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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.