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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."
First of all, before many here start mentioning Blender, Autodesk already has this kind of pay-per use business model with medium to large companies, where they provide software per seat, render farms and support.
Blender has been ready for mainstream usage for a long time now, and plenty of small studios around the world already use it for short films, game development, commercials and special effects. It's actually the lack of this kind of support and corporate presence what is avoiding it to get more adoption in larger companies.
So, this is not a chance for Blender, quite the contrary, Blender needs to do more like Autodesk.
The small civil engineering company I work for has a subscription for two network seats of AutoCAD. Major gripes include:
1) The network license software looks like it was made in the 1990s (FlexIM, not sure if anyone is familiar with it)
2) There is literally no discerable difference between versions of AutoCAD, except for
- The name (eg AutoCAD 2014 vs 2013)
- The icons (which IMHO have been getting uglier since ACAD 2012)
- The default file save format (even though all recent versions prompt to save-as 'AutoCAD v 2010 or later' by default, if you try to open something save in 2014 in 2013, you're SOL)
Although sages tell me there are new features each year, no one I know has ever used them let alone needed them. So, for our purposes, new versions of Acad are basically a problem, because the file-format versioning nonsense forces everyone to upgrade if one person upgrades (upgrading, btw, takes probably an hour out of your day, and forces petty BOFHs like myself to dick around with the FlexIM network licensing).
All this is a long way of saying: you're better off getting a new version of autocad every five years, at most. It's a product that was completed years ago and is firmly into the Acrobat-like 'milking the customer for flashy useless features' phase.
AutoDesk were Microsoft's biggest corporate customer for cloud-based Exchange and Sharepoint services, and later Office365. When MS introduced this in 2008, the AutoDesk pilot pointed the way.
They have been also getting there feet wet with cloud-based ancillary products and offerings of their own - usually free ones.
So?
I'd be more surprised if AutoDesk weren't moving to subscription delivery of online product. They are the most widely "pirated" company of non-consumer software, ever. :-)
Not that this makes rentier behaviour any more palatable...
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Never been known to fail..."
Photoshop was the only game in town. They're losing the low end rather rapidly to other companies like Corel and Pixelmator. It's only a matter of time before that erosion eliminates their market.
Worse, Adobe's decision is having serious fallout for other communities like the photographer community that historically always used Photoshop for their touch-up work because it integrated well with Lightroom. Even though they haven't been stupid enough to make LR cloud-only, there are a lot of folks who are very unhappy with the current state of affairs.
I suspect that within two or three years, one of two things will happen: Adobe will back-pedal on the whole rental-only model or Pixelmator and Corel Paint will get significantly improved, fully native DNG support and photographers will dump Photoshop en masse, and along with it, quite possibly Lightroom. The current situation is simply unsustainable.
For Autodesk, I doubt anyone will care. From what I've seen, outside the corporate world, nobody in their right minds uses Autodesk's products unless they have no alternative, so you can safely assume that they're going to milk this for every penny it is worth until they eventually go belly up. Their goose is cooked; it's just a question of who is going to carve.
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From a student standpoint, I'm okay with Creative Cloud. $19/month and I get the latest version of whatever software I'm using, even if they do a number jump. Granted, I'm not using Photoshop, but Premiere, After Effects, Audition, and SpeedGrade, primarily. Buying the academic pack would be around $250-300. I'll be using this software for the next year or so, and I get free upgrades that would normally cost another $250-300 for the Academic versions (at least, that's how I remember: Academic licensing was cheap, but not upgradable). That's good, in my book.
However, I can also say that I'm looking heavily into replacing my entire production stack with Open Source video editing options to prove to myself that it can be done. I may have to give up a few niceties (the interaction between AE-PR-AU is very nice), but that's okay. I'm not shooting the next EPIC, I'm shooting short films and learning as I go.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
For the amount of money you pay for some college classes and the simple fact that you usually use the same software across several classes, I do not understand why the universities and colleges just don't comp the software to the students using a similar rental model from the software vendors for the duration of the classes.
Even in an academic setting, the rental model is more expensive than the academic versions previously. If Adobe upgraded their software every two years, as they had for a long time, then you'd be paying about $150 a year.
Renting at $20 a month is $240 a year, so students are actually getting screwed too.
Corporations are incredibly pissed from what I have seen personally and have the same sentiment as OP.
"I'd be more surprised if AutoDesk weren't moving to subscription delivery of online product. They are the most widely "pirated" company of non-consumer software, ever. :-)"
Given that, for most of the software Autodesk makes, 'online product' is going to mean 'you download the install package and the DRM phones home a lot' rather than 'runs in a web page' or 'is delivered via ICA/RDP/X11/whatever from Autodesk's machine'. Heavy 3d (and customers who may not be at liberty to just ignore NDAs surrounding the stuff they are working on) don't fit well with that model unless you have impressive bandwidth and minimal latency.
