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Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

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Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#81

Post by p4wnc6 »

Animats wrote: post #79
bsimpson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

Interestingly, SGI seems to be doing alright with their supercomputer business, such as UV. The market certainly shrank on them, but what's leftover doesn't look like commoditized or cloud computing will be able to compete it away any time soon.

I agree they made poor acquisition choices, but not that "expensive computing [is] over" -- it's just not the consumer market people thought it would be.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#82

Post by Cheyana »

gruez wrote: post #11
Cheyana wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curious how that turned out. Did they solve the issue?

They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies (like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#83

Post by rcurry »

Animats wrote: post #53
fsloth wrote: post #26

Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI. Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools. They are a huge…

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…

I remember Softimage XSI, that was a beautiful system and I loved working with it back when I was playing around with some 3D stuff. They used to have great deals on pricing so it was also much more affordable than a lot of the other professional systems, but still seemed to provide a lot of the same functionality.

I was really sorry to see them go.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#84

Post by lutorm »

krschultz wrote: post #14
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. :(

I was astonished by poor quality of Fusion 360. On paper it makes great sense, in practice I found it practically unusable.

I've been using it on and off for the past six months, and I agree it has issues. However, it's tons better now than it was even when I started, so it seems they're quite aggressively work on it.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#85

Post by galfarragem »

I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#86

Post by lispm »

imgabe wrote: post #55
fsloth wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn" I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested inte…

As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though. Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp t…

I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp.

Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.

Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#87

Post by r00fus »

Silhouette wrote: post #41
rdudek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.

That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customer…

You might be interested in this analysis: http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-growth/

Looks like the transition has been good so far.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#88

Post by CyberDildonics »

Animats wrote: post #53
fsloth wrote: post #26

Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI. Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools. They are a huge…

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…

> That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood;

Big studios didn't convert to NT, they converted to Linux. SGI ended their own reign by not being able to compete with Nvidia and AMD/Intel. Even now all those studios use csh since that was the default shell that came with Irix.

Re: Autodesk announces 925 layoffs

#89

Post by jscheel »

fsloth wrote: post #26

Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI. Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools. They are a huge…

Man, I so miss XSI. It was such a great piece of 3d software.
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