The
problems and lessons learnt in the development of MDT on top
of the problematic R13 may have been the reason for Inventor -
in my eyes, the first major new code stream from Autodesk
since AutoCAD. The main contenders in the MCAD (Mechanical
CAD) field all had pure 3D interfaces, while AutoCAD was very
much 2D and 3D enhancements and, in fact, it was sold as a
migratory solution for those that wanted to transition to 3D.
With an unstable revision of AutoCAD to build on and quickly
advancing competition (notably SolidWorks) , one can imagine
the pressures on the Autodesk MCAD division’s VP, Dominic
Gallello, who decided that a new ‘from scratch’ modeler should be developed.
To
date, Mechanical Desktop has the largest installed base of any
of the mid-range modelers and its continued success has even
astounded its creators who now have to try to move the MDT
users to the more than capable Inventor. Autodesk’s marketing
of MDT has declined and future roadmaps of releases, past the
next release (V6), are hard to come by.
Architectural Desktop (ADT) owes its heritage from Autodesk’s
purchase of the US developed Softdesk product Auto Architect.
One of the earliest object-based developments on top of
AutoCAD, Softdesk’s solution managed to get a dominating
position within the US market. Here in the UK we had our own
longstanding development, AutoCAD AEC, but this was shelved in
favor of ADT. While ADT is selling well, it’s still not clear
if customers are using its Single Building Model capabilities
in anger. My experiences with ADT have left me with the
distinct feeling that I’m wading through treacle and I
wondered if the AEC division was going to develop its own
‘Inventor’ style product and replace ADT?
“My experiences with ADT have left me with the distinct
feeling that I’m wading through treacle…”
A year ago Autodesk previewed some technology which it called
Project Nora, which became known as StudioDesk, a 2D/3D
modeling package that was extremely easy to use and not based
on AutoCAD. Developed by Autodesk’s CTO who thought up
Inventor, Scott Borduin, StudioDesk appeared to be a
revolutionary conceptual modeling tool. Now named
Architectural Studio, the product is slated for launch later
this year. Whether if it will replace ADT at some point is
still unclear. However, in an article on
www.cadserver.co.uk,
he commented:
“In the future,
ADT will be flexibly linked to a distributed and shared
project-based building model database. Other purpose-built solutions will be working
on appropriate elements of the same project information
system, providing secure access to the right information by
the right people at the appropriate time.”
This concept of a centralized database
crops up again later in this article and appears to be an
undercurrent to Autodesk’s ‘behind the scenes’
developments. For now I conclude that Architectural Studio
will be the package which will aid the conceptual and
unconstrained part of the process, where ADT, or something
like it, will be there for the detailing.
So
the Autodesk suite offers LT for intermediate DWG compatible
drafting, vanilla AutoCAD for customized 2D and 3D design, the
Desktops for industry-specific AutoCAD-based solutions and now
is in the process of evolving new 3D code streams -- Inventor
for MCAD and Architectural Studio for AEC solutions. Currently
the pressure within Autodesk is to push the Desktop products
to its current and potential AutoCAD customers. Not only do
they do more than vanilla AutoCAD, they also provide better
profit margin to the company.
2002 and extensions
And
so to the new release of AutoCAD, R2002. Autodesk had publicly
stated “no more big Rs” (referring to their release
nomenclature of R13, R14). In some ways, mainly with its
distinct lack of content, 2002 fits that bill. AutoCAD will be
enhanced gradually through the year via the release of a
series of ‘Extensions’ and every year there will be a
release made up of these Extensions plus any core changes to
AutoCAD (an equivalent of a big ‘R’). These releases will
have to be purchased. However, those who sign up to an
Autodesk subscription will get all the Extensions for a fixed
yearly fee. Up until now, a new revision of AutoCAD has
appeared around every 18-22 months with AutoCAD and its
dealers spending marketing money attempting to sell the
upgrade to the installed base. Subscription plans would smooth
out Autodesk’s earnings, making it more predictable for the
stock market, reduce the efforts required to transition users
to one common release and benefit the end user by delivering
features over time rather than in one big lump – though
potentially causing training headaches and deployment issues
for large users.
