
Autodesk announces 925 layoffs - spinningarrow
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/03/autodesk-announces-929-layoffs-10-of-its-workforce-as-part-of-restructuring-plan/
======
fsloth
Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of
cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've
palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI.

Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still
has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is
using Autocad tools.

They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not
very innovative.

~~~
coldtea
> _They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not
> very innovative._

Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X?

There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than
in the average "unicorn".

~~~
fsloth
"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 :)

~~~
imgabe
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
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.

------
greggman
I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations
software would fund and/or contribute to Blender (or some other open source 3D
app)

Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than Blender but it seems like
if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be
better off for it.

~~~
Silhouette
Part of the trouble is that the FBX format in parts of these industries is
like the DOC(X) and XLS(X) formats in office productivity software: _everyone_
uses it, so if you want to use a tool that doesn't reliably convert to/from it
losslessly you are at risk of severe friction when working with others. And
like DOC(X) and XLS(X), it's a proprietary format, which creates various
complications for anyone who wants to create and maintain any sort of
conversion tool.

Another part of the trouble is that Blender suffers from some common ailments
in the FOSS world, notably a lack of UI refinement, stability, and
documentation. While there are people trying to improve these things, and over
time they are making some decent progress, and it's not as if the Autodesk
products themselves are perfect on any of these counts, on balance there is
still a much stronger ecosystem around the incumbents. A challenger like
Blender needs to be not just playing catch-up but dramatically in the lead to
shift this sort of market.

~~~
isaiahg
> notably a lack of UI refinement

That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and
innovative.

~~~
JeremyHerrman
Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted
options:

blender is slow

blender is too hard

blender is hard to use

I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot
that I still have today.

Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:

blender is hard

blender is damaged

blender is confusing

blender is free

blender is slow

In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point
out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video
& transcript here: [http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-
part-1-wh...](http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-why-
its-broken/)

Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew
was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought
Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole
lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming
users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).

Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting
modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things.
What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone
except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so
many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because
there's simplicity in specialization.

~~~
greggman
Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more
"standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.

But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to
understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going
through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back
in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no
escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.

Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?

Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for
years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I
tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click
on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is
still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.

~~~
Arcanum-XIII
First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get
easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even
Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work
the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in
ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender.
It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying. A bit like
Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some
people love it, Lots don't.

------
arca_vorago
I have a lot of seething anger for Autodesk. They have managed to achieve
mindshare lockin for so many people when doing certain tasks (primarily
AutoCAD variations), but their pricing is horrible on budgets. $210 monthly
cost for a single Autocad license?!

Thankfully, avoidance of their ecosystem has pushed me further into Blender
which I am loving more and more, but on the business side I still quietly
mumble curses at them.

~~~
krschultz
$210 a month is _low_ in that industry. Seriously. Solidworks, CATIA, and NX
are all significantly more expensive.

~~~
fixermark
Which is, perhaps, arca's point---the whole industry might be over-priced for
the cost to provide the software. It's scary to think how much ground people
could cover in 3D design if the pricepoint for getting in wasn't prohibitive.

Blender offers a counterweight against the price running too high.

------
dba7dba
All I can add is that Autodesk has the best office layout that I am aware of.
In 1990s.

In their HQ, every single employee got a little glassed in office with enough
room for a desk, chair, and 2 chairs IN front of the desk. There was room for
an employee to bring in a sleep bag and sleep if necessary with some privacy.

IMO much better than this open office stuff. Hopefully they still have that.

~~~
thisismyanon1
Wow... I wish ADSK had offices like that. Our office in San Francisco is now a
completely open office. I don't like it much. At least Management was very
thoughtful when they introduced it.

~~~
thisismyanon2
Our office (ADSK) in San Francisco filled in all the open space with vacant
desks, removing every possibility to decompress away from your desk.

------
justinclift
Wonder how many of the layoffs will be from QA?

Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they
don't lay off _any_ QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not
optimistic. :(

~~~
Cheyana
A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users)
purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple
of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh.
We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for
5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself.
We were going to make them work for that money.

