Tag Archives: Rental

BricsCAD V19 promo pricing ends 15 December

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I’ve previously explained the changes to BricsCAD pricing that came in with V19, and showed how the prices for new purchases would rise when the promotional period ends.

Upgrading now requires All-In. Problem?

One change I failed to point out, but which was mentioned by a commenter, was that for customers not already on the All-In Maintenance program, they needed to sign up for one year’s All-In in addition to paying the upgrade fee. This meant the upgrade fee was significantly greater than in previous years because customers were effectively paying for two upgrades (e.g. V18 to V19 as an upgrade, plus V19 to V20 covered by All-In).

Although this still represented good value compared with the competition and recent BricsCAD upgrades have proven to be well worth the money, there was still a ‘sticker shock’ effect associated with this double payment, and people who budgeted for upgrades based on previous pricing found themselves in a bind. There were complaints from customers and partners. For Bricsys, accustomed to being the good guys in terms of CAD pricing and licensing fairness, this was an unusual situation.

Fixing the problem

On 16 November, Bricsys responded to this feedback by introducing significantly reduced prices in this scenario, and committing to making good with those customers who already paid the higher prices. How significantly reduced? About half. To give you an idea, an upgrade of BricsCAD Pro V18 to V19 (and later to V20 thanks to All-In) is about US$425 or €400.

I don’t see much to complain about there. It’s great to see a company that actually listens to its customers and acts accordingly, even when doing so costs real money.

However, it’s important to note that this lower upgrade pricing only applies during the promotional period that had already been announced for new license pricing. That period ends on 15 December (i.e. prices go up from 16 December). To make things very plain, at the time of writing:

BricsCAD promotional pricing for both upgrades and new purchases will end in two days.

This only affects on-demand upgraders

None of the above has any effect on customers who were already on the All-In program. That program has always represented the best value way of keeping BricsCAD up to date; I recommend getting on it and staying on it. You can of course hop off it in the future if Bricsys one day fails to keep you happy with its upgrades. Although you’re effectively paying for upgrades in advance it’s still a perpetual license system, which gives you the ability to keep playing even when you stop paying.

There is also the option of the rarely-used subscription (rental) pricing for those cases where licenses are not needed long-term or need to be assigned to a specific project. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my thoughts on that licensing model. If you need it, fine. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be strong-armed into adopting it.

Perspective

Bear in mind that with all this talk of rising prices, a little perspective is useful. Based on currently-available pricing, the 3-year cost of BricsCAD Pro including All-In in the USA is $1615, compared with $4605 for AutoCAD on subscription. At the end of the 3 years, you will have a perpetual license of the then-current version of BricsCAD Pro, or you will have nothing at all if you had spent 2.85 times as much to rent AutoCAD.

If you look beyond 3 years (and some customers of mine have AutoCAD licenses ten times that age) then the difference in the value proposition between the products becomes even more dramatic. You’re all smart people with calculators and spreadsheets, so I invite you to do your own comparisons.

Reminder: if you want to get the absolute best value for money from a BricsCAD purchase, remember to do it on or before 15 December. If you do decide to buy, and also want to support this blog, then please use this link to do so:

Bricsys Store

Disclosure: this is a sponsored link. If you buy a Bricsys product using this link, I get part of the proceeds. However, this will not have any effect on the editorial content of this blog. I don’t expect to be able to retire on the proceeds from this link (if any) and I will continue to write what I honestly think about the CAD products and policies of all companies, as I see fit.

BricsCAD V19 – pricing changes explained

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The BricsCAD V19 release has not only given us a new software release (an excellent one – and I’ll be writing about that later), it’s also given us a new Bricsys website and a new pricing structure. In some cases prices are actually slightly lower, but in the vast majority of cases the movement is up. The price movement varies by product, market and currency, and depends largely on whether you choose to opt for All-in Maintenance. The aim of this post is to clarify exactly what has happened to Bricsys prices.

One significant change across the board is the way All-in Maintenance is priced. It was previously a fixed amount (e.g. US$220) to pre-emptively keep up to date with each of the three BricsCAD types (Classic, Pro and Platinum). Now it’s a percentage (e.g. 30%), which means All-in is now cheaper than it was for Classic users and more expensive for everyone else.

You’ll also note that the rarely-used subscription (rental) pricing is now much easier to find on the web site. The annual cost equates to about 40% of the cost of a perpetual license.

