6 ms·

As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly p

by poseva 6y ago

As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody listened. We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete, for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then... Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked also. After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features.. they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete detailing sw). For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.

ur-whale 6y ago
> Have a bright future together Until they get bought by AutoDesk
- mihaaly 6y ago
  I believe it has the chance like Google buys Apple or vice versa, the Nemetschek consortium and Autodesk's AEC line are direct competitors.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
To be fair this is not new. Autodesk has had this MO for decades. I remember in 1999, I was interning for a company that was getting into CAD, choice was to get 3D Solidworks that no one had heard of, or get the software that literally everybody used - 2D AutoCAD. That company still uses Solidworks today and has never touched a single Autodesk product. I can guarantee the opposite would not be true if the other decision was made. We knew in 1999 that Autodesk was never going to innovate, or allow us to.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  Solidworks is what my university required students to use and it was the better choice then.
tyingq 6y ago
"where software goes to die a slowly painful death" Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.
babayega2 6y ago
Crazy enough, in my country in Africa, we aren't trained to use Revit or AutoCad but Archicad primarly.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
The gold standard around these parts is purported to be Tekla Structures. No affiliation, just a structural steel guru who’s happy to work with the fabrication drawings it spits out. I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires. I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.
- ramshanker 6y ago
  Yes. Totally agree on TEKLA Structure. Their Concrete detailing also improved substantially in past few years.
  - namibj 6y ago
    Is there anything a non-professional can use for the following four usecases (separate software is ok): 1) Reinforced concrete structure design, with support for non-trivial surfaces (e.g. splines/Bezier curves/surfaces). 2) Non-finely-meshed (in comparison to local volume thickness) truss structures, ideally not just classic steel beams + welded/riveted joints, 3) but also aluminium (considering fatigue from non-stationary loads and optimizing for the lifespan/weight/cost pareto frontier (cost would be just a simplistic metric)). 4) The holy grail, a 3d-printed core (technically a large-pore-size, low-density, open-pore foam) that is then covered by fibers via a robot that passes the spool around the core/preform (filament winding). After hardening the matrix that bonds the fibers together, the 3d-printed core could optionally be removed by melting and/or solvent washing. This kind of structure is potentially extremely stiff due to combining the truss structure with cylindrical beams and a lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer material. The issue is just the insane non-triviality in designing such a structure, because there are restrictions to holes and fiber angle shifts due to the winding process, where the fiber bundle has to be accurately woven around the mesh in the designed way. This, combined with the directionality of the fibers makes it necessary to consider much more than normal 3d-printable topology optimization[0]. A concrete-ish example would be a multi-monitor + keyboard/mouse support structure to enable a low-fatigue position where the user leans back about 30~60 degrees to allow the neck to be supported and the user's practical FOV (w.r.t. feasibly eye/head movement) is covered by screen area and the arms can rest on supports. The constraint that makes a traditional steel truss undesirable would be to have it mobile (thus lightweight), yet stiff enough to handle ~5 m/s² without impairing usability. A practical case would be to overlay travel with getting work done, by mounting this in the back of a van (including straps/seatbelts as required) and being driven. A different practical example could be amateur airplane design, e.g. devising an autonomous solar glider, where some stiffness is required to not break the solar cells laminated into the wing surface (thinned wafers are lighter and can conform to the wing's curvature, but will then dislike the wing flexing along the span), but weight is extremely important. Mounting the heavy things (motors, some backup batteries, potential payload) and handling control surface actuation forces won't easily work with a simple fiber-reinforced hollow wing, as a lack of dedicated mounting points (with their own fibers distributing the forces into the outer structural surface) would require a far heavier construction. It's also difficult to consider aerodynamic forces when computing pre-distortion of the unloaded structure, so that design loads make it take on the desired shape, if there are also ad-hoc mounting brackets glued to the inside surface (which would be necessary if they're not designed into the primary structure). Sorry for the slightly-OT examples. [0]: Project video "on using the free version of Fusion360 for shelf brackets printed in PLA on a Prusa i3 MK3": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc - Thomas Sanladerer: Making STRONG shelves with Topology Optimization
