Autodesk Inventor Ultimate | Machined Audio Horn Lens

Two things prompted this post today. One was a comment on this forum https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/moving-to-subscription/buh-bye-permanent-license/m-p/7020059#M1286. The other as you will read below was from #936 of the “upFront eZine” It goes right along with what people are saying on the moving to subscription forums regarding feature shrink and ways to raise the cost of staying with Autodesk. Two methods appear to be the way they intend to do this. Thanks a lot Darth Vader Anagnost and the rest.

Number one is hold your data hostage where their value added model is the pain of leaving is greater than the pain of dramatic fee increases.

Number two is to remove features traditionally a part of a program and charge you an extra fee to get back what you once had as a seat holder and if you are stupid enough to go there as a subscriber. The removal of Backplotting from Cimco inside of HSM is a perfect example. It can be available right now for an extra fee on top of the 35% scheduled increase of perpetual by 2019. So they snip customary important parts off and put it in a fee building environment. In conjunction with this is that they will simply stop expending as much money improving and bug fixing their products. Why try to entice voluntary customer payments with improvements when you can just tell them what you want? All of the Autodesk products I read about in the subscriber forum have users complaining about feature atrophy and increased bugs and time to fix bugs. Don’t take my word for this. Verify for yourself what others are saying.

In any case.

It is a self-evident truth that once a company decides that legal extortion is their business model customer consideration other than being an ATM has ended. Anyone who says they can’t leave because reason #1 #2 or #3 does not remember well. Mercedes-Benz left Dassault for NX as did Chrysler. There are darned few customers of Autodesk that have to deal with that degree of complexity. Siemens as far as I can tell is not planning to end perpetual. I believe this enough to have renewed with Solid Edge. SE by the way is doing it right. You can rent the program or get permanent seats. I have been with SE now since ST1 and my cost has gone up $63.00 per year. You can I believe actually rent it to by the month or the year. No mandatory minimum. Plug my dongle in and stay off-line so no exposure to confidentiality agreements breaches or hackers due to forcibly being online EVER.

It is time to make your plan on how you are leaving and not to sit here and worry about how you can afford to stay.

Quote from Ralph Grabowski this weekend ought to shed some light on how Autodesk regards loyal customers. http://www.upfrontezine.com/2017/04/stuff-i-heard-at-cofes.html

“At one mini-session, a consultant relates a story of how Autodesk apparently is cranking up subscription fees upon contract renewals. In the case he reported, the mandatory fee allegedly went from $4.9M to $9.4M to pay for “necessary” add-ons, like consulting. The problem, of course, is that if any firm on subscription says No, the software simply stops working with the next 30-day check-in.”

OK the big bully is heading your way with a baseball bat to get your money. Not ask but to take it forcibly of course. You as a rational thinking being choose A, stand there and let him beat you up and then do the same tomorrow or B, walk away with your money intact and let someone with far less foresight take the beating. You WILL choose one or the other.

Folks just a thought here. Since Autodesk has proven itself to be a master of weasel words let me toss this one out there. OK you perpetual seat holders can keep your seat after 2019. Now comes a hypothetical policy statement by Autodesk.

In a continuing effort to provide improved software and support to our valuable customers we are pleased to announce the following. It has been a real cost burden to improve our products and have to deal with two customer license environments over the years but we value your loyalty and have chosen to enhance your experience with us. Starting in 2020 we will cease improving perpetual seat products which will however remain available to you as long as you wish and migrate significant improvements over to subscription customers only. These new features may be available to perpetual seat customers for an extra fee so check with your VAR. Subscribers will benefit from dramatic product improvements and rent as you need to fit your companies demand. Autodesk sees the future and it is subscription and we welcome you to our brave new world.

I enjoy reading Ralph Grabowski’s posts. One of them arrives every Sunday Evening and it is called Upfront Ezine. Today there was a reference from a blog I had pretty well forgotten about since my primary focus regarding Autodesk products has been HSM which apparently is not used by Steve Johnson.

He is a long time yearly maintenance Autodesk customer who is like myself feeling the customer love oozing out from the portals of Autodesk. Well at least one portal for sure. Here, have a read.

http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2016/12/06/autodesk-perpetual-license-owners-to-get-screwed-big-time/#comment-152761

While you are there read a bunch of other stuff from real life customers and users of Autodesk products. They keep up better than I do with what all is going on or being said regarding Autodesk. It is interesting to me to see that independently of influence from Steve’s blog I was reaching the same conclusions about the future for permanent seat holders and Autodesk.