Those 30% and 40% figures look high, but remember that they’re a percentage of much smaller sums than you get with Autodesk. For example, the difference between buying BricsCAD Pro with and without All-in is US$255. Going Subscription (rental) for a year is $488. For comparison, keeping an old perpetual AutoCAD license up to date is in the region of US$500+ (it varies considerably under different circumstances) and the current annual AutoCAD subscription cost in the USA is US$1575 (bear in mind that this now includes access to various AutoCAD-based verticals).

Let’s compare the BricsCAD prices before and after these changes. First, US$ prices without All-in. Note that none of these prices include taxes.

US$ BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical
V18 590 750 1110 1760 1630
V19 590 770 1110 1720 1630

As you can see, there is very little price movement at all here. Note that these V19 prices are promotional, which means they won’t stay at this level for ever. (Edit: the promotional prices apply until 16 December 2018).

The Euro prices have moved up a little more:

Euro BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical
V18 480 640 990 1540 1440
V19 525 725 1050 1590 1500

A more useful comparison can be made by comparing the prices including All-in, because (temporary conditions excepted) this is the cheapest way of keeping up to date, and the way I’d usually recommend paying for BricsCAD. I’ve included the post-promotion prices here so you can get an idea of the total movement.

US$ BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical
V18 810 970 1330 2100 1940
V19 (Promotion) 781 1025 1470 2275 2155
V19 (Standard) 825 1105 1560 2405 2275

Here’s the same thing in Euros:

Euro BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical
V18 680 840 1190 1840 1720
V19 (Promotion) 701 965 1391 2115 1995
V19 (Standard) 760 1040 1475 2275 2145

The upshot is that for most customers, buying and maintaining the low-end Classic product is slightly cheaper than it was, but as you move up the product range, the price increases start to bite. However, the total cost of ownership is still significantly lower than AutoCAD. The following table shows the total licensing costs over several time periods, assuming no price increases from anybody. Yes, I know that’s not a reasonable assumption, but at least it precludes guesswork! The ongoing annual All-in price is assumed to be 30% of the non-promotional product cost.

US$ 1 Year 3 Year 5 Year 10 Year
BricsCAD Classic (All-in) 781 1276 1771 3009
BricsCAD Pro (All-in) 1025 1688 2351 4009
BricsCAD Platinum (All-in) 1470 2406 3342 5682
BricsCAD Classic (Subscription) 312 936 1560 3120
BricsCAD Pro (Subscription) 410 1230 2050 4100
BricsCAD Platinum (Subscription) 588 1764 2940 5880
AutoCAD (subscription) 1575 4725 7875 15750
AutoCAD LT* (subscription) 390 1170 1950 3900

* Note that I have included AutoCAD LT here for comparison even though it is a significantly less capable product than BricsCAD Classic, which has 3D and full LISP capabilities.

In addition, BricsCAD Platinum plus Sheet Metal is now called BricsCAD Mechanical, with the price including All-in going from US$1940 to US$2155 ($2275 after promotion). Euro prices go from €1720 to €1995 (€2145 after promotion). Similarly, BricsCAD Platinum plus BIM is now called BricsCAD BIM, with the price including All-in going from US$2100 to US$2275 ($2405 after promotion). Euro prices go from €1840 to €2115 (€2275 after promotion).

It’s worth noting that the price of Communicator, the Bricsys format translator, has dropped slightly in most cases despite providing more format translation options.

If you intend buying a Bricsys product and also want to support this blog, then please use this link:

Bricsys Store

Disclosure: this is a sponsored link. If you buy a Bricsys product using this link, I get part of the proceeds. However, this will not have any effect on the editorial content of this blog. I don’t expect to be able to retire on the proceeds from this link (if any) and I will continue to write what I honestly think about the CAD products and policies of all companies, as I see fit.

Autodesk Fusion 360 massive subscription price rise/drop

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Autodesk’s cloud-based 3D design tool, Fusion 360, is changing price and structure from 7 October 2018. Whether it’s a huge price rise or a huge price drop depends on your perspective.

Price rise

The current annual subscription cost for Fusion 360 is US$310 and that’s going to change to US$495, which represents a 60% price increase. Existing subscribers are being kept at the same annual rate of US$310 or US$300 (depending on when you first subscribed) “for as long as you renew”. Existing subscribers, that looks like a promise to never increase your prices as long as you keep up the payments. Make sure you capture and retain all of Autodesk’s statements on this matter, in case that promise eventually gets forgotten.

However, for that amount you’ll now be getting the same features that are currently in Fusion 360 Ultimate; the lesser and greater versions are being amalgamated and just called Fusion 360.

