16 ms·

Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

171 points by spinningarrow 11y ago

yoklov 11y ago
Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines. Haven't tried Autodesk's subscription, but I will say that I (unlike many I know...) am extremely happy with Photoshop CC. $10/mo is trivial for something like Photoshop, and it still works without an internet connection, so I'm not sure what all the hate is about. General mistrust of the business model?
- pixl97 11y ago
  >General mistrust of the business model? When your company requires the software to do its daily business, any misstep by the software company is a serious liability. When you 'buy' a copy of the software it is yours to run, and if the parent goes out of business you may not be able to reactivate it, at least it still runs. With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted.
  - justinclift 11y ago
    Exactly. Does anyone believe Autodesk won't pull an Oracle once they've transitioned their products to be Cloud only. I don't. :( Hopefully I'm wrong. :)
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted. Except that in the case of software, if either your data is locked up in some proprietary way or there is no competing software with a similar feature set anyway, you get evicted and there's no other landlord offering you an alternative place to live.
- blue1 11y ago
  For me, the hate is about several things: (a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that; I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people the subscription model is much more expensive. (b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted, cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever). (c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual licensing was suppressed after CS6. Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage people from using their products when possible.
  - dangerlibrary 11y ago
    You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase profit). The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      ...Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating. Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks. How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.
- aikah 11y ago
  > am extremely happy with Photoshop CC CC got a lot of heat when it was introduced, a lot customers complained, but one just has to look at the numbers to see why it was the right move for Adobe, the profits literally exploded! It's no surprise every other vendor would want to move to a subscription model. But Adobe was able to pull it off BECAUSE they have a monopoly and people in the industry are stuck with Photoshop and Illustrator. There is some competition but it's nowhere near 25 years of tech contained in Photoshop. On the other hand if one is using a product and Adobe decide to discontinue that CC product, one is kind of, f..cked, because one doesn't own the software anymore. > Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines. It also mean they might discontinue some products, which is never good for the customer. That's what bother me with these monopolies, and Autodesk kind of own every relevant 3D software in the industry.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  I thought it was way more expensive. The European website says 12e/month. I see a lot of people who could benefit from just one month of use and 10 bucks is nothing. Although it works in the case that person already knows the software. Now I wonder how much learning material they sold since the subscription model is on.
justinclift 11y ago
Wonder how many of the layoffs will be from QA? Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they don't lay off any QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not optimistic. :(
- Cheyana 11y ago
  A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users) purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh. We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for 5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself. We were going to make them work for that money.
  - gruez 11y ago
    I'm curious how that turned out. Did they solve the issue?
    - Cheyana 11y ago
      They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies (like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.
      - odonnellryan 11y ago
        Check this out: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/mats/program_install_and_uninstall https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/mats/program_install_and... I believe that's the right tool. It's a somewhat 'magic' uninstaller.
        11y ago
KaiserPro 11y ago
IT doesn't help that their cash cow (media and entertainment) has been rather anaemic, along with autocad and other mains stays starting to see real competition.
- martinpw 11y ago
  Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like AutoCAD and Inventor.
golergka 11y ago
One of the best game engines? What? It might be nice, but I haven't actually met or heard about anyone who would be using it.
- thenomad 11y ago
  Warhammer Vermintide used it, I believe.
- krig 11y ago
  It may be better known under its pre-acquisition name Bitsquid, made by a swedish company called Fatshark. I think the engine part of the company was split off and then sold to Autodesk. Still, certainly not one of the most popular game engines (of course popularity isn't necessarily the same as being the best)
