Andrew Anagnost | Machined Audio Horn Lens

Today I am reminded again just how remarkably tone deaf leaders of companies can be. This morning I get a “hurry it’s your last chance” email regarding PLM Connection and the Solid Edge University which resides in it this year. Now I don’t know if you can attend this marvelous event just for the SE agenda but I suspect not.

How Could You Refuse This Deal?

I like the limited seats comment too since I have experience that says it will literally be one room out of the dozens set up for the UGS side. So yes severely limited is the literal truth.

Now before you get all over excited and are frantically scrambling for your credit card in a frenzied burst of SE enthusiasm calm down and see what you will get for your dough.

The Whole Chillona

I completely resent the cavalier way Siemens has decided to treat it’s SE users and to clearly indicate once again that the red headed step child is someone they hide from themselves and the public. At PLM Connection they will sit in the isolation chamber down the hall in a room where it is grudgingly admitted that yes the DNA says Siemens but darned if we are happy about it. You UGS people disgust me with the way you scheme and maneuver to hide a product you are afraid of competing against. Unable to compete based purely on capabilities and pricing they sabotage the SE ecosystem and starve it into submission.

Can you believe they have the unmitigated gall to charge you full three day event price for one day of stuff that is pretty well useless to most SE users? I sure can and remember with extreme disgust dealing with these idiots and the PLM World mindset. They are God and you are the distasteful stuff on their shoe sole to be wiped off when hopefully no one is looking to observe this.

I do have to say though that in fairness to myopic management they have some justification for sending their Grindstaff smother SE henchman John Miller over there to do a job on SE and the University. As users the SE people were given a real chance under Karsten Newbury and Don Cooper to show the world and UGS/Siemens that there was interest in the SE University. For some years running users as a percentage that showed up was pitifully small and to be honest if I were over deciding to do these things and not dedicated to the idea of building a community I would kill it off to. Either the SE user base is FAR smaller than I think or for some reason the ones willing to show up percentage wise are far smaller than say SW or Autodesk.

In any case you reap what you sew and I blame primarily the UGS Cabal but users that don’t support anything should not expect to get anything either and by repeated years of no shows the excuse needed by Siemens UGS Cabal (Have you noticed I love saying this? These contemptible people deserve to get raked over the coals at every opportunity and since this is my blog I do so.) I suppose SE users are back to the 36 people total attendance at the premier Siemens software event. A towering monument to Siemens/UGS corporate stupidity that excels in back room skullduggery. I have to wonder how things could be if armies of corporate drones were not solely devoted to CYA and turf protection and useless make work meetings to plan the next meeting spent this same time and energy improving the product and growing market share to where it could and should be.

I notice with interest that Dassault has finally admitted that even though they would love for you to buy into their overpriced over complicated Catia ecosystem there are many millions of CAD users that have A, no interest in the cloud and B, no interest in spending tons of money for un-needed complexity that does nothing but make their lives more expensive, less productive and operates levels of complexity way beyond what they need CAD for. So this year they have reversed years of we don’t like you and want you to leave SolidWorks by agreeing to spend four times the money and buy what we like and not what you like. They have committed to the idea that SW users are a force to be reckoned with and respected and desired. Now time will tell the real tale but today they say this.

Siemens/UGS (you know what they are ;D) has never to my knowledge given more than passing notice of the cloud only as an ecosystem you would have to work in nor have they seriously thought about ending perpetual seats as far as I know. Unlike the complete fool Andrew Anagnost at Autodesk. Who in combination with hostile board members deciding that users are not customers but rather they are chattel to be extorted in ever greater ways and the concern is purely for how to forcibly raise more money from existing customers. The idea of mutual benefit as a business model has ended with these people but I can honestly say that is not true with SE since it is powerful design software that is improving and is still rent or buy and a darned good tool in the tool box in spite of the, well you know who.

But anyway the last five years have been interesting and from this software customers viewpoint a real exercise in corporate disconnect from the people who happen to pay their bills and salaries. It is not your corporate investors nor is it the stock market and mutual funds. It is people like me and companies large and small that hired you to make THEM more productive and they do not believe they exist just to make YOU fat and happy. Autodesk is learning right now what happens when you jettison this basic business principle going into their 13th straight down income quarter in a row.

May I recommend to you the best software you have never heard of? You won’t hear this from Siemens but I can tell you after years of use it is the best mid range MCAD deal out there. If you are silly enough to still be agonizing over what to do with Inventor and don’t want to be forced into Fusion360 I can say SE is a fine place to go. Being a Red Headed step child is not so bad when I think of productivity and this SE excels at.

As a snarky aside here I do have to admire Andrew Anagnosts ability to pare things down. He has eliminated 23% of Autodesks staff. He has eliminated profit margins and he is eliminating gobs of customers. One of his current fascinations is replacing people with artificial intelligence. I ponder the idea of considering his job and if Artifice could be replaced with Artificial. I mean could a robot do any more harm than he is? Plus they could hire an H1-B dude to program the new boss and what a wonderful world this could be.

Before I begin the bashing I do have some good things to say today about the HSM side of Ultimate. It looks like the assigning of Jeff Peck over the HSM group is bearing fruit. The latest developmental downloads have seen the pace of improvement pick up and so finally HSM is moving forward again. Almost I could be persuaded to give Autodesk another years worth of $$$ but I draw the line at fiscal coercion which is their preferred future modus operandi IF they can get away with it. Going on ten quarters of declining profits now even though the stock market which has little bearing on true dividend earnings for shareholders any more seems to like them so far. I have met some really good people with HSM and it is the plantation overseers I object to. They are the whole problem and it is a big one for rational cost containing consumers.