Price drop

The current annual subscription cost for Fusion 360 Ultimate is US$1535. As that’s going to change to US$495, that represents a 68% price drop.

Is it fair?

If you currently use Fusion 360, even if you have no use for Advanced Simulation, Advanced Manufacturing or Generative Design, it’s not bad news. The only downside is that you’ll now be paying more if you need to add seats, or if you temporarily drop and resume subscription.

If you currently use Fusion 360 Ultimate, you are probably going to be overjoyed at spending a lot less in future. If you just paid US$3,070.00 for a 2-year subscription that’s about to be worth US$990, you might be less pleased. To assuage your ire, Autodesk will be giving you (and all existing annual subscribers) another 24 months subscription, gratis. Still, depending on the term length and renewal timing, some customers are going to be much luckier than others. That might annoy the less fortunate.

I think Autodesk has been very fair and reasonable with the way it has handled these changes. However, it does serve as a reminder that once you’re a subscriber, you’re at the mercy of your software company.

Explaining the four tiers of AutoCAD license

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Yesterday’s tiers

Once upon a time, long long ago, you could buy AutoCAD with or without sets of features  called Advanced Drafting Extensions (ADE) containing optional extras such as dimensioning. At one stage you could buy four tiers of AutoCAD license at different prices:

  1. AutoCAD
  2. AutoCAD + ADE1
  3. AutoCAD + ADE2 (incorporating ADE1)
  4. AutoCAD + ADE3 (incorporating ADE1 and ADE2)

(Interestingly, the above situation is similar to the current arrangement with BricsCAD, where BricsCAD Classic, Pro and Platinum are available with incrementing prices and feature sets, with BricsCAD BIM and Sheet Metal available on top of Platinum).

As almost everybody bought AutoCAD + ADE3 anyway, the ADEs were eventually absorbed into the main product and AutoCAD became just AutoCAD again. Later, the AutoCAD line would split again into AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD, and various AutoCAD-based vertical products such as AutoCAD Mechanical and Civil 3D.

Today’s tiers

Fast forward thirty-odd years and AutoCAD licenses are again available in four tiers (even if we ignore AutoCAD LT and Civil 3D). For an AutoCAD 2019 user, these are:

  1. A perpetual license holder who allowed maintenance to lapse after activating AutoCAD 2019.
  2. A perpetual license holder still under maintenance.
  3. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer prior to the release of AutoCAD 2019.
  4. A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer after the release of AutoCAD 2019 or who started a new full-price subscription at any time.

Note that Tier 1, etc. is my description of the category and not Autodesk’s.

What the tiers mean

This table shows what is available to customers in each of the above tiers:

Tier Perpetual Usage Updates Support Cloud Shared Views Web/Mobile Toolsets
1
2
3
4

Here’s what the table headings mean:

  • Perpetual – a perpetual license that allows continued use into the future without requiring further payment.
  • Usage – rights to use the license at home, use of previous versions and internationally.
  • Updates – formerly known as Service Packs, these bug fixes and minor feature enhancements are withheld from customers who are not actively paying Autodesk.
  • Support – the ability to log a service request that will be addressed by a technician. There are actually multiple levels depending on how much you pay: Basic, Advanced and, for subscription users, the ability to schedule a call to talk to somebody.
  • Cloud – online services such as storage and rendering.
  • Shared Views – formerly available to all AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 users, this feature was renamed, updated and made subscription-only in AutoCAD 2019.
  • Web/Mobile – the AutoCAD Web and AutoCAD Mobile App viewer/markup tools.
  • Toolsets – the ‘Only One AutoCAD’ set of AutoCAD-based verticals now called Specialized Toolsets (excluding Civil 3D). Note that if you’re a customer in Tier 3 who originally had a vertical product (e.g. AutoCAD Mechanical), you will still have access to that toolset and plain AutoCAD, but not the others.

Moving to three tiers

Felice at Autodesk has explained that Autodesk plans to move everybody in Tier 3 to Tier 4 at some point in the future (subject to legal disclaimers). But for now, if you took up the Move to Subscription offer at the wrong time, you don’t yet have access to Specialized Toolsets.

Thanks are due to Felice for patiently answering my questions to clarify the situation and explain the detail.

Autodesk subscription price rise certainty

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In my previous posts exploring the costs associated with various CAD software licensing scenarios, there was always a need for assumptions because Autodesk had failed to provide any pricing information beyond a point a year or so from now. As a result, expecting the worst appeared to be the safest strategy.

