world-wide.

That’s right, Logitech has demonstrated the (destructive) power of the cloud by using it to remotely kill your perfectly functional device. If it’s out of warranty, send Logitech more money for a newer one. No guarantees on how long it will be before the replacement gets the remote kill-switch treatment.

As you might expect, customers weren’t overjoyed at being treated in this way. Threads popped up on the Logitech forums (where the words “class action lawsuit” were auto-censored), Reddit, Twitter, and as comments on various IT news sites that reported on Logitech’s move.

The supposed reason for Logitech’s decision seemed to make no sense:

We made the business decision to end the support and services of the Harmony Link when the encryption certificate expires in the spring of 2018 – we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability. Our system shows this product, which was last sold by Logitech in fall of 2015, had a small active user base.

Such certificates are commonly purchased and renewed by hardware and software companies for relatively tiny amounts of money. It would have cost Logitech less to renew a certificate than it would to have someone write the explanation about why they weren’t doing it. Very odd. As a business decision, it sucks. It also exposes Logitech management as utterly out of touch with the reality in which their customers live.

In a reaction that should have come as a surprise to nobody (but apparently did to Logitech), pretty much everybody gave the company a major roasting. Many people pointed out that such a move would be considered illegal in their countries (including mine), or at best (for Logitech) it would entitle the customer to a full refund from the retailer. Many people promised to never buy anything from Logitech in particular, and any device capable of being remote-bricked in general.

Once it became apparent that this was a major PR disaster, Logitech did a belated partial U-turn and extended the offer of a free replacement to customers with units that were out of warranty.

“I made a mistake,” head of Logitech Harmony Rory Dooley explains to Wired. “Mea culpa. We’re going to do right by our customers, and do the right thing.”

This reminds me of those politicians who get caught out misusing expenses who then say sorry and offer to pay back the ill-gotten gains, as if that’s enough to get them off the hook. Nope. Too little, too late.

Logitech, you just destroyed a whole bunch of customer trust. How valuable is that to you? How much is it going to cost you in sales? How much will it cost you in marketing to try to regain it? It stands to be a fair bit more than the cost of updating a certificate, I would guess. And you’re still bricking a whole bunch of perfectly functional devices. How is that environmentally responsible?

The idea of any product that can be remote-disabled or even reduced in functionality by anybody should be anathema to all of us. Any product. Not just gadgets. (How’s your internet-reliant juicer going? Oops.) Oven, garage door, fridge, car (Tesla can do this), hardware, firmware, software. Yes, software.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t do CAD in the cloud. I’ve explained years ago how cloudy CAD adds multiple points of failure. I’m still not wrong about that. One of those additional points of failure is when the vendor decides to stop offering the service. And, of course, the same applies to subscription software, even when it’s not cloudy. The vendor loses interest and you’re left high and dry.

Don’t think it won’t happen. It happens repeatedly and will continue to happen. Don’t be a victim when it does.

Simplifying CAD Management the Autodesk way

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According to Autodesk, one of the benefits of subscription (rental) is simplified administration. To prove it, Autodesk has provided a simple guide for CAD Managers called The Software Administrator’s Guide to Autodesk Subscriptions – How to Set Up, Install, and Manage Your Software and Users.

It’s 18.7 MB and 78 pages long.

Don’t worry though, this simple guide helpfully includes a simple guide on how to read it.

Among other things, this eBook provides handy hints on how subscription’s simplified administration regime for standalone licenses requires you to pre-emptively name all your users, set them all up with Autodesk accounts and define what software each is allowed to use. There’s a note to say that your Internet connection needs to be working at the time of installation (obviously) and also every 30 days (less obvious) or you won’t be able to use the software.

The guide describes how you can simply go online to Autodesk Accounts (assuming it’s up), and switch those permissions around when Bert is away on site and Ernie needs to hop on his PC at 6 PM to make a quick change before a drawing goes out. It mentions how Ernie will be sent an email with a link to follow so they can sign up before using the product. The CAD Manager is encouraged to check with Ernie to make sure it all worked, and check online to ensure Ernie’s sign-in went according to plan.

Make sure you get in early tomorrow morning before Bert’s shift starts so you can switch the user permissions back again. What? You planned to have the day off? Don’t you understand that your job has been redefined by Autodesk? I dub thee “not a team player”.

