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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."
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 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.