- Agustus 11y ago
  Goat Simulator.
  - david-given 11y ago
    Goat Simulator is Unreal Engine 2.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Unreal Engine 3, actually. The generation (with various iterations) from Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Bioshock Infinite. Unreal Engine 2 would be from the period of UT 2k4 and Killing Floor.
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        Unreal Engine 2 is still quite heavily used especially platforms quite heavily, UT2004 was UE 2.5. AAA console PC titles also still use it I think the most "recent" ones would be Bioshock 1 and 2. https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2 https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2 Since UE 2 was ported to IOS (Don't recall if it has an Android port also) it actually became quite popular both in porting old games and in making new ones since it's a bit more optimized and is considerably easier to use than UE 3/4.
Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
That "A" logo is too close to Google's AdWords logo for my liking.
- officialchicken 11y ago
  I'd say you've got it backwards - Autodesk began using the 'A' logo in the early 80's and shipped on 5-1/4 floppies - at a time when very few computer users had mice, tablets, and (VGA/EGA) graphics-capable displays.
  - Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
    I see how that reads now; I wasn't intending to say who had it first, just saw Autodesk for the first time and that popped into my head.
arca_vorago 11y ago
I have a lot of seething anger for Autodesk. They have managed to achieve mindshare lockin for so many people when doing certain tasks (primarily AutoCAD variations), but their pricing is horrible on budgets. $210 monthly cost for a single Autocad license?! Thankfully, avoidance of their ecosystem has pushed me further into Blender which I am loving more and more, but on the business side I still quietly mumble curses at them.
- krschultz 11y ago
  $210 a month is low in that industry. Seriously. Solidworks, CATIA, and NX are all significantly more expensive.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    Which is, perhaps, arca's point---the whole industry might be over-priced for the cost to provide the software. It's scary to think how much ground people could cover in 3D design if the pricepoint for getting in wasn't prohibitive. Blender offers a counterweight against the price running too high.
fsloth 11y ago
Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI. Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools. They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.
- vvanders 11y ago
  few of? Pretty much everything in my mind. Still such a sadness that XSI got bought, they had killer engine integration(treating a game engine as first-class citizen inside XSI).
- coldtea 11y ago
  >They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X? There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Arguably most of their more innovative stuff like XSI, Mudbox, etc have all been acquisitions and not original IP.
  - foofoo55 11y ago
    Compared to SolidWorks, SketchUp, and even parts of MS Visio. The UI and meta-data handling is very cumbersome and every time we use it we think how much better some parts could be. As with many mega-corps they tend to follow or buy the innovations of others, eventually.
    - peeters 11y ago
      Hmm, I tried to use SketchUp a month or so ago, after being a proficient AutoCAD user but not touching it since around 2005. I'm curious what parts of the UI are more usable in SketchUp than AutoCAD. For 2D drafting, I got up to speed fairly quick in SketchUp but it became apparent to me that in terms of drafting productivity, SketchUp in 2015 couldn't really compete with AutoCAD circa 2005.
dba7dba 11y ago
All I can add is that Autodesk has the best office layout that I am aware of. In 1990s. In their HQ, every single employee got a little glassed in office with enough room for a desk, chair, and 2 chairs IN front of the desk. There was room for an employee to bring in a sleep bag and sleep if necessary with some privacy. IMO much better than this open office stuff. Hopefully they still have that.
- thisismyanon1 11y ago
  Wow... I wish ADSK had offices like that. Our office in San Francisco is now a completely open office. I don't like it much. At least Management was very thoughtful when they introduced it.
  - dba7dba 11y ago
    Ask around any old timers how their office layout was like in the old hq building.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - thisismyanon2 11y ago
    Our office (ADSK) in San Francisco filled in all the open space with vacant desks, removing every possibility to decompress away from your desk.
greggman 11y ago