Don’t complain, because the new procedure is clearly much more simple than the old-fashioned perpetual license method. You know, the one which involved the far more complex procedure of Ernie logging on to Bert’s PC and using the software, then Bert logging on and using it the next day. How did we ever cope before Autodesk’s magnificent management enhancement?

If the huge job efficiency boost provided by this simplified new method doesn’t have CAD Managers throwing their perpetual licenses at Autodesk in a subscription-hungry frenzy, I don’t know what will.

Simplifying CAD Management is alive at Autodesk.

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.

The cloud broke
And teardrops fell
On the desks
Of those who fell
For the lure
Of a cloudy hell.

The landlord laughs
To see such fun
Collects his rent
From web he spun
He still gets paid
When things don’t run.

I said t’would be
It’s come to pass
Surprised? Not me
With or without Bass
Autodesk’s cloud
Can kiss this SaaS.

Another one bites the dust – Autodesk sheds Seek

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Following on from Autodesk’s announcement of the impending demise of 123D, the shedding of Cloudy applications and services continues. This time, it’s BIM content service Autodesk Seek. Here’s what Autodesk has to say about the reason for this change:

Autodesk… does not consider the Autodesk Seek service to be strategic to our core business at this time.

The timeline went something like this:

16 January 2017 – Autodesk transferred the operations and customer support obligations related to the Autodesk Seek business to Swedish digital content company BIMobject.
18 January 2017 – Autodesk posts a notice to that effect on its Knowledge Network.
18 January 2017 – BIMobject posts a notice to that effect on its own site.
~23 January 2017 – Autodesk customers attempting to use Autodesk Seek find out about the change when they are automatically redirected to the BIMobject site.
~23 January 2017 – A well-known Autodesk personality also finds out about the change, unfortunately while presenting Autodesk Seek to a crowd. I’m sure the consummate professional in question would have handled this situation well, but it’s an uncomfortable position to be placed in.

It may well be that former Autodesk Seek users are not unduly inconvenienced by this change. This transition may be less stressful for customers than, say, Autodesk deciding to get out of the Facilities Management software business. Time will tell.

Autodesk can and will dump products and parts of its business as and when it sees fit, as it always has. Look back over Autodesk’s history and you’ll observe a long trail of corpses and weeping orphans. The difference with Cloud software and services is that very negative changes can take immediate effect. The vendor has total control; the customer has none.

Even if your Cloudy product is Autodesk’s Next Big Thing, that’s no protection. If Autodesk loses interest, the rug can be pulled at any instant, with unknown consequences. If you’re not uncomfortable with that, you should be.

When Autodesk dumped FMDesktop, customers could at least continue to use the software they had for as long as they liked. From the customer’s viewpoint, that’s the huge advantage of the desktop software perpetual license model; an advantage I can’t see customers giving up willingly.

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.

CAD on the Cloud – available anytime, anywhere except when it isn’t

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One of the multiple reasons Autodesk has failed to win over the masses to its Cloudy CAD vision is fear of unreliability. Anything that relies on using somebody else’s computer over the Internet adds potential points of failure to those already there on a standalone desktop system. These additional vulnerabilities include:

Your browser or thin client software fails
Your modem, cabling or other Internet connectivity hardware fails
Your Internet service provider has an outage
Malware or DDOS attacks on your domain or service
Governmental Internet service interference
Internet connectivity infrastructure failure
Malware or DDOS attacks on vendor domain or service
Cloud vendor infrastructure disaster
Cloud-based CAD software down for maintenance

I voiced my concerns about this in 2011, but technology has moved on since then and surely things are running as smooth as can be these days, right? Most computer users use Cloud services for backing up, sharing files, etc. and that seems pretty reliable, surely? How’s it going for Autodesk? Let’s ignore potential failures at your end and in the middle and confine ourselves to service reliability at the vendor end.

Autodesk kindly provides a health check site with a History option that allows you to look back in time in fortnightly steps to see how things have been going. At the time of writing, there are 25 full 14-day pages you can examine. Want to take a guess at how many of those pages show no problems?

Two.

That’s right, 92% of the last 25 fortnights have had at least one time where at least one Autodesk CAD Cloud service has been down or degraded. The most recent clean fortnight was in June last year. Most of the pages show multiple failures, such as this:

Some of those failures have exceeded an entire working day. How do you fancy that when you have a tight deadline to meet?

Let’s see how this compares with the service availability record of my old-fashioned standalone desktop CAD products over the same time period:

Hmm. Difficult decision.