mihaaly 6y ago
Sounds like economists run the company not engineers - Boeing comes to mind by some reason - where in place of competing with real inventions the money making has sole preference so killing of competition early using big piles of money is a perfectly decent and honorable way to go. Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.
- chrstphrknwtn 6y ago
  Sounds like accountants run the company.
  - mihaaly 6y ago
    Yes, sorry, that is right!
twelvechairs 6y ago
Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.
- syshum 6y ago
  I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
  - chansiky 6y ago
    > people that want innovation and people that want stability Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,
  - ethbro 6y ago
    > Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration, Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much! Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.
    - TallGuyShort 6y ago
      Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.
phkahler 6y ago
You may want to check the offerings from Altair. They have a lot to offer and even support many 3rd party tools. They do make a lot of acquisitions but that's to increase their capability, not to destroy competition.
mattkevan 6y ago
> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. There's a really nice lightweight vector design app for Mac and iOS called Graphic [0]. It was one of the first fully-featured design tools for iOS, and still the best to use. It was bought by Autodesk back in 2015, who promptly did nothing with it at all. Pretty much all development ground to a halt. From being updated every few months, the Mac app has only been updated three times in the last five years. It's since been spun-out to a different company, but development still isn't really happening – the iOS app hasn't seen an update since 2018. The lack of attention this app has been shown is sad, as it's a good piece of software and I use it all the time. It had the potential to be the vector equivalent of software like Pixelmator or Acorn – lightweight but powerful alternatives to Adobe products created by independent, highly-passionate developers. Instead, newer apps like Affinity Designer and Vectornator have taken any traction it might have had - and it's probably going to stop working with an upcoming release of macOS if they don't do anything. [0] https://www.graphic.com https://www.graphic.com
- cenal 6y ago
  Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made. I know your pain. Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one. I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made. At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.
    - mattkevan 6y ago
      Yeah, that's why I'm still wary of using Figma. Great though it is, I'm worried about all my designs going up in smoke if the company gets bought and shut down by Adobe or Google or someone.
tomxor 6y ago
Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS. When you buy software it's an investment - you invest your time in integrating it into your workflow and your employees learning to use it... your investment is tied to the future of that software. If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company. But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.
- wil421 6y ago
  > Small company rises to produce quality software, it sells, responds to bugs, listens to users, adds features etc. I would say: Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots. Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products. Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products. Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.
  - tomxor 6y ago
    Sorry I edited away your quote since it was implicit in parent. Your elaboration sounds more accurate i agree, but I think the end result is the same (a dead product with buried source code and wasted investment from it's users).
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  I think it's definitely possible. Look at Blender and GRASS GIS, some of the most successful open source projects among non-programmers of all time. Architecture tool is merely the midpoint between those too domains, right? :D
mroche 6y ago
> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/ https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/
- poseva 6y ago
  Seems up-to-date. I was not aware that the list is so long...
Blackthorn 6y ago
RIP to SoftImage. And we're all worried about the future of Inventor. The only reason I use that at all was because of the generous student license...other companies don't seem to do that, which feels like a giant mistake.
naikrovek 6y ago
When you are a software company and you buy another software company or you buy a product from another software company, you do not intend to maintain their software. You are purchasing the users, and adding them to your own userbase. That's the only reason to buy a competitor. Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."