I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations software would fund and/or contribute to Blender (or some other open source 3D app) Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than Blender but it seems like if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be better off for it.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Part of the trouble is that the FBX format in parts of these industries is like the DOC(X) and XLS(X) formats in office productivity software: everyone uses it, so if you want to use a tool that doesn't reliably convert to/from it losslessly you are at risk of severe friction when working with others. And like DOC(X) and XLS(X), it's a proprietary format, which creates various complications for anyone who wants to create and maintain any sort of conversion tool. Another part of the trouble is that Blender suffers from some common ailments in the FOSS world, notably a lack of UI refinement, stability, and documentation. While there are people trying to improve these things, and over time they are making some decent progress, and it's not as if the Autodesk products themselves are perfect on any of these counts, on balance there is still a much stronger ecosystem around the incumbents. A challenger like Blender needs to be not just playing catch-up but dramatically in the lead to shift this sort of market.
  - isaiahg 11y ago
    > notably a lack of UI refinement That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      In my case, it's a "misconception" based on being the guy who has to orchestrate a production pipeline from start to finish and pay the bills for everyone along the way. Blender's UI may be many things, but like any tool in this field, simple is hardly one of them. In any case, a significant problem in practice is that Blender's natural ways of working don't always match what is used by just about everyone else. Sometimes it's got just the right feature to model something in a certain way, but you then incur a disproportionate cost to adjust that asset so it's useful as part of your overall pipeline, and while the UI for the handy feature might be decent, the overall process is glitchy and error-prone.
sjclemmy 11y ago
I had an interview for a contract as a front end coder before Christmas and got offered the position at the end of the interview - he asked all the right questions - but after Christmas the contract details were taking a while to sort until I got a call saying the offer was rescinded. It seems this is why!
zanny 11y ago
Going to plug freecad - http://www.freecadweb.org/ http://www.freecadweb.org/ Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than sufficient.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently. In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.
- frik 11y ago
  FreeCAD is great. It's basically an open source CATIA (in its early stage).
orf 11y ago
My father is a quantity surveyor and Autodesk rules his industry. If you're making, sending or receiving technical drawings of buildings you use Autodesk software (and/or PDF unfortunately). From watching him work I think the biggest feature they are missing is integration with smartphones. That might sound cliche but for a surveyor having an app that helps you measure rooms (like one of these[1]) that tightly integrated with Autodesk software would be hugely useful. Edit: Another thing they are missing out on is some kind of storage system that integrates with Autodesk. The industries Autodesk are invested in have huge archival needs, and most smaller practices have an old server in the corner running a Windows shared folder that someone set up a while back with an unbelievable volume of huge AutoCAD files clogging it up. Companies would pay a lot of money for an integrated system like that, where they don't need to worry about it and it's easy for their non-technical staff to deal with. I also remember seeing the old AutoCAD logos around the house when I was a kid and even installed a trial on my first computer, but had no clue what the hell to do. Growing up around anyone in the surveying industry is awesome - they use huge A2/A1 pieces of paper for drawings which quickly become outdated and those are super fun to play with when you're younger (paper planes, massive large-scale drawings etc). 1. http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/ http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/
csense 11y ago
> Unity and Unreal, which make their respective offerings available for free The personal edition of Unity includes a splash screen and cannot be used by a commercial entity making over $100,000 a year. [1] http://unity3d.com/get-unity http://unity3d.com/get-unity
galfarragem 11y ago
I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.
forgotAgain 11y ago
Looks more like activist investors threatening the board if they don't slash and burn to increase short term profits. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-idUSKCN0VC1OR http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-idU...
kumarski 11y ago
They should have done online subscriptions a while ago?
moron4hire 11y ago
I have never worked at a company that was more than 150 people, let alone having enough people that they could lay off 925.
yyin 11y ago
One of the better websites on the internet, from the founder of Autodesk: http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html Suggested starting point: http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html He recounts lots of Autodesk history. An early software company success story, from the days before the www. Highly recommended.
- interfixus 11y ago
  You beat me to it. Fourmilab is the backbone of my www. Been visting for twenty years - the site is still recognizably itself, and though at a somewhat slower page nowadays, still regularly manages to come up with interesting new stuff. It's a treasure trove. Everyting public domain'ed.
original_idea 11y ago
Every four years they seem to do this. No surprise here.

