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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.
FTP space, just sign up and store your files there, whatever
your trade!
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