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"There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn" I was under the impression that they've bought most of

by fsloth 11y ago

"There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn" I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves. Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins. DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption. It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/ https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)

maratd 11y ago
> I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in. That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
  - neilgrey 11y ago
    That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.
    - fsloth 11y ago
      Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets. "the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors." Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG. Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable. Construction industry software is so ready for disruption. A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.
      - vvanders 11y ago
        Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.
      - theoh 11y ago
        BIM software like Revit is pretty clever and would be difficult to build from scratch. AutoCAD is horrible but a lot of the horribleness is difficult to get rid of while providing the same functionality. So, I'm not sure I agree with your take.
- tehwebguy 11y ago
  > They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? Autodesk certainly doesn't think so, at least with respect to people who purchase copies of their software.
imgabe 11y ago
As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though. Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)
- lispm 11y ago
  I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp. Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C. Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.
- theoh 11y ago
  It's confusing, all right, and I don't think it makes for maintainable code. Example: http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html

by fsloth 11y ago

maratd 11y ago

> I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.

vvanders 11y ago
Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in. That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
- neilgrey 11y ago
  That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets. "the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors." Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG. Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable. Construction industry software is so ready for disruption. A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.
    - theoh 11y ago
      BIM software like Revit is pretty clever and would be difficult to build from scratch. AutoCAD is horrible but a lot of the horribleness is difficult to get rid of while providing the same functionality. So, I'm not sure I agree with your take.
tehwebguy 11y ago
> They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? Autodesk certainly doesn't think so, at least with respect to people who purchase copies of their software.

imgabe 11y ago

As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though. Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)

lispm 11y ago
I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp. Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C. Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.
theoh 11y ago
It's confusing, all right, and I don't think it makes for maintainable code. Example: http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html