To Autodesk’s credit, this situation is now partially addressed. From this Autodesk web page:

We’re extending our price commitment through 2028 for customers who continue to renew after they switch. The special Move to Subscription renewal suggested retail price will increase by no more than 5% in 2021, 2023, 2025, and 2027. There will be no change to the renewal suggested retail price in 2022, 2024, 2026 and 2028.

There are some weasel words in the fine print that allow Autodesk some wriggle room, but let’s go with the numbers we have. It works out to an increase of 21.5% by 2027. If you’ve already switched and you’re paying $1000 a year then you’ll be paying $1215 a year in 2027 and 2028. That’s a pretty reasonable level of increase. Of course, the total number of dollars you’ll hand over is several times higher than for, say, keeping a permanent license of BricsCAD up to date.

The above refers to customers who give up their perpetual licenses that are currently under maintenance and switch to subscription (rental) under the special conditions of the Move to Subscription offer. Pricing is still in the air for you millions of stubborn users who insist on owning your software licenses, and for those who are paying sky-high rates under the conventional subscription deal.

There are also no guarantees about what you’ll be paying for. If AutoCAD 2019‘s anything to go by, you can expect little improvement, feature removal and poorer performance.

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?

Autodesk subscription offer – the first cracks appear in the all-rental wall

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Thanks to a comment by Fabien, I recently learned of a new offer from Autodesk to convert perpetual licenses to subscription (rental). It turns out that this is a global offer from 7 February to 20 April 2018.

Such offers come and go from time to time and most are not particularly interesting. This one is. Not because you’ll want to take it up (you probably won’t), but because of what it represents.

Here’s how it appears on Autodesk’s site:

What’s really interesting about this offer is this sentence:

If you are not satisfied, you can switch back to your perpetual license.

With that, we see the first solid acknowledgement from Autodesk of the reason so many existing customers are stubbornly refusing to put themselves in rental chains, despite the cracking of price whips. Customers like their perpetual licenses and are unwilling to give them away. This offer holds out the promise that they can be returned. There’s a lot of fine print that severely restricts the utility of the offer and I can’t see many savvy customers falling for it, but at least an attempt (however weak) is being made to placate perpetual license holders.

The offer is explained in the FAQs and more detail is available in the Terms & Conditions page. Here’s an overview of how it works.

  1. You trade in your perpetual license of AutoCAD, LT, Suites or several other products using this link. These can be out of maintenance and could date back to Release 14 from 20 years ago*.
  2. You sign up for subscription of an Industry Collection for 1 or 3 years. Of course, the subscription cost of an Industry Collection is pretty substantial and way more than the maintenance costs of, say, AutoCAD – even with Autodesk’s promised price hikes. For example, the AEC Collection is USD $2,018 a year under this offer, down from $2,690.
  3. The subscription cost is 25% less than it is without this offer. It’s still pretty expensive, particularly as you can’t use more than two applications in the Collection at once, but it is a bit less than is would be,
  4. You are given the option of backing out of the deal (“switch back” is the Autodesk term) within a specific 30-day window if not satisfied. That window is at the end of the full 3-year period, or after 2 years if you sign up for 1-year increments. You get your perpetual license back. You don’t get your money back.
  5. If you switch back, it’s up to you to make sure you have the media and necessary details to reinstall the old release.
  6. If you switch back, you don’t get to resume maintenance if you had it. If you didn’t already have your product under maintenance, this is fair enough.
  7. If you switch back, your perpetual license is reverted to its original release. Oh, except if you started at 2017 or 2018. In that case, you are reverted to 2016.

That last part is a nasty, petty detail. Somebody at Autodesk actually thought that up, presented it at a meeting and had it accepted as a good idea. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with here. It’s not so much “How can we better serve customers so they want to give us more money?”, it’s more “How can we hurt customers who don’t do what we want?”

If you take up this offer, the idea is to get you using the new software because there’s a bit less finality about the decision. You might be so impressed by it that you forget you’ve discarded your escape plan and signed yourself up for perpetual payment of large amounts. You might also find that you’ve saved all your files in new formats and can’t go back without losing data, particularly if you’ve used the vertical products that really, really don’t like having their drawings saved back to earlier releases, even within the same nominal DWG format. So maybe there’s a bit more finality than first appears, but by the time you’ve got to that stage it will be too late.

Is this an attractive offer? Only if you were going to subscribe to an Industry Collection anyway and have an old dormant license hanging around. In that case, go for it, save 25% of a large amount. Other than that, it’s really not an offer that will have widespread appeal and I suspect most customers will give it a miss.

