back to article Autodesk vapourises ten per cent of jobs to go completely cloudy

Autodesk, which is getting close to phasing out physical product sales, has announced it's also going to farewell 925 jobs, about ten per cent of its global workforce. The move comes less than two months after the company woke to find not one, but two “activist” investor funds on its share register: Eminence Capital and Sachem …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To anyone embarking on a Video Game / 3D art career...

    Pain is coming...

    ++ Do yourself a favor and and learn Blender first... Its free, its open source... You can still learn 3ds Max / Maya after for career related jobs... Just don't fall into the easy trap of locking yourself into these programs exclusively at first.

    ++ Its tempting and easy to do.... Why? Because even full versions of these apps are completely free to students... But the end of traditional licenses will be a thumb screw for most 3ds Max & Maya students. Free at first, but then the sting, a subscription running into thousands of euros a year.

    ++ Even just to buy the perpetual license now costs well over 6000 euros. And Autodesk see that as a steal, that's why the offer is ending / ended !!!

    ++ Are Autodesk's programs any better than Blender for game design? No, not really, just a common requirement for career jobs, a fact not relevant to most Indie work.

    ++ There's also Modo which is growing popular, and C4D and others too. But if you have to buy into the Autodesk lock-in, then at least go the Maya route. Maya Lt is crippled but at least its a cheaper option than 3ds Max, which has no budget equivalent...

    1. ColonelClaw

      Re: To anyone embarking on a Video Game / 3D art career...

      The problem is knowing how to use Blender isn't going to get you a job at anywhere decent, or maybe even at all. I know this because it's the industry I've worked in all my life. You just absolutely have to know either Maya or Max to make a reliable living. There are plenty of other packages that will look good on your CV, as long as they're accompanied by one of the 'big two'.

      Autodesk products are priced to pirate, and they know know this. I don't think they even care, they haven't updated their anti-pirate efforts in at least 10 years. What they do well know is that all the ex-students and people starting out in 3D currently using cracked software will find themselves (more often than not) using legit versions when they land an office job, as freelance or full-time.

    2. EPurpl3

      Re: To anyone embarking on a Video Game / 3D art career...

      I have switched from 3d max to Blender long time ago. Blender is great and not only for 3d, is a great video editing and motion graphics software.

    3. N13L5

      water

      under the bridge

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Good bye Autogreed

      nice knowing you.

      Lets see who makes the next awesome package people can actually own.

      Rentals are for suckers.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "subscription revenue [...] far outstripped product revenue"

    An unfair comparison, since only a few lower costs products are available outside the subscription model (i.e. Photoshop Elements or Lightroom), and thereby an 3:1 ratio is not surprisingly.

    I've nothing against subscriptions, but it looks to me they're good when the tools are your main tools for everyday work. If they are tools you need less frequently just for some specific secondary tasks, subscriptions look far lesse appealing. Maybe it's just the idea of paying recurrently for something you use no so often, instead of paying once, and the idea you're forced to pay or the product stops being useful.

    But it's very interesting to know that selling subscription is more expensive than selling products, for Adobe.

    And I still find all of this very funny when I remember and old issue of PC Magazine telling one of the reasons PCs were replacing Unix workstation was that Unix software back then wasn't often sold, but rented and users had to pay yearly fees to use it... especially CAD.

    Cloud? Subscriptions? Welcome back in the early 80s...

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: "subscription revenue [...] far outstripped product revenue"

      I've nothing against subscriptions, but it looks to me they're good when the tools are your main tools for everyday work. If they are tools you need less frequently just for some specific secondary tasks, subscriptions look far lesse appealing.

      No, it's the other way around.

      If you use a tool occasionally, it can be great to rent it for specific individual projects.

      A tool you use all the time is the one you want to buy and keep forever.

      Maybe in the future you'll want to buy a newer one that's better in some way that's important to you, but unless the newer one has some feature important to you, why spend the money? Especially as it will be different and you'll have to relearn some of it.

      If you're digging a big hole you might hire a digger.

      But if you do dig holes all the time, you want to buy that digger!

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: "subscription revenue [...] far outstripped product revenue"

        Richard, I'm with you as far as renting a special tool for a special job from time to time, for the duration of the special job. I do that from time to time - among other things I work in structural engineering. I have my everyday toolbox for that. Bought and paid for or DIY. Every once in a while something fairly exotic comes along and if I need to, I rent specialised software on a hourly or daily rate.

        But I'll be damned if I'll pay a monthly (or yearly) subscription for something I don't need really, really often.

        1. RJay75

          Re: "subscription revenue [...] far outstripped product revenue"

          One of the big selling point Autodesk made before they went to subscription is precisely this idea. You can pay a monthly subscription only for the months you need to software. I you need CAD just for three months you only pay for three months. Which is a far less amount then the perpetual license cost.

          On the other hand I think the break down is after three years you are paying more than you would have before if it's something you need for day to day work.

    2. Aniya

      Re: "subscription revenue [...] far outstripped product revenue"

      My company is a subcontractor for many large projects.

