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Jan 24, 2005

Comments

Tony Tanzillo

"Autodesk has been telling financial analysts repeatedly that the company is going to be making more revenue-per-customer as customers upgrade from 2D drafting to 3D design over the next ten years."

This prediction fails to take into account the proliferation of 3D into every aspect of computing, and the effect that will have on low- and midrange 3D CADD. Today, most 3D computing applications are dedicated to modeling things that we design - things that don't exist yet, and things that will never exist (what we see in movies like The Matrix). In ten years, I think the majority of 3D computing applications will be dedicated to modeling things that already exist, probably as part of some massive, universal, 3 dimensional, GIS-like geophysical data store, that will have broad use in numerous applications ranging from real estate sales and commercial advertising; FM/AC, to homeland defense and a variety of other infrastructure management applications.

Another factor their predictions fail to consider is the strain of competing solutions that are offering progressively better 3D functionality at steadily decreasing price points.

To put it simply, Autodesk has pretty much bet the farm on its continued ability to use its file formats and keeping DWG a moving target, as a means of keeping the cost of its legacy products (namely AutoCAD based products) artificially high.

Autodesk could very likely fall victim to the same "80% of the functionality at 20% of the price" syndrome that helped it become the number one PC CAD maker at the expense of CALMA, ComputerVision, et. al., whose products AutoCAD displaced in its early days.

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