Autodesk’s big Cloud failure

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Back in 2011, Autodesk, some other vendors and many industry pundits were utterly convinced of the inevitable and near-imminent victory of Cloud-based CAD over standalone software. I wasn’t. I wanted to get a feel for how isolated my viewpoint was, so I started a poll and let it run for a while. Here’s how that turned out:

As you can see, this blog’s readers were less than convinced about the inevitability of that Cloudy future. Not so Carl Bass, who had this to say in an April 2012 TechCrunch interview:

I’d say two to three years from now, every one of our products will be used online. The only way to use them will be online.

Here’s what I had to say about that:

So let’s say you’re an AutoCAD user. A successful Cloud push by Autodesk will mean that you and very large numbers of people just like you be using AutoCAD or an equivalent Autodesk product on the Cloud by 2014 or 2015. If that doesn’t happen for you and all the other users of Autodesk products, then that’s failure by definition. Autodesk will have failed to meet its own publicly stated goal, and that’s exactly what I’m expecting to happen …. I am convinced there is a dichotomy between the expectations of Autodesk and those of its customers, and that spells trouble. Autodesk is either going to succeed in pushing its customers into a future they are not expecting, or it is going to fail and be forced to revise its expectations. I predict that the latter will happen…

It’s now way past Carl’s predicted online-only timeframe. A successful strategy by Autodesk would mean we Autodesk customers would have all have been exclusively CloudyCADing for a couple of years by now. Is that what happened?

Knock me down with a feather, it turns out that Autodesk’s big Cloud-only push has worked out just as predicted, not by Carl but by the readers of this blog. Take a bow, Nostradamuses!

Yes, there are now Cloud-saving options in a lot of Autodesk’s software, as there are in most competitive products. Yes, Autodesk is still attempting (often astonishingly badly) to online-tie-in desktop CAD users. Yes, Autodesk has a lot of Cloud-only software products, even if many of them don’t generate revenue and some of them are headed for the chopping block. Yes, some of Autodesk’s online offerings now have utility. Yes, there are many students and hobbyists out there, often isolated from commercial and production realities, having fun tinkering with Autodesk’s largely free online software and in some cases producing some seriously cool stuff that looks great in Autodesk publicity material.

Real paying customers, using Autodesk Cloud-based products as their primary mission-critical CAD software in a production environment? Not so much. People are still using that terribly old-fashioned desktop software for that. Autodesk has failed to make reality conform with Carl’s prediction.

Why should I care? I care because Autodesk has taken vast sums of money from AutoCAD customers, and is trying hard to extract even larger sums via its compulsory rental scheme. Instead of spending that cash on genuinely useful improvements to the product that is the source of that income and the basis for many of its vertical products generating further income, Autodesk has left AutoCAD to wither on the vine. It has been some years since an AutoCAD upgrade was anywhere near good enough to be worth the amount Autodesk currently charges for maintenance, let alone the trebled(?) amount it likes to think it can get away with charging in a couple of years.

It’s not because there’s no potential for improvement, either. Autodesk gets a lot of feedback about what could be improved in AutoCAD, but ignores most of it, sometimes choosing to do dumb things instead that make things worse. In contrast, Bricsys has proven that it’s possible to make huge strides in improving a straightforward 2D/3D DWG-based desktop CAD application in a single year; Autodesk’s efforts are woefully inadequate in comparison. Meanwhile, by chasing an elusive exclusive Cloudy cornucopia, Autodesk has frittered away a fair fortune on a plethora of production-pointless products.

Autodesk to pull the plug on 123D

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The reason you should never rely on SaaS for anything important is that, well, you just can’t rely on it. If the software breaks, or the vendor goes under, or decides that line’s not profitable enough, or just loses interest, you’re screwed. More importantly, you’re screwed on a timeframe that’s out of your control, and probably much shorter than you would like. You can’t just go on using the software until you’re ready to move on, like you can with perpetual licenses.

Thanks for the latest lesson, Autodesk, regarding 123D:

Over the past few years, millions of people have unlocked their creativity with the Autodesk 123D apps and community. We’ve grown from one desktop tool in 2011 to multiple apps across desktop, web, and mobile.

We’re incredibly proud of these products, and even more proud of what you all have MADE with them. But we recognize that the portfolio has become complex. We are making some changes to simplify our Autodesk portfolio and workflows for people everywhere who love to make things. We are consolidating these tools and features into key apps such as Tinkercad, Fusion 360, and ReMake.