Autodesk is getting increasingly desperate to get its long-term customers on the rental gravy train, and the cracks have started to appear in the subscription-only facade. This offer’s not great but I suspect the offers are only going to get better as the “Another great quarter!” patter wears thinner and thinner. The offers will have to get much better than this effort to persuade your average perpetual license owner to get on board.

* Pedantic historical point: in multiple places, this promotion associates Release 14 with the year 1998, implying this is the earliest year you could have bought an eligible product. This is incorrect. Release 14 was released in February 1997 and was replaced by AutoCAD 2000 in March 1999.

Autodesk kills ArtCAM, proves subscription is terrible for customers

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This story goes back over 50 years. A British company called Delcam was founded in 1965 and developed many products. These included ArtCAM, an application for producing 3D parts using 2D artwork as a base. It won a Queen’s Award for Innovation in 2003. In 2014, Autodesk acquired Delcam for approximately USD$286 Million and ArtCAM (among others) became an Autodesk product.

As with all Autodesk products, sales of perpetual licenses ceased a couple of years ago. Owners of perpetual licenses were encouraged to ditch them and switch to subscription instead. Financially encouraged, with “discounts” and promises of price rises for uncooperative customers. You’ll be familiar with this part of the story.

Now, Autodesk has killed ArtCAM. The FAQ is here, but as of right now you can’t buy a new ArtCAM subscription. You can renew an existing subscription until 7 July 2018. Support ends on 1 November 2018. Support will be of limited value because bugs are highly unlikely to be fixed, especially if what I hear about the development team being fired last November is true.

Are you an ArtCAM customer wondering what this means for the future? Here’s what happens if you followed Autodesk’s advice and switched to subscription:

  • You stop using the software as soon as your subscription runs out. Immediately. No negotiation will be entered into.

Here’s what happens if you didn’t follow Autodesk’s advice and kept your perpetual license:

  • You get use the software for as long as it still works.

Which of these scenarios would you say is preferable from a customer point of view? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question similar to, “Would you prefer to: a) cut your own head off with a blunt rusty saw; or b) not do that?”

Remember when I said subscription was a trap and you shouldn’t fall for it? Was I wrong?

OK, hands up all those customers who still think Autodesk subscription is a good idea. Anyone?

I’ve added ArtCAM to the Autodesk Graveyard. Anybody who thinks this can’t happen to their product should read that page and ponder how many Autodesk customers thought their product would permanently persist.

I didn’t expect to see any comment about the policy of denying bug fixes to some customers from any Autodesk high-ups, but I was mistaken.

Here’s a quote on just this subject from Autodesk Senior Vice President1, Buzz Kross:

It’s just bad business. Why would you not want to take care of your customers? I would never do that. Come on, we all make mistakes. All software has bugs and as a developer, I have an obligation to provide fixes to all my paying customers, whether they are on subscription or not. Customers on subscription have the advantage of getting access to new stuff. That’s fine. But denying them access to bug fixes is just not right.

Buzz Kross, Senior Vice President, Autodesk1
9 April 2010


Photo: Autodesk

It’s not often I so completely agree with an Autodesk executive1, but I can find no fault in his logic. Thank you, Buzz.

1. Although Buzz is still listed as a SVP in some Autodesk online materials, he’s no longer with the company.

Autodesk confirms its own unconscionable conduct

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It took several attempts over a period of months and was like pulling teeth, but Autodesk has now confirmed that it is deliberately withholding bug fixes from some of its customers.

Autodesk has taken customers’ money and in return has provided defective software (OK, that happens). It has fixed some of those defects (that happens too, sometimes). But it’s limiting distribution of those fixes to those prepared to pay Autodesk further (that has never happened before).

Just let that sink in. Autodesk broke stuff you paid for, could easily fix it, but won’t do so unless you pay more. If you thought ransomware only came from Russia, think again.

Here’s how the scam works.

Let’s say customer Fred paid thousands of dollars for his perpetual license of AutoBLOB and paid thousands more for upgrades and maintenance over several decades. Due to Autodesk no longer making significant improvements to AutoBLOB, he finally gave up hope and decided to drop off maintenance. Understandable, particularly as Autodesk has announced maintenance prices are getting jacked up.

Never mind. Thanks to his perpetual license, Fred can keep right on using AutoBLOB! Aren’t perpetual licenses just the best thing?

Let’s say Fred made the decision after discovering AutoBLOB 2017 was slower than, and really not significantly better than, AutoBLOB 2016, 2015 or even 2010. Fred’s maintenance period carried him through to beyond the release of AutoBLOB 2018, which he intended using for a few years until he transitioned to an alternative product. (Or until Autodesk Becomes Great Again, but Fred doesn’t consider that likely).

