Comments on: Apple is buying Autodesk. Yeah right!

By: Butch

Butch — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:35:36 +0000

I think Apple may yet acquire AutoDesk. At this point, with the growth of Apple and the growth of Linux over almost a decade now, Microsoft just doesn’t have the Kung Fu grip on it’s customers with Office that they once had. At least 1/2 or more of Windows customers perceive that there are alternative options to Windows that are available to them which has never been the case. Apple owning AutoDesk wouldn’t really effect MCSFT even if they discontinued Windows development. If Adobe stopped development on Windows that would adversely effect Windows just from the standpoint of not having Flash would cripple most Windows users that go on the internet. Point is it would take several major applications with major market share leaving to make a significant difference with MCSFT. (Which could happen, since the necessity of Virtual Machines has dominated the Windows scene just to ease the transition from other versions of Windows.)

3DS Max isn’t a dominant app in the games space and hasn’t been for a couple of years now which is why AutoDesk acquired Alias. Max’s relevance in the market was fading. AutoCad used to be the standard for engineers, designers and architects, but with the advent of CAM and multiple other specialty enigineering areas that now have design along with the calculations, the markets got splintered which is why AutoDesk is constantly acquiring companies that are dominant developers in splintered markets that they once owned. The major issue with AutoDesk is that constantly buying dissimilar code bases, never integrating them, and essentially running them as full companies under one roof is eventually going to take them under when outside competitors continue pushing on them.

Architecture/Engineering is important to Apple, but ultimately since Apple is already heavily invested the entertainment space an AutoDesk acquisition would secure that investment by keeping the tools that create a significant portion of the content that’s fed into Apple’s Entertainment tools on the Mac and optimized for OS X. I don’t necessarily see Apple taking the same kind of stance as AutoDesk with the engineering tools just for the pure simple fact that many companies making competitive products decided to to partner with Apple a long time ago…However, where you look at say the SolidWorks and Bentley Systems markets they are rather large and those companies never sided with Apple. With buying AutoDesk Apple would secure a large investment they already have, become a market leader in architecture design and get the tools to get after some rather large markets in ways they haven’t seen before with a level of usability that they haven’t seen before. There are a lot of pluses. The major minus would be for Apple to take on the task of merging the similar code bases as much as possible to dramatically reduce development costs. As one reader mentioned porting the apps to OS X probably won’t be that hard, but merging the code bases would be another story, but if any company could do it, make the applications better and cheaper to develop it would be Apple.

By: Laureano Stella

Laureano Stella — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:42:02 +0000

Well, Microsoft, even if Autodesk is Friendly friendly with them just fucked them. They realeased Vista 64bit without any OpenGL support….Well autoCAD runs mainly on OpenGL & it can run on Direct3D but it looses 2 (out of 5 features) of their biggest 3d Features. Smooth line rendering and another. So they have to program on .NET wich.. as the latest 2009 is not nice to work with . A program that works….about at 50% on Vista 64bit (plotters dont work, some drivers dont work) & they are stuck with Direct3D…AutoCAD 2002 can be easily ported on MacOS it runs fine on WINE (crossover) and now with MONO by Novell that translates .NET on Linux & MAC it would be great.

OpenGL is fully supported on MAC & Linux
64-bit programming as been done AGES AGO on MAC & Linux
Most programs fully use processors multi-threading in Linux and MAC

… why would you go with something that works 1/2 the time.

Google works mainly on Linux and MAC…and its huge.
Why not Smaller companies.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:21:15 +0000

I think it’s not about selling os x client licenses to Autocad users. Microsoft dominates in client licenses through office, but it also dominates with exchange and windows server. Lotus notes is in decline.

Apple now has os x server / i cal server at close to par with MS and at a far superior price. They need an office product to push os x server licenses and displace MS exchange from the corporate office.

You might be able to force maya users to dump windows and linux, but I don’t think apple can force autocad and 3ds max users to switch because of all the custom macros for autocad and the fact that 3ds games are being produced for windows.

It looks like autodesk, adobe, and apple all want to grow a business in content management server software related to whatever content their tools produce. With Autodesk’s products apple can develop back end apps that are integrated across all of apples pro software , and even if autocad/3ds max/maya users are still using windows, apple can push os x server and server based products.

The other big key is 3ds max. If apple controlled the tool that people use to develop 3d for games, it might be able to push more opengl and make it easier to develop games for both windows and mac.

And I’m a software engineer and I don’t see porting a .net app to mac as that big of a deal. Yeah, it’s been heavily integrated with windows since they added visual basic support eons ago, and autocad is a beast, but the chance to knock down MS in games and the office is worth billions to apple. Apple’s already done this on a smaller scale with their pro software and the user interface improved in the process.

By: pmd

pmd — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:59:05 +0000

Actually (and I myself am a litle surprised by this), our software QA has become increasingly dependent on VMware. Part of it that is that there are so many versions of Windows to deal with: 2000, XP32, Vista32, Vista64, occasionally XP64, and once a year IA64. I think an argument could made for VMs and vertical software, since setup/maintenance requires more work (and VMs are easier - note the “-er” to manage). With the latest hardware (and TONS of memory), the speed is fine. Disclaimer: I’ve only seen this all done under Windows.

By: piotr

piotr — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:47:57 +0000

@Rob:
Yeah, I’d like to see that in a big corporate environment. Buying additional operating system and virtualization software to run it and them managing that in the whole organization. Good luck… :-)

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:25:09 +0000

With softwares like VMware and Parallel, one can use mac and still run Autodesk products.

By: piotr

piotr — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:34:42 +0000

@Robert:
Microsoft is dead (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html) so why Google spend their money on a luke warm corpse. Especially that they killed it in the first place. :-)

By: Robert B. Price

Robert B. Price — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:19:06 +0000

And, Google will shortly be purchasing Microsoft. :o)

By: piotr

piotr — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:59:43 +0000

@Troy:
I definitely think that having Autodesk products run on other platforms would be great, for both Autodesk and customers but unfortunately there is more to it than just what’s good for customers.

About possibilities - who knows, how much of AutoCAD is written in .Net and how much is exposed as managed APIs. I would suspect that the whole core of AutoCAD is still written as unmanaged C++ code and just the “visual” bit on top are .Net. Beside it, there are .Net implementations that run on other platforms (www.mono-project.com). Also, in a rather unexpected move a few months ago Microsoft has announced that they will be releasing the whole .Net source code for everyone to look at - Apple could easily sign some sort of agreement with them and reimplement .Net on Mac OS. With their resources hardly anything is impossible.

@Robin:
Exactly! I think the first time I have read about DWF reader for a Mac was 2003? Maybe Apple decided to rectify the situation on their own… :-)
By the way, just like you, I’m also a big fan of mind mapping (www.psycho-project.org).

By: Robin Capper

Robin Capper — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:37:00 +0000

This would be the Autodesk that haven’t even bothered creating a MAC OS compatible viewer application for their “universal” DWF file format after, what, a decade or so?

By: Troy

Troy — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:20:28 +0000

It would be very difficult for this to happen. All Autodesk products are heavily developed in Microsoft’s .NET. To reprogram all of the applications would take a very long time, meaning that they wouldn’t release new features for years and that would make Autodesk users very upset.

I read most of this as maybe Apple helping Autodesk port many of its programs to work on Apple since it is now an Intel cpu system. Running on both OS’s would be a win-win for the users of the software.

By: Apple is buying Autodesk. Yeah right! | MS Office Security Watch

Apple is buying Autodesk. Yeah right! | MS Office Security Watch — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:03:00 +0000

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