Until July 18, you can trade in your copies of AutoCAD LT for Inventor Professional 2009 at just $2,495 -- regular price is $6945, so a discount of 64%.
In fact, just about any Autodesk software is available for $2495+LT, but Inventor Pro has the most dramatic percentage savings since it's the most expensive software from Autodesk.
"Introducing Synchronous Technology in Your Organization" sounded like a good topic from Learning Circuits.
Chuck Kater's article starts of in a promising manner:
Synchronous technology is the newest buzz, but for good reason: It holds great promise to change the way we work and deliver...
...training.
Oops.
Overcoming resistance to certain factors "..is the key to marketing synchronous technology successfully within your organization." Perhaps Siemens PLM Software may want to borrow Mr Kater's list (part of which is shown below) so that they can prepare for the excuses potential customers may have for not implementing NX and SE with SynchTech:
After a 25-year delay, Autodesk wants to finally get around to trademarking the name of a file format (DWG), and doesn't like that the Open Design Alliance has registered OpenDWG as a trademark in the USA.
During this attempt to overturn the registration, Autodesk and the ODA are getting into a sniping match. For instance, the ODA marked 12,000 documents as "commerically sensitive," forcing Autodesk to come up with a reason to why each and every one should NOT be labelled as such.
Autodesk complained to the USPTO (trademark office), and last week the trademark office agreed that the ODA was being annoying. (See ruling here.) The USPTO turned the tables on ODA, telling them they had 20 days in which to redesignate all 12,000 pages at their proper confidentiality level -- "thoughtfully".
Autodesk won another complaint: it didn't like the way the president of the ODA answered its questions, and demanded that (1) he return to the witness chair; and (2) answer the questions. (In the prez's defense, he had only recently joined the ODA, and so was not knowledgeable about its history and inner goings-on.) The USPTO's normal rules are that a witness cannot be recalled unless both sides agree. But the rules are also that the defense has to produce a knowledgeable witness, and so the ODA's president or someone else has to take a second turn.
But Autodesk lost a third demand: it has wanted the ODA to explain how it reverse engineers the DWG format. The USPTO really couldn't see the method by which a defendant obtains the information is at all relevant to any possible confusion over OpenDWG trademark ownership.
(In my understanding, the ODA uses Russian programmers located in Saint Petersburg to decode the DWG format.)
This the question Autodesk has asked the USPTO to answer: are consumers confused when the ODA uses "OpenDWG" and Autodesk uses "DWG"?
The new schedule for ADSK vs. ODA case is as follows:
Discovery period to close -- August 22
Plaintiff's 30-day testimony period to close -- November 20
Defendant's 30-day testimony period to close -- January 19, 2009
Plaintiff's 15-day rebuttal testimony period to close -- March 5, 2009
Engineous Software and its 95 employees are being bought by Dassault Systems for its Delmia Simula division at $40 million, reports the Triangle Business Journal. Its software automatically determines optimal designs and trade-offs with direct links to most CAD software, Excel, Word, MATLAB, Ansys, Adams, and Patran. Annual revenues were $17 million in 2007.
I had to chuckle at Chris Coletta's description of Dassault: "French logistics software firm."
Earlier this year, Autodesk opened a customer briefing center near Portland OR, to court MCAD and Alias customers.
This fall, Autodesk opens a similar center for architecture customers in San Francisco CA. It's located at One Market Street, where the company already has its downtown SF offices.
Link.
The article referenced by the link reports, "But the migration toward SF has sped up amid a pitched hiring battle among companies for technical talent, a desire to retain top employees who live in the city, and the advent of $4-a-gallon gasoline."
$4/gal gasoline is cheap! In my hometown, gas went to $5.50/gal ($1.45/l) this week -- one the lowest prices in Canada.
...one of my people just talked to Katie Cotton and she says Steve is in extremely good health and isn't frail at all and this whole thing about losing weight was just made up by the filthy scumbags in the media to stir up controversy and it was all just caused by the way the lighting was done on the stage at WWDC because they put in special lights to try to make Phil Schiller look less huge and the side effect of that lighting was that it made everyone else look thinner too but in fact Steve weighs more right now than he's ever weighed in his life and there's nothing to worry about and no reason to short the stock and everyone at Apple is just super-excited about the 3G iPhone and that's really what we're here to talk about and if you are going to keep asking about personal questions then this interview is just going to have to be over because we don't talk about hypotheticals and we don't talk about speculation and we don't respond to rumors and frankly from the way you phrase the question it sounds like you've already made up your mind and jumped to conclusions and you've already written your story without doing any reporting and so what point would there be in us trying to talk to you and anyway we're here to talk about the 3G iPhone and we're all just very super-excited about the new 3G iPhone and we're not ducking your questions we're just saying we're super-excited about this really exciting new product which we think people are going to be very excited about and we really just want to talk about that excitement because it's just so super-exciting and we don't have time to cover everything related to Apple and we don't have the bandwidth to be talking about all sorts of other things and we're just trying to stay focused on something that's very exciting and if you have other questions then those questions are things you should maybe talk about at another time sometime down the road and no I don't know when that time will be and I'm not saying we're going to talk about anything I'm not making any statements about when we're going to make a statement because there is no statement to make at this time and no that doesn't mean there will be a statement to make at some later point in time and seriously what is wrong with you people?
Adobe Systems Q2 revenues were this US$887 million, beating the Street's consensus of $880 million. But in Q3, the company expects revenues to fall to $855-$885 million.
Traders punished the company's better-than-expected results by cutting the share price by $1.38.
A recent posting by Roopinder Tara caused some mulling to take place in my mind. In Solid Edge Ready to Take Off?, he reports:
I imagine the developers at D-Cubed and Parasolid [both owned by Siemens PLM Software] have saved a few tricks for the company from which their paychecks are issued. Could it be some undocumented features are never found by the competitors?
I wonder if Siemens will get into trouble with European Commission regulators if a competitor complains about aspects of D-Cubed and ParaSolid that are unavailable to competitors -- just as Microsoft has had to pay billions after keeping APIs for its server software undocumented.
Afterall, it's not longer UGS, the under-noticed MCAD vendor; it's now Siemens, one of the largest (and unfortunately corrupt) companies in Germany. The EU loves filling its coffers with corporate fines.
Or, maybe competitors will pull an Autodesk (as with ACIS -> ShapeManager) and write their own equivalent code. #1 on that list would be SolidWorks, which uses the ParaSolid kernel. Perhaps it's time for SWX to come home to the family and begin using the ACIS kernel.
PS: For an excellent sturm und drang over the "new" Solid Edge from an ueber SolidWorks user, read the synchtech series by Matt Lombard.
Are EULAs enforceable? R. Paul Waddington thinks not. We don't read end-user license agreements, and software companies don't enforce them, he says at his Caveat Emptor blog. And so:
As Autodesk will not co-operate nor negotiate their terms and conditions, and as there is no mechanism to accept only a portion, I am left to make the only sensible decision I can for the continuance of my business....I reject, in full, Autodesk’s Subscription and Licence Terms and Conditions and will continue to use Autodesk’s products.
He now awaits for a response from Autodesk. Given that the software company has for 1,200 days ignored his questions to them about their EULA's infamous Audit Clause, he expects their lawyers to ignore his ignoring.
Autodesk is in this bind:
Autodesk completes purchase of Moldflow. Final price tag: $201.7 million.
Next up: dealing with Flomeric's demand for an all-cash offer from Autodesk. Sigh. Being the richest CAD company in the world must feel like being a recent lottery winner and having all your new friends come calling.
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