Today, we are sharing the news that in early 2017, after we complete this consolidation, we’ll be shutting down 123dApp and turning off many of the apps to new download. Rest assured that we remain committed to providing free tools to hobbyists, kids, hackers, and makers around the world. We value you, your models, and are going to do this consolidation in the right way.

You’ll be able to access and download your content from 123dApp in the coming months. We will make every effort to make sure you will be notified before we make any changes to the apps or website.

What’s next? We’ll be working closely with you, the 123D Community of users, to make sure your questions are answered. We’ll be sharing more details on this blog and our support forums, and will notify you when we start to implement changes.

Autodesk is committed to help people make anything and we are committed to help you continue to do just that. Look for more detailed information in the next few days, weeks and months.

–The Autodesk 123D Team

Whether Autodesk’s definition of “the right way” coincides with that of users remains to be seen. Of course, Autodesk 123D is free and you get what you (don’t) pay for. But if you think Autodesk won’t do this with its paid SaaS products, you’re dreaming. The same applies to any vendor, but Autodesk in particular has a horrible history of killing products and leaving masses of crying orphans to fend for themselves.

Guest Post (Ed Martin) – The Times They Are a-Changin’

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I’d like to thank Steve for the opportunity to write this guest post. My post doesn’t necessarily represent Steve, nor does it represent any company. It’s strictly a personal point of view. The purpose of this post is to prompt discussion and debate, and get your opinion.

Recent discussion on this blog has focused on Autodesk and its many changes over the past few years (upgrade pricing, policy changes, term-only aka rental licenses, move to the cloud, etc.), and there’s been a lot of skepticism. If we stand back and look at the landscape, though, Autodesk is not alone. True, they’re moving faster and more aggressively than their competitors, but many software companies are making similar changes.

Change can be disruptive, it can have positive and negative impact, and there can be winners and losers. But … it’s inevitable, and it’s better to understand change than to fight it. To stick with the “time” theme from the title, let’s take a ride in a time machine to the year 2020 and see what all of these changes will lead to.

Thinking ahead to 2020, it’s very likely that major CAx / PLM vendors will be actively promoting cloud services and term-based access or licenses. Some of them may have eliminated perpetual licenses entirely, and some may even be “pure SaaS” companies that don’t offer traditional desktop or server installed software any longer. We may see some consolidation in the industry through mergers and acquisitions. It’s entirely possible that a company that was small in 2016 will be a significant market player in 2020. Open source solutions may gain a greater foothold in the market.

By 2020, there will be some events that impact the market more broadly. There’s a good chance that at least one or two major economies will see another business recession. On the security side, the white hat vs black hat battles will continue, and it’s very possible that we’ll see a security breach that impacts someone in the CAx / PLM world.

I want to start a debate about what 2020 will look like. I’ve provided some starter questions below to prompt the debate. Pick one or two that resonate for you and share your thoughts …

1. How will your company react to the switch to term-based licenses? Why?
2. Which industry players will win and lose? Do you see anyone being absorbed into another company? What will trigger this?
3. If there is a major recession, what will you do with your perpetual licenses, maintenance contracts, and term licenses? Which will you keep, and which if any will you cut?
4. When (if ever) will SaaS / cloud services hit the “tipping point” in your industry? What will be the catalyst that leads to this?
5. What pros and cons do you expect with wider cloud adoption? What must a company do to make the cloud work for you?
6. Do you think that one or more small players (or open source movements) will grow to become a significant force in the market? Where will they win and what will make them successful?
7. If there is a major security breach, what impact if any would it have on the market?

What do YOU think?

Ed Martin

Dear Autodesk Recap 360 team…

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…your software (3.0.0.52, came with AutoCAD 2017) fails to allow sign-in (a prerequisite to connection to the cloud) in a secure proxy server environment. This happens (see picture):

I am online. I did try to inform you about this problem using the feedback mechanism in the product. This allowed me to type my problem report, but on hitting the send feedback button, I got this (see picture):

I am connected. In fact, I’m so connected I’m typing this post online while reproducing the problem. While this is going on, I’m able to sign in to Autodesk Account, A360 Drive, AutoCAD Beta forums, the Autodesk public forums and so on. What’s happening is your software is trying to do something our firewall doesn’t like. Autodesk has an unfortunate history of doing this sort of thing. Often, things that worked in one release will stop working in the next, and vice-versa, because somebody tinkered under the hood. For example, Application Manager works, desktop app doesn’t. There have been many other examples going back over a decade.

