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Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

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Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#71

Post by lomnakkus »

Cheyana wrote: post #9
justinclift wrote: post #4

Wonder how many of the layoffs will be from QA? Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they don't lay off any QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not optimistic. :(

A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users) purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh. We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for 5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself. We were going to make them work for th…

I'm just a small data point, but I had the distinct "pleasure" of assisting an office-mate in installing one of their products[1]. Now, she's not not particularly computer-savvy, but she can usually install things. It turned out they were doing some sort of absurd web-install thing -- which didn't understand non-IE logins, btw. Even worse, it turned out that if anything interrupted the install process you couldn't resume... and here's where it gets really weird: You couldn't just click the installer executable to restart the download... you had to start THE WHOLE FUCKING "LOG-IN TO AUTODESKS SHITTY SITE TO AUTHORIZE THE DOWNLOAD" PROCESS COMPLETELY OVER. You... couldn't just click on the "install" executable again. Because that's what normal people do. Over and over -- until someone who understands shitty programmers reverse-engineers the typical AutoDesk programmer's thought process.[2]

Soooo much UX fail.

[1] Can't recall exactly what it was: I think it may have been AutoCAD or Rivet, but, no matter... same company.

[2] The people who programmed this should be fired. Even if they programmed it because "management" told them to, they should probably be fired because they didn't fight back enough.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#72

Post by wlesieutre »

Animats wrote: post #54
isaiahg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> notably a lack of UI refinement That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.

Here is the Blender hotkey chart.[1] All 9 pages. With the different hotkeys for each of 12 modes. Any questions? [1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...

Sure, and here's a 13 page list of AutoCAD command shortcuts:

https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/files/17331/AutoCAD_Sh...

This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that.

If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#73

Post by PeCaN »

Animats wrote: post #54
isaiahg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> notably a lack of UI refinement That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.

Here is the Blender hotkey chart.[1] All 9 pages. With the different hotkeys for each of 12 modes. Any questions? [1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...

Blender's UI is like Vim. If you don't put the time in to learn it, it makes no sense, but if you do it's the most efficient thing ever.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#74

Post by wlesieutre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #72
Animats wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the Blender hotkey chart.[1] All 9 pages. With the different hotkeys for each of 12 modes. Any questions? [1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...

Sure, and here's a 13 page list of AutoCAD command shortcuts: https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/files/17331/AutoCAD_Sh... This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that. If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.

Addendum having just looked at the blender "hotkey chart" you linked: That's not a hotkey chart. That's a detailed description of every command with a hotkey.

If you added similar descriptions in the AutoCAD commands list it could probably hit 100 pages.

Besides, if your finger memory hasn't picked up all of blender yet, tap spacebar for command search. As long as you remember vaguely what something's called you'll find it in there.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#75

Post by fsloth »

neilgrey wrote: post #60
vvanders wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in. That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.

That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we…

Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets.

"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."

Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.

Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.

Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.

A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#76

Post by speeder »

bsimpson wrote: post #58
Animats wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XSI was originally from Softimage. Softimage sold out to Microsoft, which had no idea what to do with a high-end product other than to make it run on Windows NT. That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood; between 1998 and 2001, studios moved off SGI onto PCs with lots of memory and graphics cards that rapidly got cheaper. Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor…

Thanks for the history lesson; I had no idea Alias|Wavefront was a division of SGI.

SGI bought Alias|Wavefront BECAUSE of Microsoft.

When Microsoft bought Softimage, SGI freaked out, they feared MS would pull something awesome and make everything switch to x86 for editing.

Then they bought Wavefront and Alias separately, and forced the two to merge, Wavefront had a cool suite of editing tools that was award winning in the movie industry, Alias had a competing suite, the suites had lots of stuff unique to them, they merged the suits and created Maya (example: some of binaries that ship with Maya came from Alias, another ones from Wavefront, the GUI if I remember correctly was designed by Alias, the scripting language and the file formats by Wavefront, and so on...)

Autodesk then just reaped the mismanagement of MS and SGI

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#77

Post by CaptSpify »

zanny wrote: post #65

Going to plug freecad - http://www.freecadweb.org/ Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than sufficient.

I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently. In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#78

Post by vvanders »

fsloth wrote: post #75
neilgrey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we…

Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets. "the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors." Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not fin…

Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#79

Post by Animats »

bsimpson wrote: post #58
Animats wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XSI was originally from Softimage. Softimage sold out to Microsoft, which had no idea what to do with a high-end product other than to make it run on Windows NT. That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood; between 1998 and 2001, studios moved off SGI onto PCs with lots of memory and graphics cards that rapidly got cheaper. Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor…

Thanks for the history lesson; I had no idea Alias|Wavefront was a division of SGI.

In 1995, SGI bought Alias and Wavefront, each with their own animation systems. Impressively, SGI got their people to work together and produce Maya. But it was close to the end of $10,000 to $20,000 graphics workstations; around 2000, the gamer graphics cards became good enough to run the high end software.

SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. They bought Cray, for supercomputers. Didn't work out. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. Dead end; PCs could do that. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. Failure on all fronts. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over.

That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.

Autodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler[1], a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.

[1] http://www.homestyler.com/

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#80

Post by fsloth »

peeters wrote: post #68
foofoo55 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to SolidWorks, SketchUp, and even parts of MS Visio. The UI and meta-data handling is very cumbersome and every time we use it we think how much better some parts could be. As with many mega-corps they tend to follow or buy the innovations of others, eventually.

Hmm, I tried to use SketchUp a month or so ago, after being a proficient AutoCAD user but not touching it since around 2005. I'm curious what parts of the UI are more usable in SketchUp than AutoCAD. For 2D drafting, I got up to speed fairly quick in SketchUp but it became apparent to me that in terms of drafting productivity, SketchUp in 2015 couldn't really compete with AutoCAD circa 2005.

Sketchup is designed for architectural sketches. The modeling grammar is nice for some operations but Sketchup is not really a well rounded modeling package. They are trying to move into construction.

IMO, main advantage of Sketchup over Autocad are a free API to access the model (although the domain model is not entirely well designed) and a fairly limited context of user interface operations (which makes the learning curve lowish).

The most critical difference though, is that Autocad supports actual analytic shapes while Sketchup handles only boundary representations (i.e. polygon meshes). No real cylinder for you! This may or may not be a problem.

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