by poseva 6y ago

ur-whale 6y ago

> Have a bright future together Until they get bought by AutoDesk

mihaaly 6y ago
I believe it has the chance like Google buys Apple or vice versa, the Nemetschek consortium and Autodesk's AEC line are direct competitors.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago

To be fair this is not new. Autodesk has had this MO for decades. I remember in 1999, I was interning for a company that was getting into CAD, choice was to get 3D Solidworks that no one had heard of, or get the software that literally everybody used - 2D AutoCAD. That company still uses Solidworks today and has never touched a single Autodesk product. I can guarantee the opposite would not be true if the other decision was made. We knew in 1999 that Autodesk was never going to innovate, or allow us to.

thejynxed 6y ago
Solidworks is what my university required students to use and it was the better choice then.

tyingq 6y ago

"where software goes to die a slowly painful death" Computer Associates (CA) is also pretty infamous for this.

babayega2 6y ago

Crazy enough, in my country in Africa, we aren't trained to use Revit or AutoCad but Archicad primarly.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

The gold standard around these parts is purported to be Tekla Structures. No affiliation, just a structural steel guru who’s happy to work with the fabrication drawings it spits out. I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires. I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.

ramshanker 6y ago
Yes. Totally agree on TEKLA Structure. Their Concrete detailing also improved substantially in past few years.
- namibj 6y ago
  Is there anything a non-professional can use for the following four usecases (separate software is ok): 1) Reinforced concrete structure design, with support for non-trivial surfaces (e.g. splines/Bezier curves/surfaces). 2) Non-finely-meshed (in comparison to local volume thickness) truss structures, ideally not just classic steel beams + welded/riveted joints, 3) but also aluminium (considering fatigue from non-stationary loads and optimizing for the lifespan/weight/cost pareto frontier (cost would be just a simplistic metric)). 4) The holy grail, a 3d-printed core (technically a large-pore-size, low-density, open-pore foam) that is then covered by fibers via a robot that passes the spool around the core/preform (filament winding). After hardening the matrix that bonds the fibers together, the 3d-printed core could optionally be removed by melting and/or solvent washing. This kind of structure is potentially extremely stiff due to combining the truss structure with cylindrical beams and a lightweight fiber-reinforced polymer material. The issue is just the insane non-triviality in designing such a structure, because there are restrictions to holes and fiber angle shifts due to the winding process, where the fiber bundle has to be accurately woven around the mesh in the designed way. This, combined with the directionality of the fibers makes it necessary to consider much more than normal 3d-printable topology optimization[0]. A concrete-ish example would be a multi-monitor + keyboard/mouse support structure to enable a low-fatigue position where the user leans back about 30~60 degrees to allow the neck to be supported and the user's practical FOV (w.r.t. feasibly eye/head movement) is covered by screen area and the arms can rest on supports. The constraint that makes a traditional steel truss undesirable would be to have it mobile (thus lightweight), yet stiff enough to handle ~5 m/s² without impairing usability. A practical case would be to overlay travel with getting work done, by mounting this in the back of a van (including straps/seatbelts as required) and being driven. A different practical example could be amateur airplane design, e.g. devising an autonomous solar glider, where some stiffness is required to not break the solar cells laminated into the wing surface (thinned wafers are lighter and can conform to the wing's curvature, but will then dislike the wing flexing along the span), but weight is extremely important. Mounting the heavy things (motors, some backup batteries, potential payload) and handling control surface actuation forces won't easily work with a simple fiber-reinforced hollow wing, as a lack of dedicated mounting points (with their own fibers distributing the forces into the outer structural surface) would require a far heavier construction. It's also difficult to consider aerodynamic forces when computing pre-distortion of the unloaded structure, so that design loads make it take on the desired shape, if there are also ad-hoc mounting brackets glued to the inside surface (which would be necessary if they're not designed into the primary structure). Sorry for the slightly-OT examples. [0]: Project video "on using the free version of Fusion360 for shelf brackets printed in PLA on a Prusa i3 MK3": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc - Thomas Sanladerer: Making STRONG shelves with Topology Optimization

mihaaly 6y ago

Sounds like economists run the company not engineers - Boeing comes to mind by some reason - where in place of competing with real inventions the money making has sole preference so killing of competition early using big piles of money is a perfectly decent and honorable way to go. Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.

chrstphrknwtn 6y ago
Sounds like accountants run the company.
- mihaaly 6y ago
  Yes, sorry, that is right!

twelvechairs 6y ago

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

syshum 6y ago
I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
- chansiky 6y ago
  > people that want innovation and people that want stability Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,
- ethbro 6y ago
  > Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration, Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much! Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.

phkahler 6y ago

You may want to check the offerings from Altair. They have a lot to offer and even support many 3rd party tools. They do make a lot of acquisitions but that's to increase their capability, not to destroy competition.

mattkevan 6y ago

> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. There's a really nice lightweight vector design app for Mac and iOS called Graphic [0]. It was one of the first fully-featured design tools for iOS, and still the best to use. It was bought by Autodesk back in 2015, who promptly did nothing with it at all. Pretty much all development ground to a halt. From being updated every few months, the Mac app has only been updated three times in the last five years. It's since been spun-out to a different company, but development still isn't really happening – the iOS app hasn't seen an update since 2018. The lack of attention this app has been shown is sad, as it's a good piece of software and I use it all the time. It had the potential to be the vector equivalent of software like Pixelmator or Acorn – lightweight but powerful alternatives to Adobe products created by independent, highly-passionate developers. Instead, newer apps like Affinity Designer and Vectornator have taken any traction it might have had - and it's probably going to stop working with an upcoming release of macOS if they don't do anything. [0] https://www.graphic.com https://www.graphic.com

cenal 6y ago
Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made. I know your pain. Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one. I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made. At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.
  - mattkevan 6y ago
    Yeah, that's why I'm still wary of using Figma. Great though it is, I'm worried about all my designs going up in smoke if the company gets bought and shut down by Adobe or Google or someone.

tomxor 6y ago

Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS. When you buy software it's an investment - you invest your time in integrating it into your workflow and your employees learning to use it... your investment is tied to the future of that software. If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company. But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.

wil421 6y ago
> Small company rises to produce quality software, it sells, responds to bugs, listens to users, adds features etc. I would say: Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots. Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products. Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products. Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.
- tomxor 6y ago
  Sorry I edited away your quote since it was implicit in parent. Your elaboration sounds more accurate i agree, but I think the end result is the same (a dead product with buried source code and wasted investment from it's users).
Ericson2314 6y ago
I think it's definitely possible. Look at Blender and GRASS GIS, some of the most successful open source projects among non-programmers of all time. Architecture tool is merely the midpoint between those too domains, right? :D

mroche 6y ago

> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/ https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/

poseva 6y ago
Seems up-to-date. I was not aware that the list is so long...

Blackthorn 6y ago

RIP to SoftImage. And we're all worried about the future of Inventor. The only reason I use that at all was because of the generous student license...other companies don't seem to do that, which feels like a giant mistake.

naikrovek 6y ago

When you are a software company and you buy another software company or you buy a product from another software company, you do not intend to maintain their software. You are purchasing the users, and adding them to your own userbase. That's the only reason to buy a competitor. Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."