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Autodesk To Follow Adobe's 'Rent Our Software' Business Model?
dryriver writes "Autodesk will detail in October an 'evolution' of its business model that includes more options to rent its software, rather than buying it, CEO Carl Bass said in an earnings conference call yesterday. Bass promised an array of new rental options by the end of the year that he said will give customers more subscription options and increase the predictability of the company's revenue over time. Bass stressed that Autodesk wasn't upending its existing model, but augmenting it. 'Recall that, just 10 years ago, we added subscription maintenance to our revenue stream,' he said. 'That was a big change at the time, and there was no shortage of skeptics. Today, that's a billion-dollar business and represents over 40% of our revenue. Suffice it to say that transition was a huge success.' Analysts on the call immediately started drawing comparisons with Adobe's move earlier this year to a subscription-only pricing model for its Creative Cloud software. Bass said that Adobe's success made Autodesk more confident about the feasibility of rental pricing, but suggested that Autodesk's move wouldn't be quite as aggressive."
You'll be thrilled to know that the licensing software WAS made in the '90s and hasn't really changed much. I'm all too familiar with it.
I work at a moderate sized structural engineering firm. We use both AutoCAD and Revit. AutoCAD updates their file format every few versions. For example, the AutoCAD file format was updated in 2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010. A new version of AutoCAD can always save down to an older format though, so as a firm you can get by without always updated AutoCAD as long as whoever you're collaborating with on drawings knows to save their drawings in a format you can open. There's also some free DWG version convert software out there that can help with collaboration between different versions.
Revit is a different story, though. There is no backwards compatibility. Once a project has been started in or upgraded to a new version of Revit, it is impossible to save it down to a format that can be opened in an older version of Revit. The result is that any firm that does any meaningful work in Revit HAS to upgrade every year, since if you don't, you can't collaborate with anyone who has upgraded. It also means that you usually have to have latest two, three, or even four versions of Revit installed on all your workstations, since if you have any construction projects that span over multiple years, you'll likely have to be able to open up files that all need a different version of Revit in order to maintain compatibility of those files with the various other firms you're collaborating with. Sometimes its a complete headache, and the only reason AutoDesk gets away with such poor functionality is near total lack of competition. The know they control the market for construction related BIM software, and they don't seem the least bit afraid to milk as much money out of that market as possible, even if it means ignoring features that would be extremely useful to users.
You'll be thrilled to know that the (2D) software ITSELF WAS made in the '90s and hasn't really changed much. I'm all too familiar with it :-)
Uh, No. The 2D software in question was made in the 1980's ... and still hasn't really changed much.
I used AutoCAD tiny-version-number back in 1987 and 1988 and just three months ago whn I helped a friend learn the latest version all the stuff I had used was still there and still worked the same way. Oh there's a GUI layered on top but all it does is construct the same old command-line commands after 25 freaking years.
Makes me wonder whatever happened to alternatives like CADkey.