      Our AutoCAD is perpetual license but we had software maintenance for a very long time. Eventually we dropped it because we realized it was quite useless. AutoCAD releases a new version every year. But most of those new features no-one really cared for. When our renewal came up in 2012 (thus we are using AutoCAD 2013 now) we asked what new features they had to show.

      "Upload your documents to the cloud!"

      Wow. Really? 99% of our clients always demand that all their subcontractors use a www they had set up for project management and file sharing. Some even just use Google Drive. So this is quite useless. And on top of this, we always need to save our files in AutoCAD 2004 format anyway because many other subcontractors are still using that version of AutoCAD. And they seem fine with it.

      And Autodesk knows this.

      They want to stop perpetual license because they know that no-one sees the reason to always be on the latest version because AutoCAD has been feature-complete for such a long time. Us using AutoCAD 2013 is already a huge achievement. We rarely see any other contractor or subcontractor use a newer version. So they now feel they need to force down this same silliness as Adobe.

      I cannot speak for their other products such as Maya. But to me this feels like they are trying to cover up lack of innovation while still trying to please their shareholders. Because Shareholders > Customers.

      I have to thank Adobe though for coming up with forced subscription. Really.

      Because we learned that we can actually just stick to CS6 and not upgrade every year. So we had managed the past four years without giving any money to Adobe. Super! Will be same story for Autodesk. If many contractors we deal with can still use AutoCAD 2004 until now then surely our AutoCAD 2013 should last until 2020. Or 2030.

  3. DropBear
    Facepalm

    So when do we expect Home Depot and Harbor Freight to start "renting" hammers via monthly subscription instead of selling them? They could even come with a few dozen nails thrown in for free each month! What a steal!

    ...let me spell this out for you: NO! For me to recurrently pay you each month, you have to actually DO something for me each month, not just allow me to keep doing the same thing I did last month. It might make some sense if we'd be talking about something you do very infrequently - renting a crane or a forklift to lift your brand new lathe into your shop makes more sense than buying one, yes. But software tools just aren't like that - if you needed Photoshop or AutoCAD this month, you'll be needing it next month too - and the next, and the next. And damn if I'm about to start renting my hammer.

    1. Triggerfish

      Can't say for 3DS max, but having used AutoCAD from about version 10 onwards. Apart from being a bit niocer and a few groovy things making stuff a bit easier, CAD pretty much has covered any engineering drawing I weant to do for years, and is powerful enough already that I can't see many people not being able to survive on a desktop copy.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        If you do 2d cad - Draftsight is free (made by the people who do Solidworks and Catia)

        If you do 3D - onshape is a nice free online parametric CAD by the people who invented solidworks - although it's interface is a bit more autodesk like

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "For me to recurrently pay you each month, you have to actually DO something for me each month, not just allow me to keep doing the same thing I did last month."

      Millions of people rent accommodation by the month. However they have a choice. If they can get together the capital to purchase, or at least put down a deposit, they have the option of buying a different property. The question here is whether there is an effective choice. Adobe's users, on the whole, seem to think there isn't. Is this true of Autodesk?

      Whilst the rental model may be fine for occasional users (the comparison would be with staying in an hotel for a few days) it does seem to me to be a possible abuse of monopoly for regular users if there isn't an effective non-rental alternative. I'm surprised the various competition regulators haven't looked at this. If they do, expect to see the landlords contributing to Gimp, etc.

    3. phuzz Silver badge
      Headmaster

      There's plenty of places that will rent out tools, although usually it's the expensive and specialised tools that most people wouldn't want to buy (eg a concrete mixer).

      That said, you can indeed hire a (sledge) hammer. Weekly not monthly rental though.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder if, over time, this will cause an improvement in the OSS offerings that compete in the same space. If you ran a firm that needed a few dozen photoshop licenses it might make sense to start putting some money into getting an OSS offering doing what you needed (presumably the OOS version doesn't currently do what you need or you'd be using it already). If many firms did this it could easily result in a very good OSS offering, the TCO would end up being lower. Probably a bit to idealistic though, no one want's to see their money helping someone else.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      I think it's a reaction to STOP the OSS projects.

      Need to do a bit of design? Either pay $5-10K for Solidworks/Autocad/ProE or nothing for the OSS alternative. Then once you've learned that app you aren't likely to switch to the paid app later.

      Their new pitch is, pay $99 for a month/year/special intro period - then once you're into their system you keep paying

  5. Triggerfish

    Apart from the functionality/ power of AutoCAD which to be fair 90% of the average users probably only use a small part.

    I think the OSS software needs to get in down at student level. Sun had an awesome CAD program only encountered it a couple of times working at various places. Hard to find operators for it though the average student didn't have a Sun workstation (we had Vax for email when I started so even PC's weren't that common in a student house).

    A few years later when PC's were more common everyone had a dodgy copy of AutoCAD (AC), the uni teaches engineering stuff on AC because they all have AC by the time you go work for a company your either at a reasonable AC CAD operator level (apart from speed), or past the basics enough that you can learn the rest you need quickly on the job. I reckon that makes it an easy software choice for a firm.

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