One of the things that has disturbed me recently has been the encroachment of psychobabble adspeak words into the HSM forums. Offered primarily in support of why links do not work on new and IMPROVED web sites and why features are not finished years after first being presented and the pace of improvements drops considerably. When I start reading Autodesk people using words like “leveraging” in relation to failed websites and stuff never finished it alarms me. It is a clear sign of things going wrong. People who used to use plain English and were concerned about things being right for customers become supplanted by those who thrive on Autodesk first and only and customers are meant to be BSed to. Look people, when someone starts all this adspeak stuff who do they really relate to?

So I think of this verbiage tossed around now and what I have seen and heard in regards to the atrophy of new user improvements and functionality regarding HSM. I think real hard about all the utter garbage from Autodesk I read today at Blog Nauseum.

There are signs in life that tell forward-looking people it is time to consider what is prudent and wise for themselves.

First and foremost I am loyal to my own company. Then I am loyal to fellow CAD CAM users who also for better or worse have to use software to earn a living by. I am not loyal to software although I am a big fan of good useful software. It helps me earn a living. But there comes a time where what was once good can become a bad thing. Or a thing not worth the price of admittance anymore since scant improvements do not justify yearly expenditures.

This leads to a couple of comments. Permanent seat software is the only type to consider at any time. Like right now with the customer unfriendly Autodesk ecosystem. As a permanent seat holder I can register my immense dissatisfaction with the way things are going by simply not giving them any more money. Only with permanent seats can a corporation be held accountable for lack of new user benefits. I can and will work for years without spending another dime. You get suckered into subs only and you pay forever and over time pay more and more for less and less.

Let me ask you something. If you were a greedy corporate type and you wanted to have a captive customer base who had to continue to send you money just to work. If you were a greedy corporate type who wanted to do away with the onerous burden of having to spend money for provable new benefits to entice customers to buy and stay. If you were a corporate type who wanted to squeeze your customers (captives) for more and more and get paid before their light bill’s were what would YOU choose as your modus operandi?

Autodesk has clearly made the choice that you subscription customers are to be ATM’s. They apparently are also going to force permanent seat customers out of their safe zones and into the slave zones which saddens me but somehow does not surprise me.

The handwriting is on the wall. At this time I can’t think of a single Autodesk product I would recommend to anyone. It is not that there are no great products there. I like HSM a lot and intend using it for years to come. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone though because the only way you can now buy it is the subscription chattel model. I do not and will not ever support a company that goes there nor recommend that a business become captive to an uncontrollable cost structure where the overlord can just decide they need more money from you but you never get more from them in return.

People all I can say is if you are thinking of going there don’t. If you are there as a permanent seat customer as I am it is time to make a move towards an alternative so you can make an orderly transition. It bother me a lot to read the stuff I read today at Blog Nauseum but it did connect more dots for me with info from long time Autodesk product users.

Time to let the Autodesk ship of corporate greed lose their food source and be starved into submission or bankruptcy. I would prefer they recant this ugly future for the duopoly of subs and permanent seats your choice. At this time I sadly concur with the fed up Blog Nauseum people who believe untrammeled anti customer greed is the way Autodesk is going to be.

Hey just for giggles go here.

http://schnitgercorp.com/2016/11/30/autodesks-fq3-shows-upsides-downsides-change/

And from this article I will leave you with this quoted paragraph from Carl Bass.

“Mr. Bass said that in Q3 the company “made progress on our two major initiatives: growing lifetime customer value by moving customers to the subscription model, and increasing adoption of our cloud based solutions. Given that this quarter was the most uncertain when we started the year, these are fantastic results.” He noted that “product subscriptions drove the vast majority of the new model additions. The launch of industry collections, the next generation of suites that include many of our cloud services, contributed to our strong growth this quarter. Collections are a great example of how we’re simplifying our offerings while increasing lifetime customer value.”

So you dear customer are now nothing more than an ATM and you will pay up and shut up.

Tag Archives: Autodesk Inventor Ultimate

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