171 points by spinningarrow 11y ago

Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines. Haven't tried Autodesk's subscription, but I will say that I (unlike many I know...) am extremely happy with Photoshop CC. $10/mo is trivial for something like Photoshop, and it still works without an internet connection, so I'm not sure what all the hate is about. General mistrust of the business model?

pixl97 11y ago
>General mistrust of the business model? When your company requires the software to do its daily business, any misstep by the software company is a serious liability. When you 'buy' a copy of the software it is yours to run, and if the parent goes out of business you may not be able to reactivate it, at least it still runs. With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted.
- justinclift 11y ago
  Exactly. Does anyone believe Autodesk won't pull an Oracle once they've transitioned their products to be Cloud only. I don't. :( Hopefully I'm wrong. :)
- Silhouette 11y ago
  With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted. Except that in the case of software, if either your data is locked up in some proprietary way or there is no competing software with a similar feature set anyway, you get evicted and there's no other landlord offering you an alternative place to live.
blue1 11y ago
For me, the hate is about several things: (a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that; I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people the subscription model is much more expensive. (b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted, cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever). (c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual licensing was suppressed after CS6. Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage people from using their products when possible.
- dangerlibrary 11y ago
  You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase profit). The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    ...Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating. Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks. How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.
aikah 11y ago
> am extremely happy with Photoshop CC CC got a lot of heat when it was introduced, a lot customers complained, but one just has to look at the numbers to see why it was the right move for Adobe, the profits literally exploded! It's no surprise every other vendor would want to move to a subscription model. But Adobe was able to pull it off BECAUSE they have a monopoly and people in the industry are stuck with Photoshop and Illustrator. There is some competition but it's nowhere near 25 years of tech contained in Photoshop. On the other hand if one is using a product and Adobe decide to discontinue that CC product, one is kind of, f..cked, because one doesn't own the software anymore. > Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines. It also mean they might discontinue some products, which is never good for the customer. That's what bother me with these monopolies, and Autodesk kind of own every relevant 3D software in the industry.
agumonkey 11y ago
I thought it was way more expensive. The European website says 12e/month. I see a lot of people who could benefit from just one month of use and 10 bucks is nothing. Although it works in the case that person already knows the software. Now I wonder how much learning material they sold since the subscription model is on.

justinclift 11y ago

Wonder how many of the layoffs will be from QA? Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they don't lay off any QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not optimistic. :(

Cheyana 11y ago
A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users) purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh. We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for 5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself. We were going to make them work for that money.
- gruez 11y ago
  I'm curious how that turned out. Did they solve the issue?
  - Cheyana 11y ago
    They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies (like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.
    - odonnellryan 11y ago
      Check this out: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/mats/program_install_and_uninstall https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/mats/program_install_and... I believe that's the right tool. It's a somewhat 'magic' uninstaller.
      - 11y ago

KaiserPro 11y ago

IT doesn't help that their cash cow (media and entertainment) has been rather anaemic, along with autocad and other mains stays starting to see real competition.

martinpw 11y ago
Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like AutoCAD and Inventor.

golergka 11y ago

One of the best game engines? What? It might be nice, but I haven't actually met or heard about anyone who would be using it.

thenomad 11y ago
Warhammer Vermintide used it, I believe.
krig 11y ago
It may be better known under its pre-acquisition name Bitsquid, made by a swedish company called Fatshark. I think the engine part of the company was split off and then sold to Autodesk. Still, certainly not one of the most popular game engines (of course popularity isn't necessarily the same as being the best)
Agustus 11y ago
Goat Simulator.
- david-given 11y ago
  Goat Simulator is Unreal Engine 2.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Unreal Engine 3, actually. The generation (with various iterations) from Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Bioshock Infinite. Unreal Engine 2 would be from the period of UT 2k4 and Killing Floor.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Unreal Engine 2 is still quite heavily used especially platforms quite heavily, UT2004 was UE 2.5. AAA console PC titles also still use it I think the most "recent" ones would be Bioshock 1 and 2. https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2 https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2 Since UE 2 was ported to IOS (Don't recall if it has an Android port also) it actually became quite popular both in porting old games and in making new ones since it's a bit more optimized and is considerably easier to use than UE 3/4.

