That is why I was quite surprised when I read a comment made by Evan Yares on this blog. The comment was in response to a post where I brought to light Steve Wolfe’s ridiculous statement about Autodesk’s products being used for “relatively important” tasks. Evan wrote:

I’ve spoken to Buzz Kross at Autodesk about the challenge of winning major OEM clients. There’s little more that he’d like better than to win a big powertrain design deal. But I don’t think he’s crazy enough to believe he has a chance to win a major deal for airframe or body-in-white design anytime in the near future.

So I decided to get it straight from the horse’s mouth and sent Buzz an email. I wrote:

I am wondering if you are being misquoted here. Do you truly believe that Inventor is lagging behind the competition in the manner that you have been portrayed in the comment?

And here is Buzz’s reply:

I did read your blog, Evan’s comments as well as Stephen’s. I guess I am crazy enough and I am being misquoted here. Inventor is ready for any job in the world. The 2010 version (shipping now) is the best in the industry. 2011, shipping soon, with its integrated direct manipulation capability will extend our lead. Add my Alias products, which is key to virtually every car design in the world, and you have flexibility and power beyond anything others offer.

Actually this is the job of Autodesk PR – to clarify statements and quotes attributed to their executives and employees. But since this happenned on my blog I decided to do my bit to straighten things out.

I do not appreciate people using my blog as a medium to misquote or misrepresent others for whatever reason.

Jim Quanci, ADN Director, on the right with Stephen Preston, DevTech Americas Manager, on the left getting ready to give a presentation. Stephen focuses on AutoCAD and works very closely with the AutoCAD team in Engineering. From my conversations with him, I get the feeling that he has the unique ability of dreaming in C++ and .NET. If you have any problem related to ObjectARX or any other AutoCAD API, Stephen is the guy.

The DevDays theme this year is “Choose the right tool for the job“. The thing with Autodesk is that it has a wide variety of software products, each specializing in a different field. Autodesk partners are usually proficient in the API’s of one or two products. For example, at SYCODE, we develop plug-ins for AutoCAD and Inventor. We have built custom solutions for customers that involve 3ds Max, but do not have commercial products that we sell off-the-shelf as yet. The focus this year is to encourage partners to look at other products in the Autodesk stable and learn their API’s in order to effectively create solutions for customers.

For example, one could write an AutoCAD plug-in that automatically creates a spiral staircase using parameters supplied by the user. But that would be at least a thousand lines of code. But the same thing could be achieved in Inventor using just a few lines of code due to Inventor’s inbuilt parametric solid modeling features. Of course, if it is a custom solution for a specific customer, you need to first check whether the customer is ready to make the investment to purchase a new product and get trained on it. Assuming that is the case, the developer’s job then becomes much easier when it comes to developing, implementing and maintaining the custom solution.

This is the Indian DevTech team that I mentioned in Part 3. An extremely helpful bunch of people. Second from left is Arvindh Thangli. He manages Autodesk’s partner program in India, Australia and I think a few more countries in the region. If you are in this region and want to become an Autodesk partner, that’s the guy you want to know.

Throughout the day, we were shown a bunch of presentations and new product demos. However, I guess I am allowed to show you only this one masterpiece.

After the event Arvindh invited me to their customary dinner. There is only so much that can happen over email. A little more can happen over the phone. A lot can happen in a meeting. But nothing comes close to what can happen over beer and good food.

I look forward to attending Autodesk DevDays 2010 next year.

The software development side of things at Autodesk is structured more or less like this. There are programmers who sit in various development offices in countries spread across the world. Some of these programmers come on board due to acquisitions that Autodesk may have made. There are product managers that manage these teams of developers. There can be more than one product manager for a product. Something as large as AutoCAD has several product managers. These product managers interact heavily with users and draw up detailed specifications and mock ups of features to be developed or things to be fixed. They coordinate with each other and see to it that things happen.

Autodesk has a separate department to handle their developer partners like myself. They are part of something known as the DevTech team which are also spread across the world. These guys are programmers as well, but are not actively involved with the core development of the products, although they do contribute code from time to time. They are the crucial link between Engineering and third party developers. They help in the drawing up of API (Application Programming Interfaces) that partners need to extend Autodesk products. They document the API’s, create tutorials, code samples and are responsible for supporting partners as well. They even regularly advise partners on which API’s to use and suggest tips and tricks. Basically, they are a very helpful bunch of people always eager to solve our problems.

The reason I am telling you all this is because at the DevDays events, these are the people we get to meet. They give us presentations on the new features added or are being added and show us how we can use them in our solutions. We have one-on-one meetings with them and discuss our plans for the future or raise issues that have been bothering us.

Although DevDays is free event for Autodesk partners only, non-partners can attend as well after signing an NDA. If you are developing solutions based on Autodesk products, even if they for in-house use and not commercial products, I strongly urge you to try and attend one of the events that is closest to you. As a developer I find it extremely helpful.

You can receive the results of the survey free of cost by entering your contact information. Normally the report would cost you $1995. Taking part in the survey also gives you a chance to be considered for an invitation to COFES 2010. If you wish to have a one-on-one meeting with executives or managers of software vendors to further discuss the topics covered in the survey, Cyon Research can help make that possible as well.

The results of this survey are not just useful to software vendors and their resellers. End users can also use the results to see where they stand in the big picture. What are the current trends in the industry and ask themselves why they are or are not following these trends.

Click here to take part in the survey. I highly recommend it.

