AutoDesk and You in the Future

Wow, interesting article. Take the time to read the comments as well, some interesting points made there.

AutoDesk Is Setting Itself Up For No Future

When you absolutely own the software you become absolutely liable for it's failure. I imagine future lawsuits regarding bridge and building collapses with loss of life bankrupting AutoDesk.

Major gasoline companies went bankrupt or barely survived because in order to control what gasoline a station sold they elected to own the tanks in the ground. They are now bleeding billions of dollars still cleaning up the groundwater from leaks.

With such a legal precedent all I can say is "Goodbye AutoDesk and good riddance".

Why they are so desparate to control .dwg is so they can make annual changes in the format so that no one else can ever afford to keep up. Bill Gates set that business model up years ago.

And fie on IBM for choosing MicroSoft over Digital Research for the first PC operating system many decades ago. Microsoft said they could do it in 3 months. Digital Research said it would take 6 months to do it right. IBM said it could not wait 3 extra months and Microsoft is still trying to get it right 30 years later.

30 years ago I could write a 1 page letter and store it as a 2K file. This was on a 64K computer, 8MHz I believe, which worked faster than I could type. Last night I edited a 1 page letter sent as a .docx 140K in size. I opened it in OpenOffice, edited and saved it as a .doc 18K in size. I don't recall how much faster my processor is now, but that 1 page letter takes at least 4 times longer to open or save.

This is supposed to be progress.

I have to admit my laser printer is faster than a my dot matrix, but that is not exactly new technology. 30 years ago I worked at Bethlehem Steel and wrote some rather extensive reports. I enjoyed going to the data center and watching that Xerox drum printer spit out 7 pages per second.

Paul in PA