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago

That "A" logo is too close to Google's AdWords logo for my liking.

officialchicken 11y ago
I'd say you've got it backwards - Autodesk began using the 'A' logo in the early 80's and shipped on 5-1/4 floppies - at a time when very few computer users had mice, tablets, and (VGA/EGA) graphics-capable displays.
- Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
  I see how that reads now; I wasn't intending to say who had it first, just saw Autodesk for the first time and that popped into my head.

arca_vorago 11y ago

I have a lot of seething anger for Autodesk. They have managed to achieve mindshare lockin for so many people when doing certain tasks (primarily AutoCAD variations), but their pricing is horrible on budgets. $210 monthly cost for a single Autocad license?! Thankfully, avoidance of their ecosystem has pushed me further into Blender which I am loving more and more, but on the business side I still quietly mumble curses at them.

krschultz 11y ago
$210 a month is low in that industry. Seriously. Solidworks, CATIA, and NX are all significantly more expensive.
- fixermark 11y ago
  Which is, perhaps, arca's point---the whole industry might be over-priced for the cost to provide the software. It's scary to think how much ground people could cover in 3D design if the pricepoint for getting in wasn't prohibitive. Blender offers a counterweight against the price running too high.

fsloth 11y ago

Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI. Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools. They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.

vvanders 11y ago
few of? Pretty much everything in my mind. Still such a sadness that XSI got bought, they had killer engine integration(treating a game engine as first-class citizen inside XSI).
coldtea 11y ago
>They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X? There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".
- vvanders 11y ago
  Arguably most of their more innovative stuff like XSI, Mudbox, etc have all been acquisitions and not original IP.
- foofoo55 11y ago
  Compared to SolidWorks, SketchUp, and even parts of MS Visio. The UI and meta-data handling is very cumbersome and every time we use it we think how much better some parts could be. As with many mega-corps they tend to follow or buy the innovations of others, eventually.
  - peeters 11y ago
    Hmm, I tried to use SketchUp a month or so ago, after being a proficient AutoCAD user but not touching it since around 2005. I'm curious what parts of the UI are more usable in SketchUp than AutoCAD. For 2D drafting, I got up to speed fairly quick in SketchUp but it became apparent to me that in terms of drafting productivity, SketchUp in 2015 couldn't really compete with AutoCAD circa 2005.

dba7dba 11y ago

All I can add is that Autodesk has the best office layout that I am aware of. In 1990s. In their HQ, every single employee got a little glassed in office with enough room for a desk, chair, and 2 chairs IN front of the desk. There was room for an employee to bring in a sleep bag and sleep if necessary with some privacy. IMO much better than this open office stuff. Hopefully they still have that.

thisismyanon1 11y ago
Wow... I wish ADSK had offices like that. Our office in San Francisco is now a completely open office. I don't like it much. At least Management was very thoughtful when they introduced it.
- dba7dba 11y ago
  Ask around any old timers how their office layout was like in the old hq building.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- thisismyanon2 11y ago
  Our office (ADSK) in San Francisco filled in all the open space with vacant desks, removing every possibility to decompress away from your desk.

greggman 11y ago

I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations software would fund and/or contribute to Blender (or some other open source 3D app) Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than Blender but it seems like if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be better off for it.

