5 ms·

Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.

by wakeupcall 3y ago

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I am surprised VMWare didn’t do the same thing tbh.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Yet...
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    2023 starts to look like the Year of Enshittification, so it may come sooner than expected.
  - nirui 3y ago
    Fun joke aside, I don't think that's really possible anymore since there are high quality opensource alternatives such as KVM (for server deployments) and Virtual Box (for end users). But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case). So maybe when next time someone wanted to say "fuck Autodesk", send $5 to FreeCAD instead (https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php).
    - ushakov 3y ago
      > Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives What about SolidWorks?
      - theatrus2 3y ago
        SolidWorks (and Catia upmarket), Siemens NX are the two most popular in the field that Inventor/Fusion plays in. 2d Autocad is pretty entrenched in some industries with no real competition.
    - seoulbigchris 3y ago
      > But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives I’m an EE who only needs to use 2D CAD occasionally. Back in the early days I got myself a copy of AutoCAD LT (my company used AutoCAD so it made sense to learn the same tools that out draftsmen used). I developed strong muscle memory for the AutoCAD commands, and it’s not really worth my time and hassle to learn a new tool given how infrequently I need it. Some years back I stumbled on DraftSight which was free / low-cost and was a UI clone of AutoCAD. They eventually switched to a subscription model. I’m not a big fan of SASS, but when it’s not an exorbitant price, needed for my professional work, and the software generates industry standard files that I can use with other packages if I want to get off the SASS merry-go-round, I’m not strongly opposed, either.
- postmodest 3y ago
  Didn't they change things so VMWare Fusion replaced the VMWare Player? I switched to Parallels because of some shenanigans a while back...
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    ~~They dropped the lifetime licensing but they didn’t force people into subscription.~~ ~~I know that LTT had such a license and made it a point to bring it up every time VMWare called them to turn it into a subscription.~~ I remembered wrong. :(
    - seritools 3y ago
      Pretty sure you're remembering TeamViewer instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRzaGUKEFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRzaGUKEFA EDIT: Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113513
      - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
        Yeah you are right. I think I have made this mistake twice before. Oof.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nicce 3y ago
These companies are doing well and making billions. We can assume that we will see more similar ones, as long as users still use their products in similar situations.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  no, it is more like this. Imagine building a great city. Each group decides what they would like to make, and their skills. One group decides to make a "book press" , where all the parts of making a paper book are improved. A different group decides to make a lock and key system, so that any time a city person wants to read a book, any book, they must use a key for that lock system. The City government over time is included, to say that "yes, we need these locks for safety" Years pass.. the thousands of amazing and efficient books are printed, but people now have more books than they know how to use. But the lock system is in more places. The book maker group now has bills to pay, and the interest in new books is less and less. But the lock people are making more money every month. SO the fine book people decide that they must now build locks.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Great way to put it. The structure of the firm dictates it’s future.
  - immibis 3y ago
    I saw this described as the conflict between business and industry. Industry is making things. Books, food, video games, computers, petrochemicals. Business is getting money. Business strangles industry to death all the time. The only thing we can do about it is make things that can't possibly be monetized. This is relatively easy in software - but still hard. Linux succeeded, and nobody pays for Solaris. Git succeeded, and nobody pays for Bitkeeper. One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents, but the world will be better off. But the people who make these things won't be rewarded, because they won't be doing business. Indeed, in many cases they'll go straight to prison.
    - 3y ago
mdip 3y ago
> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s. My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files. I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends. Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2] I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in. The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle. [0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates." [1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left. [2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.
award_ 3y ago
I just got into 3d printing as a hobby a few months ago and this has been my take away from their offerings as well. I use TinkerCad for most things; I'd like to get into Fusion 360, but I'd be a little afraid of learning a bunch about that software only to have more and more of it become out of reach behind licenses that don't make a lot of sense to buy as a hobbyist. That said, the products look great and seem to have everything a creator might want, so it definitely makes sense for pro shops to license and use.
- nunuvit 3y ago
  The F360 businesses strategy is to sell subscriptions to companies. The free and cheap tiers are a lure for their target market which they're gradually reeling in. Don't get personally invested in it for fun unless you can sustain the financial investment.
- bobrown010 3y ago
  Look into onshape - all online (read, no installs of any kind required), free for personal use, and really what fusion 360 should have been. Still missing minor advanced features of fusion360 but imo worlds better even if so
  - eropple 3y ago
    OnShape is pretty good, but I tend to think even hobbyists should be allowed to have private designs. That's a really weird and uncomfortable limitation that keeps me from recommending it to other people.
  - jhallenworld 3y ago
    Onshape is DOA for us- if Onshape goes away, so do your designs. They must know this is a huge issue, but still they provide no way to download your full work.
  - award_ 3y ago
    Thanks! I've seen this come up a few times with some youtubers I follow as well. Its got some limitations but might be just what I'm looking for.

Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I am surprised VMWare didn’t do the same thing tbh.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Yet...
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  2023 starts to look like the Year of Enshittification, so it may come sooner than expected.
- nirui 3y ago
  Fun joke aside, I don't think that's really possible anymore since there are high quality opensource alternatives such as KVM (for server deployments) and Virtual Box (for end users). But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case). So maybe when next time someone wanted to say "fuck Autodesk", send $5 to FreeCAD instead (https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php).
  - ushakov 3y ago
    > Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives What about SolidWorks?
    - theatrus2 3y ago
      SolidWorks (and Catia upmarket), Siemens NX are the two most popular in the field that Inventor/Fusion plays in. 2d Autocad is pretty entrenched in some industries with no real competition.
  - seoulbigchris 3y ago
    > But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives I’m an EE who only needs to use 2D CAD occasionally. Back in the early days I got myself a copy of AutoCAD LT (my company used AutoCAD so it made sense to learn the same tools that out draftsmen used). I developed strong muscle memory for the AutoCAD commands, and it’s not really worth my time and hassle to learn a new tool given how infrequently I need it. Some years back I stumbled on DraftSight which was free / low-cost and was a UI clone of AutoCAD. They eventually switched to a subscription model. I’m not a big fan of SASS, but when it’s not an exorbitant price, needed for my professional work, and the software generates industry standard files that I can use with other packages if I want to get off the SASS merry-go-round, I’m not strongly opposed, either.
postmodest 3y ago
Didn't they change things so VMWare Fusion replaced the VMWare Player? I switched to Parallels because of some shenanigans a while back...
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  ~~They dropped the lifetime licensing but they didn’t force people into subscription.~~ ~~I know that LTT had such a license and made it a point to bring it up every time VMWare called them to turn it into a subscription.~~ I remembered wrong. :(
  - seritools 3y ago
    Pretty sure you're remembering TeamViewer instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRzaGUKEFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRzaGUKEFA EDIT: Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113513
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      Yeah you are right. I think I have made this mistake twice before. Oof.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nicce 3y ago

These companies are doing well and making billions. We can assume that we will see more similar ones, as long as users still use their products in similar situations.

mistrial9 3y ago
no, it is more like this. Imagine building a great city. Each group decides what they would like to make, and their skills. One group decides to make a "book press" , where all the parts of making a paper book are improved. A different group decides to make a lock and key system, so that any time a city person wants to read a book, any book, they must use a key for that lock system. The City government over time is included, to say that "yes, we need these locks for safety" Years pass.. the thousands of amazing and efficient books are printed, but people now have more books than they know how to use. But the lock system is in more places. The book maker group now has bills to pay, and the interest in new books is less and less. But the lock people are making more money every month. SO the fine book people decide that they must now build locks.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Great way to put it. The structure of the firm dictates it’s future.
- immibis 3y ago
  I saw this described as the conflict between business and industry. Industry is making things. Books, food, video games, computers, petrochemicals. Business is getting money. Business strangles industry to death all the time. The only thing we can do about it is make things that can't possibly be monetized. This is relatively easy in software - but still hard. Linux succeeded, and nobody pays for Solaris. Git succeeded, and nobody pays for Bitkeeper. One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents, but the world will be better off. But the people who make these things won't be rewarded, because they won't be doing business. Indeed, in many cases they'll go straight to prison.
  - 3y ago

mdip 3y ago

> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s. My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files. I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends. Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2] I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in. The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle. [0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates." [1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left. [2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.

award_ 3y ago

I just got into 3d printing as a hobby a few months ago and this has been my take away from their offerings as well. I use TinkerCad for most things; I'd like to get into Fusion 360, but I'd be a little afraid of learning a bunch about that software only to have more and more of it become out of reach behind licenses that don't make a lot of sense to buy as a hobbyist. That said, the products look great and seem to have everything a creator might want, so it definitely makes sense for pro shops to license and use.

nunuvit 3y ago
The F360 businesses strategy is to sell subscriptions to companies. The free and cheap tiers are a lure for their target market which they're gradually reeling in. Don't get personally invested in it for fun unless you can sustain the financial investment.
bobrown010 3y ago
Look into onshape - all online (read, no installs of any kind required), free for personal use, and really what fusion 360 should have been. Still missing minor advanced features of fusion360 but imo worlds better even if so
- eropple 3y ago
  OnShape is pretty good, but I tend to think even hobbyists should be allowed to have private designs. That's a really weird and uncomfortable limitation that keeps me from recommending it to other people.
- jhallenworld 3y ago
  Onshape is DOA for us- if Onshape goes away, so do your designs. They must know this is a huge issue, but still they provide no way to download your full work.
- award_ 3y ago
  Thanks! I've seen this come up a few times with some youtubers I follow as well. Its got some limitations but might be just what I'm looking for.