Tag Archives: subscription software

Corporate Forever Promises Are Worth The Paper They Are Written On

Reading stuff on the Practical Machinist CAD/CAM forums the last few days where Autodesk continues to be brought up by various people. Seems to be running about 5 to 1 regarding Autodesk with loathing in a big lead. Another company I despise is AT&T. Masters of lobbying corrupt government officials so they can get out of promises made like when they bought out Bell South and said they would continue rural broad band roll outs as a condition to buy them. To this day some seven years later I have fiber to the top of the ridge around 10,000 feet away where Bell South ran it and AT&T left it. I am lucky to get 75kbs and AT&T has ordered no new DSL equipment for years so when things break it is harder and harder for techs to even get us service.

So why mention AT&T today? I received an ad from them that was priceless and I will show you a couple of screen captures from it.

We will love you forever—-promise!

I included the intellectual property section so you know all these logos and junk belong to AT&T. I thought it was a nice touch that they would show a stone fool liberal idiot as an incentive to buy into their mess.

What is a promise worth these days with these big outfits? I think of Inventor Pro with Autodesk over the last year. There were a ton of extra programs I could access a while back. Just before my perpetual seat ended on 12-15-17 I went to download all I could and much to my amazement there was about a 75% reduction in aps Inventor Pro now had rights to even though the price was going up 25% by 2019.

I propose a new addition to anything anyone says at any time from Autodesk. I like the way AT&T said it and the intent behind it. “Offers, programming, pricing, terms & conditions subject to change and may be discontinued at any time without notice.” The famous old price creep everyone who has ever had satellite TV has experienced as soon as they can get away with it.

Just like Autodesk who has now had ten declining income quarters in a row now AT&T is losing subscribers left and right because bait and switch is not a viable alternative when other options become available. Neither is subscription only industrial software to industries when other options are available and I look with glee to Autodesks upcoming eleventh down quarter in a row and wait to see how mercenary evil guy Anagnost spins it as a plus THIS time.

My opinion for what it is worth is that AT&T and Autodesk share common values and avarice towards customers. Their promises are worth the paper they are written on only and of value just like the rolls of paper we all buy and use most every day. AT&T has my business because I am forced to go there. Autodesk does not have my business because they had no ability to force me there but they wanted to try doing so. Autodesk has lost my business forever and as soon as I can dump AT&T they will too.

Autodesk Inventor Ultimate 2018 CPA MBA Marketing Insanity

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.

Yes It IS True, The Subscription Model is Failure For You

I had promised not to talk about this again and find myself regretting those words and posting again on this. Todays events in my shop reminded me in ways that could not be ignored of the value of continuing to talk about the terrible future awaiting anyone who is foolish enough to be subscription only for their business CAD and CAM life blood.

Sitting here today waiting for the latest developmental download to Inventor pro HSM. While I am waiting though I want you who are thinking of buying into subscription only CAD or CAM to get a little taste of what is headed your way. Remember the Marketing babblespeak of easy self updating IT free bliss promised by these shills for greater fees from you to them and loss of all control over your data. Of course this is not my problem because I have a permanent seat and can uninstall a version when I wish as well as install. Thank you very much marketing goof balls but I think I am adult enough and responsible enough to determine what works best for me. I sure don’t need you to charge me extra over time and be subjected to the reality of the pain your greedy desires will inflict upon all who enter. Fusion 360 looks like a genuine value but the expenses for Inventor subs anything are ludicrous over time. Fusions future bargain status is in question though as the ancillary charges will soon be forthcoming while you “rent” server farm stuff from you know who.

Today while using developmental build 115 from 1-12-16 I can’t finish a drill path. Nope, not gonna happen. Get to calculate, hit OK and the program does the magic disappearing act. After six times of variations I conclude it is well broken. So I go and post this problem at the CAM forum and less than 15 minutes later I get a response. It seems that this quickly became a known problem and 0n 1-15-16 build 117 was released to fix this. Now remembering the extraordinarily painful days of CAMWorks for Solid Edge I can only say that the fix was quick. Generally I have been told developmental builds are pretty robust and over this past year my experience has borne this out. Autodesk does warn you though that only official builds are for production.

Current version

But the last current recommended for production version is from 4-13-15 and there have been 14 developmental builds since then and only one has given me a problem. So what has happened here? If I was a subscriber I would have to wait and wait and wait for a new current build? Been a lot of months now. Or would I have a forced update that was buggy and have to wait for the patch to be issued for the problem. Now remember the problem might be unique to my setup and not a developmental or current release problem as much as a conflict with the way I have things set up on my end. Now what? Who is going to make my stuff work now? Wellllll you know with a permanent seat I just stay with what works and beta test on my own to verify quality outside of my workaday income earning area with my take home laptop version that comes with my permanent seat. I DO NOT have to ever suffer from this with a permanent seat. Auto updates with 115 would have caused significant problems until 117 was released. I love HSM and with my permanent seat expect to be well satisfied for years to come. But I want it my way which is to choose how I interact with my software vendor and I choose permanent seat over subscription chattel.

Can we talk about how robust your internet connection is here too since this is relevant to this whole kooky cloud only thing these people want us to devolve into over time?
ScreenHunter_200 Jan. 22 11.13

I am like a TON of you around the world that will never have internet speeds that will make the cloud work faster than I can do it myself. With the exception I suppose of FEA or rendering if you care to put your critical intellectual property out on the unsecure web. I am lucky to get 80KBS and even luckier if the connection is not often broken.

I am going to build my next workstation. Intel 5930 CPU, server quality board with overclocking to probably 4.2 or 3GHZ. 32 gig of 3200 ram, water-cooled with at least a Quadro K2200 with a PCIE SSD main drive and multi terabyte secondary backup drive for under $2,000.00. You can build this all day long and cut your cost in half from the manufacturers. Just how many simultaneous internet connections would I have to have to equal this astounding computing power on my desktop? 6GPS buss speed on this upcoming workstation would require 6 GB divided by 80KBS would be 75,000 concurrent internet connections. Do the math. Dare I say in-house also equals secure and constant backups if needed are cheapo to? Priced any 5 terabyte hard drives and soon to be 10 lately?

Please explain again to me dear corporate CPA MBA Barracudas just how wonderful subscription only and the cloud is going to be for me. Just be aware that after years of subjection to Democrat PC correct insanity and Rino Republican elect me lies I look behind the curtain before I buy. Subscription only stinks just as bad as the lies and deceptions emanating from Washington and has the same ruling class elitist mentality. Maybe it is a symptom of getting older but I find my patience with people who lie to me with insider jargon word combinations they think are fooling me into believing their deceptions does not exist anymore.

Permanent seats and TRUMP BABY!!!