Because of that, the anti-piracy effects of 'cloud' (in this sense) are pretty minimal, they certainly have been with Adobe's flavor. What this sort of subscription model does do, though, is remove the need to make version N+1 so compelling that people who own version N or version N-1 are moved to buy it, or at least pay an upgrade fee. This doesn't mean that you'll totally stop making improvements or adding features; but you get paid either way, so you no longer face the "Is our new product actually a meaningful improvement over our old one?" test on a regular basis.
That's what makes moving to a subscription model (for what is fundamentally client software, obviously charging fees for ongoing access to things hosted on my servers or otherwise generating recurring costs is a different matter) raises suspicions of 'lack of imagination'. Do you have enough market power that you can dictate an often-unpopular pricing arrangement? Do you suspect that you have no ideas for version N+1 that will motivate people to upgrade? Subscription model time!
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.
Exactly. $20/month, I'm in. $40/month? No thanks, unless I magically get a job doing this for a living.
Honestly, if I could give aspiring filmmakers some advice:
It doesn't matter what you cut on, it's the film that matters. No one watches your movie and says "Man, I bet this was cut on an AVID system!" Workflow is a trivia question at best, and based on the quality of films I had in class, the Editor used was the last thing that mattered. Some of our best films were cut on iMovie and MovieMaker. I used both Vegas and Premiere. Same thing with the camera: the guy that shot on a borrowed $7k camera? It looked pretty good, but I wish he learned how to write a better story. The best film of the semester was shot on an iPad (imo, of course. it actually placed 2nd behind a film shot on a t3i). You can learn to shoot a film using your web cam if you're smart about it. Sound, on the other hand...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I work for a Medium sized GC and we have the pleasure of using their Building Information Modeling (BIM) suite.
13K PER SEAT for the product (BDS Ultimate) ... and the installer damn near filled UP the stick. This year, they decided that all of us Subscription having clients wanted to download 32GB - all to save the cost of sending media, even if we've historically requested media (That's what I pay for your cheap @#(*^(@&*^)
Crappy compatibility with previous versions (which are released yearly) - Everyone on the design and build teams basically all need to be on the same version.
Does not like running Side By Side older versions so it's not like you can plant them all together.
Holy Megabloat - Last year's installers came on Autodesk-monogramed 32GB USB3 sticks
Frustrating at times - today I'm trying to install the 2014 version on a $6,000 Precision Workstation spec'd for Revit - I started at 10AM, it's still installing - very slowly, but moving along. Same on our M6700 workstations.
Not the least bit surprised that Autodesk software gets pirated ... they gouge the legitimate license holders outrageous fees for this stuff....I can't imaging how Ma & Pa Construction Company could afford this.
In other words, it's greed + stupidity, it's going to be seen as a huge disaster in a decade, but in the short term "everyone is doing it, and making lots of money, so we should totally be doing it too."
Except your customers are totally going to remember that you fucked them, and fucked them good. They'll pay it short term, don't get me wrong...you got them up against the wall; but major companies will begin looking into projects to, heh, lighten the rental costs. Those will come to fruition in about a decade, maybe less, maybe more.
And the added bonus? You're totally forgetting about all the students who are going to have to use a free variant of CAD, not made by AutoCAD, and will be totally unfamiliar with AutoCAD when they get out...increasing training costs, decreasing productivity, and introducing the possibility of the free stuff eventually displacing AutoCAD in the work place. But, you say, they can always use a pirated copy if they want to learn AutoCAD...well, your dial-home DRM / Cloud stuff prevents that, doesn't it? But, you say, surely we will make it cheap enough for them to purchase as an Academic version, or for their college / university to provide to the...except college / universities are also into 'saving money,' and would totally cut the legs out from under AutoCAD if it meant an extra pack of cigarettes at the end of the day; and college students...well, between those loans, hideously low wages, and of course, just being college students (beer first, bros), no one is spending money on a monthly subscription to AutoCAD cloud.
I am John Hurt.
None of these has used cinepaint exclusivly. these productions used a hundred time more photoshop and roto tools than cinepaint. they also used Notepad, it doesn't mean that notepad is an awesome production tool. any crap gets used on production where there are hundreds of people and a dozen vfx companies involved. it's meaningless but the cinepaint people do love to hang on to the illusion. All of this only occured because of one programmer at Rhythm & Hues. Cinepaint was dump HARD quickly after.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Be the only one around who owns fishing equipment and you can rent it to him on a daily basis for the rest of his life.