No, please don’t direct me to the knowledgebase article that expects me to drill a bunch of holes in the firewall. That’s not happening. Instead, make your software work nicely, please. Find the bits of code that work, make them standard, and insist your developers use the standards.

Just thought I’d let you know. Other people in the same situation would probably just give up, and you would never know it was happening.

AutoCAD 2017 Feature – Share Design View

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An interesting new feature of AutoCAD 2017 is Share Design View, which is invoked using the leftmost button on the A360 Ribbon tab or the ONLINEDESIGNSHARE command. The idea behind this command is to create a web-published snapshot of your drawing that can be accessed by anyone with a browser (they’ll need a fairly recent one).

This command works as advertised and provides another option to allow limited access to your design information without providing access to your DWG files. It creates a web page containing a view of your drawing and lets you have the URL (link) so you can access it. You can then share this URL with anyone you want to share the design with. They just follow the URL and can view the design using the Autodesk A360 Viewer (no download required).

Heidi Hewett wrote a fuller description of how it works on the AutoCAD blog that would be pointless to reproduce here.

One caveat: although Autodesk describes the design’s location as secure and anonymous, it’s important to understand that it’s an open location. Anybody with that URL has access to that page. Although the URL is long, complex and probably unguessable, if you email somebody that URL and they start an email forward/reply chain that ends up with other people, all of those people can also access that page and you might never know about it. Also, the index that Autodesk must maintain for all of these pages would be a prime target for hackers looking to steal design content, at which point “secure and anonymous” will be meaningless.

So maybe don’t use this method to share your nuclear plant designs. Also, rescind any sensitive designs as soon as access is no longer needed, in order to limit the exposure time (see About Conferring with Clients and Colleagues Online). The URL stays active for 30 days unless you rescind it earlier.

Autodesk is to be commended for providing this feature and documenting it well and honestly. There is little evidence of the misleading hype about security that tainted Autodesk’s DWF marketing back in the day. Here’s a Cloud-based feature that adds value to AutoCAD with little or no downside. Just be aware of its semi-open nature and use it appropriately.

Note: this feature requires A360 to be selected during installation or deployment creation (which it is by default). If A360 is not installed, the Share Design View button will be greyed out. The command will still exist and will attempt to connect to A360 but will then fail with a Service Unavailable message.

Autodesk desktop app. Worst. Name. Ever. Is the product better than the name?

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Autodesk wants your software to be automatically updated so you’re always running the latest version. Let’s pretend for a moment that this is a good idea and have a look at how Autodesk now attempts to do this. For the previous couple of releases (2015/2016), this has been done using Autodesk Application Manager. For 2017, this has been replaced by Autodesk desktop app. Even if you haven’t installed any 2017 products, you may have already seen this kind of thing pop up. Repeatedly.

Note how there’s no obvious “stop nagging me and leave me alone” option. Autodesk Application Manager’s settings page does include an Alerts tab which allows you to turn off all desktop alerts, but the above message indicates Application Manager has suffered an “end of life” experience so there’s not much point having it on your system.

Before I get onto the new product and how it works, I want to discuss its name. It’s woeful. I have never been less whelmed by any product name than Autodesk desktop app. It’s not even Autodesk Desktop App, it’s Autodesk desktop app (sans initial capitals). It’s dull, generic, uninspired, and it means nothing. AutoCAD is an Autodesk desktop app. Inventor is an Autodesk desktop app. Graphic Impact used to be an Autodesk desktop app. This is the equivalent of Ford naming their next new car “Ford road vehicle”. It says to me, “We couldn’t come up with a name so we just gave up.”

Having got that off my chest, what about the product itself? What does it do? According to Autodesk, this:

Autodesk desktop app is a content delivery solution. The desktop component installs with Microsoft Windows^®-based Autodesk 2017 products and suites. It replaces the previous in-product update components and the Autodesk Application Manager.

Autodesk desktop app keeps Autodesk Subscription customers informed of product updates, new releases, new features, and special subscriber-only learning and training materials, as they become available. Autodesk desktop app also delivers and applies critical security patches for all 2015 Autodesk products onwards.