Yep CPA’s and MBA’s will in time go down as the group of management responsible for the moving of industry to China, the complete lack of loyalty to anything other than manipulating stock values for their own personal benefits and the gross increase in upper level income and perks relative to historical norms. This is the mindset that will make lots of millionaires in the C suites while at the same time they are removing the ability of their customers to afford much of the offerings because their high paying jobs have been eliminated by offshoring. It is why cars and trucks are now up to huge costs and long notes.

“According to new data from Experian Automotive, the average new and used-car loan terms are now at record highs of 67 and 62 months, respectively. What’s more, roughly 30% of new car loans being written today are for loan terms of between 73 and 84 months — a 19% increase over the first quarter of last year and the highest percentage recorded since Experian began publishing this figure in 2006.” http://tinyurl.com/ycwbjbb7

Here is a comment on executive pay by historical norms from 2014. http://tinyurl.com/k8v9q3h
“From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.
The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 29.9-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 295.9-to-1 in 2013, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.” When coincidently hourly wages bought far more and economic growth was as an average greater than the last fifteen CPA MBA run years. In 1967 I made $1.65 an hour at McDonalds. It bought FIVE gallons of gas though and all things being equal I would have to make $12.25 after taxes today to do the same. My first new car was a $2,700 1974 Hornet Hatchback and I paid that off in six months with my $9 something per hour Chrysler assembly line worker wage. I don’t think you could even get a three year long loan for vehicles back then.

This brings us full circle to the current thief now in charge of Autodesk. Another C suite dude who thinks a company’s sole reason for existence is stock manipulation for personal wealth creation. I would love to see what he thinks he is worth and the golden parachute in place so even if (when) he fails he gets to steal even on his way out. Gone is the forward-looking planning and today it is how can we lie today for gains today driven by increase in the value of stocks today. Never a word about shareholder income in dividends which made this country great and provided secure retirements for many. Today it is a house of cards here and if you can ride it up well and good. You stay there to long and you are toast. In the past, up until I figure about 2000, if stocks declined precipitously you were covered by the dividend income you bought the stock for. Capital gains was the icing on the cake and not the cake. Anyway.

I go to the Autodesk forum today. http://tinyurl.com/yakf6zs6 It is just to amusing for words but I will try anyway. Remember cost containment is for the anointed but not for the unwashed masses.

“Hi all –

We’ve been watching the feedback regarding the elimination of the backplotting capabilities in the version of the CIMCO Editor that ships with Inventor HSM and HSMWorks. It’s clear that this is a capability that many of you are genuinely missing. We’d like to give you a little background on what happened here, and what we’re planning to do about it.

For the past few years, we have had a technology sharing agreement in place where we could redistribute the Professional version of the editor, in exchange for access to the HSM CAM kernel. This agreement expired at the end of last year, so we had to renegotiate the arrangement.

The arrangement we reached, at considerable increased cost to Autodesk, was to redistribute only the Standard version of the editor, with a corresponding reseller agreement, where we can provide access to the Pro-level features at an extra cost.

We are considering an amendment to the agreement with CIMCO that would allow us to include the Professional version with certain levels of the Autodesk HSM product. This is still under discussion, and we have no firm plans to do this.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and truly regret that we weren’t able to provide advance notice of the change.

We’ll keep you posted about what, if any, adjustments we are able to make in this area. As has been noted in various forum posts, those of you with access to prior releases are still able to use the older version of the editor, with backplot capabilities.

Thank you very much for your feedback concerning how much you value the backplot feature.”

Now let me get this right. Mr Anagnost it is not OK for people to tell you what you should pay for a product but it is OK for you to do so to your customers. OK got it. Controlling your expenditures is prudent fiscal management but increasing your costs to your customers is a value added benefit you bequeath to them. Check. Gotta love the psychobabble garbage these people put on things to try to make extortion more palatable for the rubes.

My answer to you Mr Anagnost is go get screwed. This customer at least is willing to continue to do business with you on the terms that brought me here but understand I am not your cotton picker. The very second you tried to make this a coercive relationship is when you lost me and many others. I hope you fail and they strip you of your ill-gotten gains and the exit door puts a big welt on your butt on your way out. I watched one of your kind destroy the O’Charleys restaurant chain which was at one time the livelihood of about 14,000 people. By the time the MBA moron Greg Burns got done with it went from 600 plus stores to 200 some and had to be sold off to an investment company because it was failing. He too was grossly over compensated way above worth while he was there and got a nice severance package as he arranged the buyout of the chain HE had caused to fail.

I will never forget when one of Burn’s big shots started removing quality ingredients from food so as to save money and so he could get bigger personal bonuses each year for cost containment. A friend of mine was pretty silly and when asked his opinion on the latest Honey Mustard Dressing with a drop of honey and a ton of corn syrup compared to the old with lots of honey in it what he thought of it. He was told by the Vice President in charge of food quality for the whole restaurant chain that his negative opinion did not matter. That “people were stupid and we are going to educate them as to what they are going to like”. I kid you not and this was the beginning of the end for the old O’Charleys.

People do know what they like though and I in particular do not like the terms Autodesk now offers. Crash and burn Anagnost and the sooner the better. Your two faced self serving hypocrisy is here for all to see.

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