Users
who have paid money for AutoCAD have really bought a perpetual
license giving them the right to use that version of AutoCAD
forever. Subscription won’t change that, in fact it will
open up more options where it will be possible to rent or
lease AutoCAD seats on demand. This option will help in those
crunch times where more copies of AutoCAD are needed, coming
in 30, 60, or 90 days usage. In the future Autodesk will also
offer to host AutoCAD and deliver it as an Application Service
Provider (ASP) over the Web, either from its servers or on
yours. It won’t run on a local machine, just interact with
the designer over the web.
There
will be management tools available with the extensions later
on, these will allow CAD managers to deploy the extra
functions provided by the regular Extension updates over a
large number of workstations.
In
January Autodesk will officially cease support for the popular
AutoCAD R14 and this will mean that if you fail to upgrade to
a newer version, you will have to pay for a whole new copy of
AutoCAD to get an update. It will also be deleted from the
sales catalog so no new copies of R14 will be sold. In many
respects the lackluster feature set of 2002, combined with the
unchanged DWG file format, aids that transition providing few
barriers or problems should users want to upgrade.
It’s at this point that one decides to
either pay for upgrades every 18 months or go on subscription.
Autodesk’s stated intention is to get all of its customers
on subscription eventually. However, to do this it has to
provide compelling reasons for customers. While I can see the
benefit for subscription for companies with lots of seats of
AutoCAD, smaller companies tend not to find subscription as
appealing.
”One of the best models for
subscription is Bentley’s Select program”
One of the best models for subscription
is Bentley’s Select program. Over 80% of Bentley customers
paying for MicroStation updates on a subscription basis. Here
extra functionality comes via the web or on CD (users can even
compile their own suite of functions to be burned onto CD at
Bentley and delivered to the company). On the technology side
Bentley has certainly talked up what’s in R&D but has
fallen short on several occasions of not delivering on its own
deadlines - one of the problems with talking up future
technology - but I’d rather know what was coming down the
line if I was already paying for it. One difference between
Bentley’s customer base and Autodesk’s is that Bentley
has, on average, over 25 seats per site, while Autodesk has a
figure closer to 5. It may be the case that Autodesk’s
typical customer may not be as eager to subscribe as a typical
Bentley one.
At the launch of 2002 I asked if
Autodesk could tell me what new features they were working on
that will be streamed through Extensions over the next year or
so. I was told to look back at what Autodesk had provided in
previous releases.
While R14 became popular as it was the
definitive Windows version of AutoCAD, 2000 and especially
2000i have added few useful features and enhancements. The
majority has focused on the Internet and with the relatively
poor acceptance of these versions it’s obvious that these
features haven’t been compelling enough for AutoCAD
customers. Which leads me to wonder just what else can be done
to
AutoCAD in the coming years to make
subscription worthwhile? According to Ralph Grabowski, Editor
and Publisher of the Upfront ezine (www.upfrontezine.com),
there has been a trend towards providing an ever decreasing
number of new AutoCAD commands in releases since R14:
*
Release 14 introduced 86 new commands (52 of which were
"bonus commands"), but removed 11 commands. Net =
75.
*
AutoCAD 2000 introduced 65 new commands, but removed 32
commands (many of which renamed or combined commands, like
DDLModes). Net = 33.
*
Between them, AutoCAD 2000i and 2002 introduced just 29 new
commands, but removed 4 commands. Net = 25 over two releases.
Autodesk needs to
provide a more robust vision of exactly where AutoCAD, as a
product, is going. I want to know what features are in
development? Could Autodesk spell out how specific future
Extensions will enhance the productivity and ease the lives of
designers? Before you ask a customer-base to pay in advance
for new features, it’s only fair to give them some insight
as to what they will get for their money. It seems odd that I
can write more about how subscription will improve the
business predictability and cash flow of Autodesk than I can
write about the benefits of subscription to actual customers!
Autodesk is a company that tells us more about investment
opportunities with its stocks than sharing information on the
technology path beyond the next release.
Goodbye DWG?