Does it deliver? No. Not for me, anyway. In my secure proxy server environment, it fails to connect, despite Autodesk Application Manager working fine in the same environment. There is a long and unfortunate history of various aspects of Autodesk software switching between working and not working in a secure proxy environment, and this product just added to that history. Things that worked in one release stop working in a new release. Some of them might start magically working again in a later release. I can only assume it’s developers tinkering with stuff and not realising the consequences. Whatever the reason, it inconveniences customers, makes Autodesk look bad at the Internet (again), and throws a spanner in the works as far as Autodesk’s online-driven future plans are concerned.

Besides it having the dumbest name ever and (for some) not doing the one thing it’s designed to do, what else is wrong with it? Here’s a list for starters:

After an AutoCAD install, unless you specifically choose not to install it, it will be installed and will automatically run, getting right in your face when you probably just want to draw things.
It automatically sets itself up to run all the time, using your system resources. I intend to go into more detail about Autodesk web stuff abusing your resources in future.
On systems where it doesn’t work, the user experience is, er, sub-optimal. I won’t bore you with the details, but you are sent on a wild goose chase.
On systems where it works, it calls home and communicates with Autodesk in undocumented ways (“Collects usage data to support users better.”).
On systems where it works, it may repeatedly tell you about updates you have already applied.
On systems where it works, it may not keep you up to date in the advertised manner; some hotfixes are not supported.
It has a Sign In button, which encourages you to get an Autodesk account if you don’t already have one. It should not be necessary to sign in to anything to keep your products up to date. If you’re managing a corporate environment, you might not want your users all signing up for individual accounts without your knowledge.
The whole idea of giving Autodesk unfettered access to update your apps when it feels like it is pretty horrific. That would involve a naive level of trust in Autodesk that it has proven repeatedly it does not deserve. The very application that wants to auto-update so it can carry on doing auto-updating other things is itself a classic example of why you really don’t want to allow that sort of thing to happen.

Let’s say you don’t care about any of that and still desperately want this thing working. What to do? At the bottom of the About Autodesk desktop app knowledgebase article, there is a link: Autodesk desktop app is not able to connect to the Internet. When I clicked it, I got this:

Well….this really is embarrassing. To be fair, the link appears to be working now, so you probably won’t see the above. However, what you do see isn’t any better. The advice provided there is terrible. It’s asking for totally unreasonable holes to be punched through your firewall, allowing whitelist access to a myriad of marketing and other undesirable sites (e.g. Akamai, which has a history of sub-optimal online ethics). I don’t think so.

The best thing I can say about Autodesk desktop app is that you can choose to not install it with your 2017 product. That seems like an excellent idea to me, because this product is a crock. Uninstall it if it’s been installed. Uninstall Autodesk Application Manager if that’s installed, because it’s just going to stop working and nag you to death in the meantime. Then store away this little episode at the back of your mind for future reference, because I’m sure Autodesk hasn’t finished pushing us down this path yet. Push back. Hard.

Let’s have your AutoCAD WS 1.6 reviews

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Autodesk has just released the latest iteration of its free online CAD app, AutoCAD WS. It’s available directly via your browser or as iOS, Mac or Android apps. This is the closest Autodesk has yet come to showing us what real CAD in the Cloud can do. Autodesk has now had three years’ work behind it since buying the company responsible for this technology. I’d like you to put aside any Cloud concerns you may have and give it a fair go. Please try it out and report back what you find in a mini-review. How well does it work? The customer stories are all from organisations using it as a viewer or for simple markup edits. Is that all it can do, or does it come close to deserving to have CAD in its name?

What do I want you to try? It’s up to you, but I don’t want to waste too much of your time. Why not have a go at something that would only take you a couple of minutes in any AutoCAD release from the last quarter of a century?

For example, I’m sure everyone here could start a new drawing using a template containing your company’s layer standards, insert a title block and populate a couple of the attributes, then accurately draw and dimension a single 2D view of a rectangular plate containing a single round hole. Try to do the equivalent in AutoCAD WS. If you have difficulty with that, try uploading a simple drawing and perform a few simple edits instead. How did that go?

I’ll be interested to see what you came across at each stage of the process. Was the setup process straightforward? What was easy to do in the WS editor? What was difficult? What was impossible? What worked well? What didn’t? What happened quickly? What took a long time? What’s good about the interface? What’s not? Do the commands work as you would expect them to? Please try to describe your experiences as objectively as you can.