Because Autodesk’s products are cheap and used for relatively unimportant tasks, such as drafting, customers can get by without upgrading them or renewing their subscriptions during tough times. In contrast, the products of Dassault Systèmes and Parametric Technology are critical to new product development.

Steve is wondering whether Autodesk is a bubble stock citing the 31% drop in revenue in Q3 of 2009. Frankly, I do not wish to comment on the financial aspects of what Steve wrote. But I sure as hell would like to comment on the statement that he made about Autodesk products being “cheap and used for relatively unimportant tasks“.

If I may, I would like to speak for the Autodesk programmers that wrote those software products along with the thousands of third party developers who develop solutions on top of Autodesk products. We most definitely do not believe that our software is used to do unimportant things. Personally, I believe such a statement is not just insulting to the 9 million Autodesk customers, but also to Autodesk developers and their partners.

If you are an Autodesk customer, I would love it if you left a comment explaining why you think what you are doing unimportant.

Mr Sarda tells me that he disputes the amount owed, especially in light of receiving “not a penny” compensation for the three years he was ITC president and two years as ITC’s development manager. In addition, he was never refunded the loan he made to the organization in its early days.

Today in a comment on IntelliCAD.net, the ITC’s Treasurer Darcy Detlor wrote:

The claims that Surya is making for payment for positions held in the past will not get very far, because at the time they were voluntary positions (unpaid) – as is the position that I now hold as Treasurer. He is trying to create a smoke screen to hide the fact that he did not pay his membership fees.

Looks like the two sides have already started arguing their cases in public.

Today’s discussion is covered under your ADN Agreement with Autodesk. The information we will be providing is highly confidential and is to be shared within your company on a “need to know basis” and to NO ONE outside your company

So I cannot tell you whatever I heard or was shown at the event. But technically, I can tell you what I said at the event since Autodesk’s NDA does not cover the things I said. So these are the questions that I asked.

When will AutoCAD run natively on the Mac?
Surprisingly, I got a definite answer to this question.

Will AutoCAD run as a Software as a Service in the future?
I got a satisfactory answer to this question.

Why cannot AutoCAD open Revit and Inventor files?
I was not satisfied with the reply to this question.

When will Fusion be integrated into Inventor?
I got an expected answer to this question.

It is important to note that audience was filled with programmers only. The replies to my questions and those of other developers were purely technical and free from any marketing bullshit.

I guess there is one thing that I can say though. Autodesk has outlined some great plans for AutoCAD. Their focus is moving from AutoCAD being a drafting and documentation software to a modeling and analysis solution.

Although there is a “Part 1″ in the title of this post, I must warn you there may not be a “Part 2″ because DevDays is an event for Autodesk partners only and everything said and shown is strictly confidential. For those who are interested the agenda is here. As you can see, among the things that will be discussed are new features of the next release of AutoCAD and other products. Actually the focus is more on the API’s related to the new features, not the features themselves, since the target audience is basically developers that extend Autodesk products by means of plug-ins and other integrated solutions. The DevDays events are meant to give Autodesk partners a heads up on the new functionality as well as receive feedback from them.

Tomorrow’s event in Bangalore will be followed by similar events in two other Indian cities, Chennai on 10th January and Pune on 13th January of next year. The US will have only one DevDays event which will be held on the sidelines of Autodesk University in Las Vegas. China and Japan have two events each, whereas Israel, Russia, UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Australia, Singapore and Korea will have one event each. That makes India the country with the largest number of DevDays events this year. Not exactly sure what to make of that.

I was thinking of live tweeting the event. But like I said, I don’t think there will be much that I could tweet about. Let’s see.

Don’t just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order.

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.

Life is one of those races in nursery school where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same is with life where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die.

One thing about nurturing the spark – don’t take life seriously. Life is not meant to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up?

It’s ok, bunk a few classes, scoring low in couple of papers, goof up a few interviews, take leave from work, fall in love, little fights with your spouse. We are people, not programmed devices.

Don’t be serious, be sincere.

The press release is actually the announcement of the release of the final chapter of a book written by Dr. Hiroshi Toriya, the President and CEO of Lattice Technology. The company has been regularly releasing chapters of this book for some time now. Two chapters every month starting May of this year. The book is titled “Improving Lean Manufacturing Through 3D Data“. According to the web site:

This 13 chapter book delivers in-depth studies of companies including Toyota, Brother Industries, Alpine Precision, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to name but a few, as they create and innovate processes that use 3D in downstream manufacturing. Other chapters deliver vital resources on the challenges manufacturers are facing, and how Japanese manufacturers are planning to overcome them.

The target audience of this free e-book is manufacturing executives and educators and is primarily focused on improving existing manufacturing processes. I guess there is nobody better than the Japanese to learn that from.

For those who don’t know what Lattice Technology does:

With Lattice Technology’s Solutions, engineers and manufacturers can perform design review, simulate assembly processes, automate creation of 3D parts lists / BOM’s and create animations with even the largest 3D assemblies. Lattice’s standards based XVL (eXtensible Virtual world description Language) technology provides secure, highly accurate and compressed 3D files that can be used, shared and easily supported by partners, suppliers, and internal departments in a lightweight browser-based solution.

Basically, they have created this patented XVL file format which has the ability to accurately compress 3D data to about 0.5% of its original size. Then they have various solutions for Design Review, Kinematics Simulation, Production Planning, etc. that revolve around this XVL file format. You can get more information about their XVL technology here.

Note: You need to register to receive the free e-book. I just downloaded my copy of the 17 MB, 159 page e-book.