~~~
gruez
I'm curious how that turned out. Did they solve the issue?

~~~
Cheyana
They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a
lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really
uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies
(like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because
the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract
their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.

~~~
odonnellryan
Check this out: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/mats/program_install_and...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/mats/program_install_and_uninstall)

I believe that's the right tool. It's a somewhat 'magic' uninstaller.

~~~
Cheyana
Yeah, Visual Studio is definitely the right candidate for a cleanup tool. I
guess Microsoft learned their lesson. It's a shame every vendor doesn't put as
much effort into cleaning up their crap as they put into the installer, but
maybe they figure if you're removing it then they couldn't care any less about
you.

------
zanny
Going to plug freecad -
[http://www.freecadweb.org/](http://www.freecadweb.org/)

Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions
pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of
my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than
sufficient.

~~~
CaptSpify
I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and
after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently.
In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small
projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.

------
sjclemmy
I had an interview for a contract as a front end coder before Christmas and
got offered the position at the end of the interview - he asked all the right
questions - but after Christmas the contract details were taking a while to
sort until I got a call saying the offer was rescinded. It seems this is why!

------
yyin
One of the better websites on the internet, from the founder of Autodesk:
[http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/nav/topics.html)

Suggested starting point:
[http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/atlast.html)

He recounts lots of Autodesk history. An early software company success story,
from the days before the www.

Highly recommended.

~~~
interfixus
You beat me to it. Fourmilab is the backbone of my www. Been visting for
twenty years - the site is still recognizably itself, and though at a somewhat
slower page nowadays, still regularly manages to come up with interesting new
stuff. It's a treasure trove. Everyting public domain'ed.

------
orf
My father is a quantity surveyor and Autodesk rules his industry. If you're
making, sending or receiving technical drawings of buildings you use Autodesk
software (and/or PDF unfortunately). From watching him work I think the
biggest feature they are missing is integration with smartphones. That might
sound cliche but for a surveyor having an app that helps you measure rooms
(like one of these[1]) that tightly integrated with Autodesk software would be
hugely useful.

Edit: Another thing they are missing out on is some kind of storage system
that integrates with Autodesk. The industries Autodesk are invested in have
huge archival needs, and most smaller practices have an old server in the
corner running a Windows shared folder that someone set up a while back with
an unbelievable volume of huge AutoCAD files clogging it up. Companies would
pay a lot of money for an integrated system like that, where they don't need
to worry about it and it's easy for their non-technical staff to deal with.

I also remember seeing the old AutoCAD logos around the house when I was a kid
and even installed a trial on my first computer, but had no clue what the hell
to do. Growing up around anyone in the surveying industry is awesome - they
use _huge_ A2/A1 pieces of paper for drawings which quickly become outdated
and those are super fun to play with when you're younger (paper planes,
massive large-scale drawings etc).

1\. [http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-
apps/](http://houseit.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-room-measurement-apps/)

------
galfarragem
I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction
sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as
much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for
literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has
some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.

------
forgotAgain
Looks more like activist investors threatening the board if they don't slash
and burn to increase short term profits.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-
idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-autodesk-restructuring-
idUSKCN0VC1OR)

------
yoklov
Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along
those lines.

Haven't tried Autodesk's subscription, but I will say that I (unlike many I
know...) am extremely happy with Photoshop CC. $10/mo is trivial for something
like Photoshop, and it still works without an internet connection, so I'm not
sure what all the hate is about. General mistrust of the business model?

~~~
blue1
For me, the hate is about several things:

(a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the
Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that;
I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and
in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work
in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people
the subscription model is much more expensive.

(b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able
to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription
model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted,
cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever).

(c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed
and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual
licensing was suppressed after CS6.

Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage
people from using their products when possible.

~~~
dangerlibrary
You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a
move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase
profit).

The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies
have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and
Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to
stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time
being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services
instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms
stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong
here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard
because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.

~~~
Silhouette
_...Adobe isn 't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to
stagnate._

The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new
functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would
have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that
so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade
suggests objectively that the products _were_ stagnating.

Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked
into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a _dis_
incentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry
momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up.