Note: I’ve asked a similar question before, but that was some time ago and things have moved on since then.

AutoCAD Help suckage to continue – confirmed

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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.

AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1 – Now you see it, now you don’t

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Last week, Autodesk released Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013, and then removed it a few days later.

Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013 has been temporarily removed due to a newly discovered fatal error. The AutoCAD team is actively working on resolving this and a new service pack will be posted here as soon as it is available.

This is the sort of thing that Beta testing is supposed to prevent, but in this case it obviously didn’t. Somebody in a position of influence at Autodesk needs to investigate whether this is just a freak one-off, or if there is some systemic weakness within the Beta testing program.

One of the supposed benefits of Cloud software is that there are no updates for users to worry about. It’s all taken care of on the vendor’s server and you’re always using the most up to date version. OK, now fast forward five years and imagine how this scenario would have panned out if AutoCAD was a SaaS product.

You come in one morning to find your AutoCAD keeps crashing, or worse, corrupting your files. It keeps doing this for several days until Autodesk is convinced that the problem lies at its end and reverts the changes on its server while it works out how to fix it. In the meantime, there’s nothing you can do to keep your business running except use one of those old-fashioned copies of AutoCAD you have lying around the place. Except your Subscription agreement only allows you to go back 3 releases. Autodesk no longer supports the release you happen to have handy, and won’t allow the software to be activated. You don’t have a 30-day window because you once evaluated that release on your PC and your 30 days are well and truly gone. Oh, and the file format of the drawings you have been using lately has changed several times and the old release won’t open them anyway.

Why would anyone want to put their business in this position?

Edit: A couple of weeks later, Autodesk released AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1.1 to resolve the problem.

Cloud concerns – Security – Autodesk puts its arguments on line

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I’ve made the point before that while Cloud proponents like Autodesk have been happy to talk big on the potential benefits, they have been conspicuously (suspiciously?) silent on the legitimate concerns their customers have raised. The best responses you have been likely to see regarding such concerns can best be characterised as “glossing over”.

So it’s good to see that Autodesk has put together a white-paper-type-thing called Autodesk® 360: Work Wherever You Are – Safely. This 275 KB PDF, with 5 pages of actual content, puts Autodesk’s point of view about one of the aspects of Cloud that people commonly raise as a concern. This is a good start, but of course there are quite a few potential dealbreakers that need addressing yet.

How well does this document address this issue? As you’d expect from Autodesk, it’s gung-ho positive, but there is at least some acknowledgement of Cloud concerns, e.g. “Customer experiences, however, can be largely impacted by the speed and quality of their Internet connection”. In addition to such occasional connections with the real world, there are some categorical assurances that may make some potential users happier. Here are some examples:

Autodesk 360 is delivered from data centers in the United States.

Files and identities are safe during storage, transit, and usage.

As part of Autodesk‟s due diligence for customer security and protection, prospective Autodesk personnel with potential access to sensitive data are screened through background checks before being employed.

Once purged, your data may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be recovered or read by anyone.

Customers own the content they create.

While that’s all well and good, Autodesk needs to get its legal team reading off the same page and fix up its terms and conditions to make them less anti-customer. Otherwise, this virtual document is worth more less than the virtual paper it’s written on. Some parts of the document are only superficially reassuring:

Any access to customer data or personal information is strictly governed by the Autodesk 360 Terms of Service (http://www.autodesk.com/termsofservice) Autodesk‟s Privacy Policy (http://usa.autodesk.com/privacy/), and internal procedures.

While that sounds fine on the face of it, Autodesk has violated its own Privacy Policy in the recent past and to the best of my knowledge, nothing ever came of it. That assurance is therefore rendered completely worthless by Autodesk’s own history. Add to that the fact that both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are extremely rubbery and rather one-sided, and this statement becomes more of a concern than a reassurance.

Other parts of the document are contradictory. Take these statements, for example:

Working in the cloud is all about reducing the hassles and headaches that companies and employees would rather avoid, like …. Managing data security and backups

It’s good practice, however, to personally observe safety and security wherever and whenever you are using Autodesk 360 …. Download and back up work locally in a secure environment.

Cloud’s great because it saves you having to make backups. However, make sure you make backups of the stuff you put on the Cloud. Hmm, okay…

So what do you think of this document? Is it all spin or does it address your security concerns? If it addresses your concerns, does it do so to your satisfaction? Please have a read and add your comments.