Silhouette 11y ago
Part of the trouble is that the FBX format in parts of these industries is like the DOC(X) and XLS(X) formats in office productivity software: everyone uses it, so if you want to use a tool that doesn't reliably convert to/from it losslessly you are at risk of severe friction when working with others. And like DOC(X) and XLS(X), it's a proprietary format, which creates various complications for anyone who wants to create and maintain any sort of conversion tool. Another part of the trouble is that Blender suffers from some common ailments in the FOSS world, notably a lack of UI refinement, stability, and documentation. While there are people trying to improve these things, and over time they are making some decent progress, and it's not as if the Autodesk products themselves are perfect on any of these counts, on balance there is still a much stronger ecosystem around the incumbents. A challenger like Blender needs to be not just playing catch-up but dramatically in the lead to shift this sort of market.
- isaiahg 11y ago
  > notably a lack of UI refinement That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    In my case, it's a "misconception" based on being the guy who has to orchestrate a production pipeline from start to finish and pay the bills for everyone along the way. Blender's UI may be many things, but like any tool in this field, simple is hardly one of them. In any case, a significant problem in practice is that Blender's natural ways of working don't always match what is used by just about everyone else. Sometimes it's got just the right feature to model something in a certain way, but you then incur a disproportionate cost to adjust that asset so it's useful as part of your overall pipeline, and while the UI for the handy feature might be decent, the overall process is glitchy and error-prone.

sjclemmy 11y ago

I had an interview for a contract as a front end coder before Christmas and got offered the position at the end of the interview - he asked all the right questions - but after Christmas the contract details were taking a while to sort until I got a call saying the offer was rescinded. It seems this is why!

zanny 11y ago

Going to plug freecad - http://www.freecadweb.org/ http://www.freecadweb.org/ Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than sufficient.

CaptSpify 11y ago
I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently. In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.
frik 11y ago
FreeCAD is great. It's basically an open source CATIA (in its early stage).

orf 11y ago

My father is a quantity surveyor and Autodesk rules his industry. If you're making, sending or receiving technical drawings of buildings you use Autodesk software (and/or PDF unfortunately). From watching him work I think the biggest feature they are missing is integration with smartphones. That might sound cliche but for a surveyor having an app that helps you measure rooms (like one of these[1]) that tightly integrated with Autodesk software would be hugely useful. Edit: Another thing they are missing out on is some kind of storage system that integrates with Autodesk. The industries Autodesk are invested in have huge archival needs, and most smaller practices have an old server in the corner running a Windows shared folder that someone set up a while back with an unbelievable volume of huge AutoCAD files clogging it up. Companies would pay a lot of money for an integrated system like that, where they don't need to worry about it and it's easy for their non-technical staff to deal with. I also remember seeing the old AutoCAD logos around the house when I was a kid and even installed a trial on my first computer, but had no clue what the hell to do. Growing up around anyone in the surveying industry is awesome - they use huge A2/A1 pieces of paper for drawings which quickly become outdated and those are super fun to play with when you're younger (paper planes, massive large-scale drawings etc). 1. http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/ http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/

csense 11y ago

> Unity and Unreal, which make their respective offerings available for free The personal edition of Unity includes a splash screen and cannot be used by a commercial entity making over $100,000 a year. [1] http://unity3d.com/get-unity http://unity3d.com/get-unity

galfarragem 11y ago

I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.

forgotAgain 11y ago

Looks more like activist investors threatening the board if they don't slash and burn to increase short term profits. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-idUSKCN0VC1OR http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-idU...

kumarski 11y ago

They should have done online subscriptions a while ago?

moron4hire 11y ago

I have never worked at a company that was more than 150 people, let alone having enough people that they could lay off 925.

yyin 11y ago

One of the better websites on the internet, from the founder of Autodesk: http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html Suggested starting point: http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html He recounts lots of Autodesk history. An early software company success story, from the days before the www. Highly recommended.

interfixus 11y ago
You beat me to it. Fourmilab is the backbone of my www. Been visting for twenty years - the site is still recognizably itself, and though at a somewhat slower page nowadays, still regularly manages to come up with interesting new stuff. It's a treasure trove. Everyting public domain'ed.

original_idea 11y ago

Every four years they seem to do this. No surprise here.