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.