The Autodesk Metamorphosis

StudioDesk to Emerge from Autodesk Metamorphosis

by Martyn Day, CADserver

Autodesk's existence to date has largely been tied to the fate of its flagship AutoCAD and products built on it. Efforts to build new code streams and tackle new markets have met limited success. That, combined with demands from Wall Street and a pro-Internet press, has forced Autodesk to rethink its future. Martyn Day went to Autodesk's HQ in San Rafael, California, to gauge Autodesk's new outlook. 

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay area, including Silicon Valley, is the globe's center of computing innovation and the very heart of 'dot.com' culture. Once you land it doesn't take long for this fact to become patently obvious. Whilst queuing to get through passport control, I noticed an old friend from my hometown standing in the queue next to me. After exchanging salutations we started talking about why we were in San Francisco. Formerly a stockbroker in London, Huw had decided to jack it all in to head-up his own Internet start-up specializing in 'radio over the web' down in Brighton and was 'in town' to procure some new whizzo technology. I should have guessed the Internet had something to do with my friend's visit, as to some degree it had also pulled me there, although in my case, we were on opposing sides, I'm a self-confessed web-agnostic, an 'e-skeptic' if you will and Autodesk wanted to show me the latest design technology, which just so happened to use the web.

Journeying from the airport to the center of San Francisco takes about 20 minutes along the freeway and billboard advertising abounds. On my first visit, a few years ago, I was amazed that all these expensive boards were mainly advertising web sites, concerning web-enabled stock trading, ebay auctioning, net development tools and the like. At the time, the UK had yet to see any serious web advertising. This journey I only saw Internet advertising but the subject matter had got even more esoteric.

One ad that caught my eye was a site called gazoontite.com (as in the German geshundheit, said after someone sneezes) that offers products for allergies, provides pollen forecasts and whose site tag line is to 'breathe happier and healthier'! The irony here is that electrical charges on the glass-end of cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), displaying the allergy website information, actually attracts all the dust towards it and the dust sensitive user. As a side issue, there appear to be literally hundreds of medical websites, which I can only assume serve the burgeoning numbers of hypochondriacs with Internet connections! Call me old-fashioned but when I'm ill and suffering I go and seek the advice of my doctor, the non-digital variety.

And so on to the purpose of my trip: to meet Autodesk and get the lowdown on new products, initiatives and its evolving web strategy.
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