I really don’t want to even think about this. The destruction these types of self centered idiots bring in their wake has to be seen to be believed. No longer can a company make long term plans because now some group who takes over part of the company gets to dictate to long term investors and CUSTOMERS. UGS was saddled with two groups of people like this and they made decisions based on what made their short term goals look good to their investors at the expense of future growth to realize short term gains. Kind of like an engineer starts a company and understands what it’s value is to customers and what has to be done to make customers first and foremost happy since they fund the business. He dies and the banker idiots take over and all they see is profit potential by eliminating “waste”. So the creativity the engineer brought to the table as well as the understanding of what things were important to do even if they did not result in immediate profits is replaced by people of myopic vision who can count but they can’t create.
Read it and weep. http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/ March 21 2016
Carl Bass understands completely the peril this represents to Autodesk but his hands are tied. Autodesk will now in part be told what to do and how to do it by people who only understand running up stock prices so they can sell out before the results of the policies they force into being harm or destroy the company they do this to. I have no idea where this will end up nor who will get canned in the inevitable upcoming house cleaning as dead wood according to people who know nothing about Autodesk wield the axe. That will also be manifested in software that is not immediately profitable too I suppose. I would also imagine that development will slow down because some of that after all is future oriented with results that may not be seen for years. Autodesk is now going to be beholden to quarterly must make more money at any cost idiots. We users of Autodesk products who must plan in terms of years will be shackled to 90 day time frame destroyers of companies.
I have to wonder how much of this onerous anti-customer profitability subscription stuff is because these guys have forced it. I still believe in Bass but just like I watched with Karsten Newbury and Don Cooper the very best forward looking talent can and will be countermanded if the wrong people get to be in charge. Carl talks about the philosophy of long term investors and institutional make a quick buck investors like these hostile new people are in the World Cad article. Now the word hostile is not what he used it is what I use. I think it is accurate since they do not care about our future other than we will send them more money.
It is depressing to think such a fine thing as HSM, which is the reason I am here after all will be subject to these people who make no chips, write no software and have no clue what we customers value will determine in part or over time in whole what we get. There will be indications as we go forward as to what will be the result. Sadly though for the first time I have to question if permanent seats will be forever as promised to current holders. I HOPE Carl Bass can convince these people to be prudent about what is done. I think subscriptions only were done against his advice though and expect he will be ignored in other ways to.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 
Hi Dave,
Sadly this is happening to every productive enterprise the world over and I fear it will lead to a disaster of the likes of which the world has not seen. In fact I would say it is not only potentially a threat to what we are familiar with as civilisation but may even lead to an extinction event. I don’t mention this lightly but to offer warning but I believe it is possible we will see 10’s of millions of people starve to death in the streets as a result when these corrupt practices finally come unstuck. The people who have taken over the reins are rabid self interested destroyers and profiteers, not creators. grafters and nation builders.
CEO’s are obliged to return profits and growth regardless of circumstance. The bankers call the shots in a sick and brutal game of monopoly with no regard to consequence. What ever keeps the returns up and bonuses up is what gets done. Corporations borrow cheap money and buy back their shares to inflate returns instead of investing it in new or improved products. The products themselves are reduced to appearances, entertainment or ‘experiences’ for mindless masses whereas they actually came to exist for practical purpose and took many years of R&D and experience to perfect. Industry is not trivial, it is about skilled people investing time and effort. It is multi-layered and interdependent. It is a vital component of an economy.
Where we are headed is that the FED will be unable to contain the rot and inflation will eventually break out and crush these mislead businesses in their leveraged positions. The longer this back room printed prosperity goes on the more businesses will be pulled in to the mincer. It will be very hard to put things back together. perhaps even impossible. It is not beyond consideration that we will find ourselves in a new ‘dark age’. Everyone who owes money to a bank is in danger of having to surrender ownership of their assets. In many cases it was the bank that suggested/required of the owner to put themselves in a perilous position to begin with. Indeed it can be said that they full well know they are putting their clients into a position where they will fail and be able to clean up handily on that. I would say they even bet on it with derivatives.
I predicted some years ago now that CAD companies would endeavour to lock their customers in to rent seeking deals as their products matured and people fell away from subscriptions in hard times and that indeed seems to be the case. If Mr Bass finds himself powerless to serve up engineering tools despite his best efforts that would be consistent with the general state of dysfunction we are cursed with presently.
It is very important people around the world band together to defeat this ruinous pox on humanity. The Nazis were relatively easy to spot in their jackboots, here we have a more insidious evil to be defeated. We cannot allow these people to prevail. People need to offer active resistance as they can.
The stakes are higher than most people are aware or will admit. All said and done these lowlife are a minority that can be dealt to quite easily if there is an awareness and will to do so.
I think it was Nancy Regan who said to ‘just say no to drugs’ and Eleanor Roosevelt who said ‘a slave is someone waiting for others to set him free’.
Today we should make use of that advice and ‘just say no to bankers’ and take off our mental shackles and put real ones on those responsible.