Meantime, Fred discovers that there’s a new bug in AutoBLOB 2018 that makes it useless for his needs. It’s not a crash, drawing corruption or security issue, but it is something that makes it difficult of impossible for him to produce the required output. Because he installed AutoBLOB 2018 before his maintenance expired, Autodesk won’t allow him to use 2017 or any earlier version.

Meanwhile, Autodesk has, miracles of miracles, developed a fix for that nasty bug. All Fred has to do is download and install the hotfix or Service Pack, right? Wrong. Because Autodesk has wrapped up the bug fix with AutoBLOB 2018.1, a mid-term update that includes not only bug fixes but also a few new minor feature improvements. Unlike the competition, Autodesk restricts such updates to continuously paying customers. AutoBLOB 2018.1 is therefore only available to subscription and maintenance customers. Fred’s bug has been “deemed non-critical” by Autodesk and therefore the fix won’t be distributed to him.

Fred is screwed by a combination of Autodesk’s worst aspects: chronic failure to improve the product, price-gouging business practices, incompetence in development and testing, and unreasonably restrictive licensing terms. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s then screwed again by one final, nasty, vindictive, petty piece of bastardry by a company desperate to strong-arm its reluctant customers into subscription slavery.

This is not OK.

This is no way to treat customers. It’s unethical. It’s unconscionable. It’s immoral. It’s disgusting. It’s evil.

In the EU at least, it could well be illegal. I certainly hope so; Autodesk being fined a few hundred million Euros might discourage other companies from following suit.

Although it’s tempting to think of Autodesk as a single edifice, it’s important to remember that it’s made up of many individuals. Many of them are great people who would never dream of stooping this low and who are probably quietly embarrassed to be associated with a company that does so. Those people have my sympathy and should stop reading now.

But if you’re that person at Autodesk who thought up this idea? Or one of those who thought it would be OK to do this? Or just sat silently during the meetings where this was discussed and didn’t pipe up, “This is just WRONG”? I have a message for you.

You’re an asshole.

I continue to snigger at your pronouncements of technological inevitability

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Back in January, I declared my amusement at people proclaiming impending technology trend takeovers as inevitable and irresistible. Among other things, I had this to say (it’s a familiar phrase in Britain):

What a load of bollocks.

 
Today I was provided with another example (thanks Ralph):

What falling e-book sales tell us about technology in 2017

I encourage you to read that post, which seems to me to be right on the money. E-books, yesterday’s Next Big Thing, are now in sharp decline. The inevitable technology takeover turned out to be not quite so inevitable after all. Who could have guessed?

Here’s another quote from my January post:

Next time somebody tries to tell you something like, “The whole software industry is moving to the rental model, all software will be sold that way soon, there will be no avoiding it,” please refer them to paragraph two above.

 
Autodesk has bet the farm on not just one apparently inevitable technology trend, but two. If either rental-only software and cloud-based CAD/BIM/M&E fail to live up to expectations, Autodesk will be in a world of pain.

That’s quite a gamble, and Autodesk has already blown a billion bucks on what it probably thought was a sure thing. Anybody who thinks there’s such a thing as a sure thing in technology hasn’t been paying attention.

Further Autodesk subscription inflexibility

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Autodesk’s claim that its all-rental business model adds flexibility for customers has always been bullshit.

That’s a self-evident truth. Nobody believes that removing customers’ purchasing options amounts to anything but inflexibility. Particularly when the purchasing option removed is that preferred by the vast majority of customers.

But wait! There’s more! I recently discovered that it’s even more inflexible than I originally thought!

If you sign up for single-user (standalone) subscription licenses you’re stuck with them for the duration of your agreement. You can’t upgrade them to multi-user (network) licenses. Doesn’t matter how much cash you wave in Autodesk’s face, or how much you point out that single-user subscription licensing is a crock, it will be a case of “computer says no”.

Astonishing.

Autodesk has released an update to fix the following AutoCAD 2018 problem:

Product users of version 2018 Autodesk single-user subscriptions may experience an intermittent crash. The crash occurs when it has been more than 24 hours since the last successful authorization check and there is intermittent or no internet connection, or the licensing authorization server is unavailable. The licensing authorization check occurs in the background and is completely unrelated to activities the user is performing at the time of the crash.
A fatal error message may be shown by the product. For example:

FATAL ERROR: Unhandled e06d7363h Exception at ee563c58h

 
Links:

Note that this crash only afflicts subscription (rental) single-user (standalone) customers. People with perpetual licenses don’t have to put up with the multiple additional points of failure caused by the subscription licensing system insisting on phoning home every 30 days. Yes, even if you pay for three years’ subscription up front, you’ll still need a working Internet connection every 30 days if you want to keep using the product.