To get a vision of the future of
Autodesk’s development, one has to read between the lines
and extrapolate from conversations with key Autodesk
personnel. The problem is mapping the current product
portfolio to some of the inferred directions. From the
Bernstein AEC article, there seems to be some work on a centralized
data model and while talking with Scott Borduin,
Autodesk’s CEO, on the subject of proprietary file formats,
he made the following statement : “We are going to get to an
era when the CAD application, this great big mammoth chunk of
code, will interconnect with all of these new architectures
and force you into a multi-tier paradigm with swappable
components between these tiers and even from the application
standpoint, you will have a lot smaller subsets of things
going on – you won’t just fire up one CAD environment to
add all of the information from the geometry to the detailing,
to the cut lists and structural information. Every one of
those will wind up being different small applications living
at the top tier of all these architectures.”
In short this means that Borduin’s
current view of the future of CAD is a central model database
with small specialist programs, specific to certain market
areas (architectural, services, land, QA, civils etc),
accessing the information that is only applicable to their
fields. All this will work over the Internet or intranets. If
this is the real aim, then Autodesk has to work out a way to
evolve AutoCAD and the Desktops into that type of solution,
unless it chooses to deliver a ‘from scratch’ product like
Inventor. One would assume that it would be easier to start
with a clean slate than to tie the hands of the developers
with legacy issues. My guess is at some point, perhaps as
little as three years away, DWG and files in general may well
become antiquated notions.
Conclusion
For Autodesk it’s clear that
subscription is a global goal and the benefits that it will
bring the company in predictable revenues will benefit it
greatly in the coming years. To do this Autodesk has to switch
to delivering piecemeal functionality improvements and deliver
value throughout the year. An important part of this will be
to engage its customers to keep them informed and implement
their development wishes. I am sure that most of the Autodesk
big cheeses can reel off a list of impressive corporate
customers but very few AutoCAD customers that have five seats
or less, yet it’s these that make up the lion’s share of
the installed base. One other worry here is the US-centric
mentality, which is still pervasive within the company. Many
of its recent products start as US-only distribution, e.g.
RedSpark, Buzzsaw, the Extensions and Streamline to name but a
few. This makes me wonder just how much input the European
part of the operation gets in these products? Perhaps the US
is better ‘Internet prepared’ and more savvy in some of
these areas but if the original target market of these
products is the US, when does the European point of view get
factored in?
I started off this article stating that
Autodesk was perceived as a one product company and to a
larger extent, irrespective of the Autodesk spin, the company
is still a one product company. Vanilla AutoCAD is still
providing a hefty amount of bottom line revenue, together with
the AutoCAD code stream acting as the foundation for all its
current Desktop and budget (LT) solutions. In a business
sense, the proprietary AutoCAD DWG compatibility issue has
been leveraged well throughout the product line and is utilized
as a strong sales pitch. In the business world it’s
not good to be seen as a one-product company, and while on the
design and drafting side this is pretty much the case, the
purchase of discreet (high-end Digital media, 3D Studio etc)
did help diversify its portfolio.
Relatively recently, starting with the
development and introduction of Inventor, Autodesk has
embarked on a new journey, a place where its traditional
comfort zone of DWG compatibility, armies of trained users and
industry-wide familiarity cannot be played. The AutoCAD
products lead to the development of the Desktops and while the
foundation AutoCAD code has been redeveloped, there seems to
be only so far you can really evolve a product. Applying
modern programming techniques to redevelop a 19-year-old bit
of software, while tying the hands of the developers to
maintain legacy and historical functionality is like trying to
re-build a bi-plane using the latest aerospace technology –
whatever you do, it’s still going to be a bi-plane, albeit a
jet powered one! For me, Inventor, an outstanding new product,
is proof that starting from scratch is the way forward and
reading between the lines, the forthcoming Architectural
Studio looks to be the AEC’s equivalent to Inventor. It also
seems Autodesk’s technologists are looking at ways of
removing the limitations of ‘files’ in this interconnected
and networked era, together with the centralization of the
design database. For Autodesk, the managing of this customer
migration from its ‘legacy AutoCAD DWG’ world to the next
generation vertical products will provide the biggest
challenge.
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