 _I don 't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding
is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are
unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks._

How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a
combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial
factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting
and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is
starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously
dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more
questionable by the day.

~~~
rdudek
Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of
software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew
owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay
the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they
can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.

~~~
Silhouette
That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable
information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most
plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half
as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites.
IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product
licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had
chosen not to upgrade to CS6.

If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the
data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more
than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not
regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they
have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own
permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest
competition.

The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's
products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than
hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings
potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only
model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for
Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software
for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll
make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if
they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more
copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of
larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing
deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news
for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.

~~~
r00fus
You might be interested in this analysis: [http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-
growth/](http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-growth/)

Looks like the transition has been good so far.

~~~
Silhouette
FYI, I found this one, which cites more recent data from Adobe themselves:
[http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-
me...](http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-members.html)

Given this one links to data straight from the source, I'm going to assume
it's reliable and therefore the previous report I mentioned with lots of
caveats was actually off by about a factor of 2-3.

The most interesting detail here might be that while they've been steadily
increasing their subscriber base for CC so far, they're also still only at
around half of their previous installed base for Creative Suite even today,
around 3.5 years after launch. To put that in perspective, a little under half
of that previous installed base was on CS6, while a modest majority were still
on CS3-CS5.5. That suggests it may become harder for them to continue growing
their CC subscriber base at the same rate if they approach a saturation point
within the industry or at least within those parts of it willing to keep
spending money on regular updates.

The other thing we should probably consider is that Adobe had almost a free
ride in the early days of CC, as there was relatively little serious
competition left in the industry. Now they're starting to face credible
threats, albeit mostly on a small scale or in specific niches for now, and if
they lose mind share and eventually the critical mass that means everyone has
to use CC because everyone uses CC, that could cause them some problems.

The next couple of years will be interesting for them. Presumably time will
tell whether they can find ways to drive significantly more people to regular
subscriptions than they used to get upgrading anyway, and whether they'll be
able to hold off any emerging competition.

------
golergka
One of the best game engines? What?

It might be nice, but I haven't actually met or heard about anyone who would
be using it.

~~~
Agustus
Goat Simulator.

~~~
david-given
Goat Simulator is Unreal Engine 2.

~~~
wlesieutre
Unreal Engine 3, actually. The generation (with various iterations) from
Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, and Bioshock Infinite.

Unreal Engine 2 would be from the period of UT 2k4 and Killing Floor.

~~~
dogma1138
Unreal Engine 2 is still quite heavily used especially platforms quite
heavily, UT2004 was UE 2.5.

AAA console PC titles also still use it I think the most "recent" ones would
be Bioshock 1 and 2.
[https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2](https://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/bioshock-2)

Since UE 2 was ported to IOS (Don't recall if it has an Android port also) it
actually became quite popular both in porting old games and in making new ones
since it's a bit more optimized and is considerably easier to use than UE 3/4.

------
KaiserPro
IT doesn't help that their cash cow (media and entertainment) has been rather
anaemic, along with autocad and other mains stays starting to see real
competition.

~~~
martinpw
Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not
very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like
AutoCAD and Inventor.

------
moron4hire
I have never worked at a company that was more than 150 people, let alone
having enough people that they could _lay off_ 925.

------
csense
> Unity and Unreal, which make their respective offerings available for free

The personal edition of Unity includes a splash screen and cannot be used by a
commercial entity making over $100,000 a year.

[1] [http://unity3d.com/get-unity](http://unity3d.com/get-unity)

------
original_idea
Every four years they seem to do this. No surprise here.

------
kumarski
They should have done online subscriptions a while ago?

------
Disruptive_Dave
That "A" logo is too close to Google's AdWords logo for my liking.

~~~
officialchicken
I'd say you've got it backwards - Autodesk began using the 'A' logo in the
early 80's and shipped on 5-1/4 floppies - at a time when very few computer
users had mice, tablets, and (VGA/EGA) graphics-capable displays.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
I see how that reads now; I wasn't intending to say who had it first, just saw
Autodesk for the first time and that popped into my head.