At least, Autodesk has been saying it’s only once every 30 days (as if that wasn’t bad enough). The information provided with this hotfix tells a different story. What is the license server doing phoning home 24 hours after the last successful authorization check? Enquiring minds want to know.

No criticism of Autodesk is implied for providing this hotfix. As always, I commend Autodesk for fixing up problems as they arise. The basis of my criticism is the hotfix being necessary in the first place. It’s caused by Autodesk inflicting unnecessary complication on its customers for its own internal reasons. This one fails the “how does this benefit the customer?” test big-time.

The single-user subscription licensing mechanism has been a crock from day one, especially for CAD Managers of multiple users who have to deal with its onerous requirements. It’s an astonishingly poor design, very badly implemented. Even with this particular crash fixed, it’s still a crock.

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:

The big Bricsys interview 5 – perpetual licensing and choice

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik confirms the Bricsys commitment to perpetual licensing. That’s a statement important enough to preserve, so here’s the recorded audio for posterity.

We also learn what proportion of CAD customers choose perpetual licenses over rental when given fair pricing and the choice. Hint to Autodesk: it’s not 0%.

Steve: Are you committed to the perpetual licensing model?

Erik: Yes, yes. We are committed to choice. If somebody wants another way of licensing our stuff, that’s fine as well. I mean you can hire our stuff, you can pay per month, it’s possible.

Steve: That’s not in all markets, is it?

Erik: We don’t promote it, but it’s possible if somebody contacts us, no problem. It’s choice, and we believe in choice. It’s not up to us to impose how people work with our stuff. But perpetual, it’s fair, I think. Somebody buys software, it’s always been like that, and we have to continue that. And we will continue that. Read my lips! We will continue.

All: (laughs)

Cyrena: Speaking of choice, can you talk about the type and portion of users who go for rental rather than perpetual?

Mark: Of course the vast majority go for perpetual.

Erik: 95% buyers.

Mark: When you see these clients in Russia that have these big oil projects in Siberia for six months or whatever, then it [rental] might make sense. But with the channel… 95, 97, 98% is just perpetual.

But what we see more and more is people are asking about it [rental] more and more, because of course in the Autodesk world there is no other option. So of course people just want to compare apples with apples.

Steve: So they’re just asking for the numbers?

Mark: Yes, for the numbers, “What would it be?” That’s the feeling that we have, ultimately when they make a decision they’re going to go for perpetual.

Erik: Because the price is acceptable as well, I think. It’s not that high a price for a substantial amount of software, so it’s not a problem.

Mark: Our price levels are completely different, of course. It’s affordable.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Clearing up the Autodesk rental / subscription / maintenance naming confusion

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Some people are confused by Autodesk’s naming terminology about subscription, maintenance and rental. This is entirely Autodesk’s fault, because it took a name (Subscription) which had a long-established meaning (including perpetual licensing) and used that name (but without its initial capital) to mean the opposite (no perpetual licensing).

There was a brief period, only last year, where the S word meant both things at the same time and differentiation between the opposing meanings was achieved using different prefixes.

Confused yet?

I’m not sure whether it’s kinder to view Autodesk doing something so obviously confusing as merely incompetence in communication or a deliberate attempt to confuse and deceive customers and/or the share market. Or maybe it was an inspired choice and I’m too obtuse to comprehend its genius. Choose whichever explanation you prefer.

In an attempt to clear things up, but at the risk of confusing matters further, Autodesk’s naming history goes something like this. The years shown below are approximate and some of them varied for different products and markets.

Year
 Name for perpetual license + pre-paid upgrades Name for rental
1997-2001 VIP Subscription Program –
2001-2003 VIP Subscription Program Rental
2004-2012 Subscription –
2013 Subscription Rental
2014-2015 Subscription –
2016 (briefly) maintenance subscription desktop subscription
2016- maintenance subscription

The current rental regime, which has run under two names to date but is currently called ‘subscription’, is the third attempt Autodesk has had at rental. The first two attempts failed in the marketplace because the vast majority of customers prefer perpetual licenses.

The big Bricsys interview 4 – thank you, Autodesk

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, we learn that Autodesk’s move to all-rental has helped drive BricsCAD sales higher and continues to do so.