This is one of the results Clinton gave us in the 90’s when banks became full service and could sell stocks and bonds. To much money chasing to few dividend dollars meant another paradigm had to be developed. When Clinton came into office wise people would have said invest in nothing that was not at least 8 to 1 or 7 to 1 cost to dividend ratio. Historically until then dividends were what people counted on and capital gains would be the icing on the cake if it happened. Businesses made plans based upon long term growth and took care of stock holders through profits.
After that time institutional investors changed the rules so that manipulation of numbers was of prime importance to generate fictional stock value increases. These big guys were large enough to force stocks to go up and down frequently and they also figured out how to make money churning the market. Remember this whole value distortion machine has been around less than twenty years but yet people think now this is the way it always has been and the right way. One of the offshoots from this was the divorcing of reality from top corporate management as they had to earn dollars or learn how to manipulate stock value by the quarter in order to keep their jobs. The payoff for them was grossly inflated wages and bonuses which right now are wildly beyond the historical norms. They had to have something too since they now had to make plans to gut the true value of companies and could no longer safely plan on being somewhere for many years based upon prudent dividend producing management. Another offshoot to this was make money by cost cutting which also makes stocks go up. So send the jobs overseas courtesy of another Clinton present called Nafta and Most Favored Nations Trading Status for China that Clinton the Democrats and Rino’s passed. Problem is that this cost cutting sent jobs overseas but did not reduce consumer prices all that much so now unemployed or underemployed people are somehow supposed to still buy all this crappy poor quality stuff these people bring in. Pure stock value manipulation with no regards for the long term future as how can people buy this stuff if they are not making enough money to do so.
Henry Ford, one of those evil old time capitalists the left so loves to hate said this about his workers. When he invented the assembly line manufacturing process he wanted whoever worked for him to be able to afford what they were making. He then paid them enough to do so. What he created spread across the USA and employed millions and was based on long term planning and rewards to investors were principally through dividends. This engine of growth and prosperity could not be duplicated today. Today we see preposterous things like Google and Twitter that pay no dividends but still have sought after value based solely upon capital gains fueled by major institutions who do not care to look past the next year.
Rent seeking CAD companies are another result of this paradigm. These mercenary investor group people will change Autodesk in ways that will in a few years ruin stock value but these schemers will be gone by then taking short term artificially manipulated stock run up dollars leaving customers who cant afford to leave with software that will be much less than it could have been. Software with nothing coming down the pipeline because R&D costs money and “hurts” the bottom line and was eliminated. Now with meager to no major improvements who will stay?
The Feds then give major banks loans which go straight into the stock market to make money for banks. With the zero interest rates how else are they supposed to make gobs of money? Money talks and bankers along with major Fund Wall Street groups have bought enough legislators and executive branch officials that stock values are now completely divorced from reality. When did you last hear about dividends? Add to this an evil Federal Govt which has lied every day about what they truly are spending, oops I meant printing, and nothing anymore is based upon what made this country great. There will be a day of reckoning and I figure it is not to far off.
If you consider events going back to say the oil crisis of the early 70’s and the Vietnam war as a convenient backstop in time there have been a string of mistakes made that have severely undermined the viability of the ‘west’ today. You might say that the ‘west’ is merely the latest passing empire in human history but I think it is an anchor for civilisation and the benefits we have because of it. You can throw in all sorts of labels for aspects of the progressive failure like restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing, deregulation, globalisation, privatisation, automation, service economy, information society, migrant labour, bubble economy, centrally planned industrialisation etc but what it amounts too is the consequence of on going poor decision making and expediency. Mix in the age old sins of greed and corruption and we find ourselves in an evolutionary corner. I fear we are running out of time to effectively understand our situation well and develop solutions. It seems unlikely to me that we can rely on anyone in the establishment to do anything but perpetuate the decline so the solutions need to come from elsewhere like the common sense of the people themselves enabled by communicating by the internet. Problems of this size can only really be solved if people are willing to surrender their instinct for self preservation and immediate gain for a greater wellbeing. Too often in history rational thinking is abandoned for settling disputes by violent physical contest for dominance and the outcome doesn’t actually prove to be anything but a temporary gain. The populous are misused/abused as unwitting pawns in this repeatedly. Today we have the capacity to fry whole continents in our reactionary animalistic desire to win out. I hope we can avoid however. It could be the ultimate test of mankind’s civilisation to find a way forward for everyone from here rather than a few. The day of reckoning you mention may well be quite near and tragically it well be born by those least responsible….
How about going back to the Roman days where coinage was first corrupted on a grand scale by shaving metal off and degrading precious metal content. Government of circuses to calm the restless who could see things falling apart. Or the Tulip bulb craze in the 1600’s that wiped out investor money as they poured dough into things that did not actually produce anything. Today’s stock market of course which has deserted producing dividends of worth is right up there with the Tulips.
People who forget history will repeat it and the world is full of fools who don’t care to be bothered to think. Those who see this can get out of the way of much of the upcoming bad times by planning and geography is the first and best thing to solve. Get out of debt as much as possible next.