Thinking about local shops around here. Thinking about how AT&T lied to get government funds and government approval of the South Central Bell buyout using the promise to improve rural internet so we who live here could participate in the digital revolution. So the money is spent and Nashville and high density environs see great improvements but for rural Giles County I see 75KBS at best and many around here are still dialup. This is true throughout Tennessee and I bet many other rural areas nationwide. The alternative for many is satellite which was also bought out by AT&T so they can maintain the fiction of high-speed internet to rural customers even though it costs a ton more and has serious data caps. Really serious data caps so low it is absurd. Within twenty miles or so I can think of at least 11 shops that deal with CAD and CAM and the strangled internet AT&T has given to us. Now multiply that times all the area of Tennessee and other rural and small town shops cross the nation. None of us can thrive using cloud based only CAD or CAM across our existing internet and be productive in a fiercely competitive world.
South Central Bell was rolling out improvements years ago before they were bought out by AT&T. I have fiber optic to the top of a nearby hill perhaps a little over 10,000 feet away and there it has remained for over ten years. AT&T bought up market share and made promises. They bought infrastructure (think the equivalent with Autodesk and the programs they buy up) and customers and now apparently are in the process of catering only to areas they deem worthwhile by some metric we don’t know. Even though big chunks of what they bought helped to fund their existence we are water under the bridge to them. Cell towers are not a viable solution here due to hills and population density and the existence of, by world standards, super expensive and throttled data capped service. There is an effort to make rural electrical co-ops be the next internet provider and I hope they succeed. I think they will be given a green light soon and let me tell you the very second I can leave AT&T I am gone forever.
So the ground work is laid for the disenfranchisement of huge numbers of existing customers with a company like Autodesk who only want cloud services and customers. We, that is shops like myself are not going there for a handful of reasons. Security which can’t be guaranteed over infrastructure Autodesk neither owns or controls or can make secure. Costs to even try to get fast enough internet to make this Albatross work are huge and one shop close by was so desperate they contracted for a T1 line. Add $400 to your bill each month and commit to a really lengthy contract on top of that. Nothing works as fast as your own workstation on your own desk. For less than $1,300 I bought a Dell Small Business Outlet a Dell T3620 with an Intel 7700K cpu, 1TB Samsung NVME SSD with 32gb ram and a Quadro M4000 graphics card. This thing flies and Autodesk will never be able to do for me anything that I do faster than I can do it for myself. So I have security and speed and cost containment. Any of those things matter to you as a reader? Oh and the idea that once someone has roped you into a pay to play scenario they can fire the developers and can those pesky software improvement programmers.
After all when you agreed to go to the cloud and rent, not buy into with a perpetual seat, you agreed to whatever is served up by your new slave owner. Guess what place you have in this paradigm. Yes it is true by the way since Autodesk is currently reducing the R&D budget. Users know the pace of innovation has slowed way down and bugs are not being fixed at all or expeditiously unless super critical.
It is my personal belief that even though Moores Law seems to be slowing down the ancillary parts are making up for it and more. Multi core problems will be solved one day for existing single thread functions. Everything points to huge power and speed bought economically by individual users residing on the desks of anyone who wishes to do so. It will handle all but large data problems and in general if you are dealing with these scenarios I believe that a faster economical solution will be there for you too. It will just cost more but it will still be cost-effective compared to the alternative which is the regression to main frame by others compute scenario which Autodesk wants us all to devolve into.
So we come to this point in time. It is with great delight I receive the following this Saturday (8-26-17) morning. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WorldcadAccess/~3/ZaJgiwuT_ao/the-cloud-dies-on-september-7-.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
I think Carl Bass is far smarter than Andrew Baked Beans Anagnost whom I regard as a grasping clueless mercenary money hungry individual willing to sell long time customers and a whole company down the river for his personal get really rich quick scheme. He is possessed of a malign intent that sees no further than his goal of personal enrichment. He thinks, now all this is just my opinion but there is evidence out there that makes me think this way. I did not just sit down and fantasize about stuff and come up with these ideas out of the ether. He thinks because he wants it so badly that the power of his forceful ambition and greed will overcome all these numerous existing obstacles to his dream of financial nirvana. That the suckers, well I mean customers of course will all co-operate for his personal gain.
I bet executives talk about things and spy on each others companies and I wonder if stuff like this upcoming Ansys announcement gave pause to Bass and his creation at Autodesk for the cloud junk. If I saw that what was planned was going to be doomed to failure I would ease on out to if I could and let the egg be on someone elses face. (Remember Carl did cash in a huge amount of his Autodesk stock when he left.) A deserving individual like say perhaps Baked Beans. You can always return as an older and wiser saving hero and benefit from the mess you helped to create if you just have a clueless fall guy to manipulate. Andrew has no technical and or actual user capabilities I know of and is as far as I can tell purely a sales and marketing guy. Can you think of any qualification worse than this to be in charge of real life design and production software? Can you think of better class of individual to be selected as a sacrificial lamb? I sure cant.
The whole stock market is grossly out of whack and has been for some time. Steady worthwhile income from dividends has become a thing of the past and the Ponzi scheme of capital gains on stocks being the new value gain reality will have the same repercussions the S&L crisis did in the 80’s and Dot Com in the early 2000’s. If the only thing stocks are producing is capital gains with no underlying production increases to justify it, is it real? Well yes until it inevitably isn’t and then huge numbers of people are left with no seat in the game of stock market musical chairs. I believe that in a real value based dividend oriented stock market Autodesk’s scheme would have already folded. But today corporate America has been trained to be self serving and to loot and plunder for self enrichment and get out with your loot before you lose it. Wages and perks for top guys are so far out of historical normal numbers it is scary. How can we manipulate for short term gain so I can cash out and now we have someone in charge of Autodesk who quite simply sees no further than this.
Anyway get the popcorn out folks. The coming show will be amusing and who knows. Maybe after 10 or 11 successive underwater quarters Autodesk will come to its senses and go back to the “old” and proven ways of doing business with voluntary participants on both sides who want to be there. I “Ansyst” you do so and you wont regret it. Rich buttery theater popcorn would be best I think.
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