Cyrena: Backing up just a step to sales, were you able to track any impact on your sales numbers with the chronology of Autodesk’s announcements of ending perpetual? Did you see an effect that you could map to that?

Erik/Mark (together): Yes.

Erik: We see that especially with large companies. I hear it from Mark always!

Mark: That’s what I wanted to explain this morning too, although we have an indirect sales channel, we have our resellers at work out there, especially with the large deals, we are involved always. So there’s always one of our guys, a business development manager together with the local sales person in touch with those larger corporations.

In the last few weeks, we have received tons of emails from large corporations; of course it’s hard to disclose them, but… [names a corporation]. It doesn’t mean they will switch right away, but we have meetings where they say that, “Our contract with Autodesk ends in July, August, whatever, that’s the time we will not extend it. We will not renew it, we will not go to subscription, and we are looking for alternatives.” These are really big, big, corporations. So yes, yes, we see an impact.

Erik: When it comes to alternatives, and with all respect to our colleagues [competitors], we are not the only alternative, but I think we are in a good position. If you see what we have to give people a perspective beyond AutoCAD, well…

If we would only be an AutoCAD clone, and AutoCAD stops further development, it would mean the clones stop further development more or less as well. And all of a sudden the market is going to 3D mechanical, 3D BIM, etc., then it’s a problem. I think that’s where we can play an important role.

The DWG market, the DWG community, if they really want to move on slowly, slowly (and everyone makes his own choices about staying on 2D AutoCAD-based, fine as well), but at least there is a growth path. And I see that BricsCAD is the only product that goes in that direction. All the other alternatives more or less stay around what Autodesk is presenting, with a few differences here and there.

But it’s not really mainstream that there is investment in R&D or really a big jump of other stuff than just being compatible with AutoCAD. It makes a difference.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Minority interest in keep-your-perpetual Autodesk subscription idea

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It’s undeniable that the vast majority of Autodesk’s customers don’t want to give up their perpetual licenses to sign up with Autodesk’s subscription (rental) model. I’ve gone through the evidence for this in an earlier post.

To bring that up to date a little, here are the final results from the poll “Autodesk is ending the sale of perpetual licenses. This is: (Good/Bad)”:

People are clearly attached to their perpetual licenses, regardless of what Autodesk does to manipulate prices.

A while ago I floated the idea that Autodesk might possibly come up with a better offer; one that lets you keep your existing non-upgraded perpetual license when signing up for subscription. I wanted to know if there was any more interest in that, so I wrote a post around that and created another poll, “Would you be interested in switching to Autodesk subscription if you could keep your old (non-upgraded) perpetual license? (Yes/Maybe/No)”. Here’s how the results ended up:

While the level of interest in this idea appears higher than in Autodesk’s current unappealing offer, it’s still not great. It seems most people don’t just want perpetual licenses for the sake of it, they want an escape route: the option to stop paying and keep playing, regardless of file format and OS compatibility issues. That means they want those perpetual licences to remain current.

The upshot is that Autodesk is going to find it very difficult to push most of its existing customers onto subscription, no matter what the offer.

Autodesk’s revolting customers are evaporating

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The revolting customers themselves aren’t evaporating, of course. They remain solid and are still as irate as ever. It’s just that the appearance of outrage is gradually fading away on the Autodesk Community forums.

As mentioned before, forum moderators have been busily vacuuming up threads from all over the place and moving them to the Moving to Subscription forum. Some time in the last week or so, that forum became less visible. It’s no longer listed among the bold links on the right pane under Subscription Management, but for now can still be found (if you look hard) in the list of 96 forums. Or at least you can get to the page above that forum, from where you can click on another link.

As it’s now so hard to find, I’ll help Autodesk with its sincere desire to be transparent about its extortion scheme, er, wonderful discount offer by making the link a bit easier to find. Here it is:

Autodesk Moving to Subscription forum

Don’t mention it, Autodesk!

Oh, and the first time I tried to get in as a signed-in user, I got kicked out to the top forum list level. Don’t give up, try again and it should work.

From the beginning, I’ve had no doubt that the main idea behind the forum is to keep customer dissent neat and tidy in one easily-hidden place. It will almost certainly lose its final link in due course, then it will be made read-only and merged into semi-oblivion, just like the last one. When I dared to suggest such an outrageous thing, an Autodesk moderator accused me of being a conspiracy theorist.

Well, melt my steel beams with jet fuel, look what’s happening! Who would have thought it?

I’ll be sure to let you know when each of the final evaporation stages occurs. If you happen to notice before I do, please let me know and I’ll pass the information on to my readers.