Shaan, Does that go beyond the applications themselves? If so, I would like to hear comments on the current adsk newsgroup situation, especially the broken search.

While I have had many disagreements with Shaan on various subjects over the years, I’m glad Autodesk keeps paying him. I’m also happy to see him comment here, and would hate to see that discouraged.

I’m not going to censor comments unless they get really extreme, and very much encourage you all to contribute your views here. If you think Shaan is wrong, please point out where he is wrong. If you’re angry about something, tell us exactly what you’re angry about. But can I please encourage everyone to play the ball instead of the man?

Shaan, we are all upset and angry because WE PAY and you live on our money.

Sorry, but you don’t run this blog. I know it must be inconvenient to have your customers’ views visible in public, especially when they don’t match the nothing-is-wrong corporate illusion, but that’s just too bad. The polls will continue, I will continue to comment on them, and you need to learn to live with it. After all, you love bloggers and respect their independent voices.

SH: “The total votes *could be* you voting multiple times”

No they couldn’t, because that would be dishonest, and I hope you’re not suggesting any such thing. In any case, do you really think that the polls here are out of sync with what your customers think? Or are you really under the impression that most AutoCAD users think the product is getting faster, that the recent web update was fantastic and that the 12-month cycle is definitely not damaging AutoCAD?

Rather than trying to discredit my polls, feel free to counter them by making your own data public. Fully public, that is, with all the details visible, as mine are. Your response to my ribbon usage poll was a good start, although more detail of how your figures are measured would have made them more meaningful.

If you provide some specific issues, comments, or a specific project where Autodesk is not being active in Myfeedback to me in email I will look into them (shaan.hurley@autodesk.com).

I would like you to give us an example of what you have personally done to “improve the products” so that I know who to curse next time I am “experiencing” an hourglass cursor or some other improvement.

Shaan, could you please for once accept the criticism, apologize to the users and do something about it, instead of blaming everybody else for the mess that we call AutoCAD.

And finally, as a proof that Steve is right, all you have to do is read the comments on your own MyFeedback web site. But then, judging by the response rate from Autodesk, maybe it should be renamed MyBlackHole site.

So if R12 is better performance for you, you have no need to upgrade. Surely the competitors you have with your industry will love this as they will kick you lowly fast bootup but limited productivity butt.

The fact is we do care about our customers and our products otherwise most of us would not be working at Autodesk spending much of our own time to improve the products and customers experience. I am not the exception.

There are other factors we have little control over such as the operating system and APIs. If your software environment is loaded down more than it was back in the DOS days (which it most certainly is) we have more to overcome for performance.

Please stop the polls unless there is a therapuetic value for you. The total votes *could be* you voting multiple times, 5 blog visitors, 3 bored web surfing people that don’t know what AutoCAD is but like selecting a button on a poll, as well a family members. It takes a large wide and varied population to draw even the slightest conclusions from. Your statement “It is clear from the very different voting patterns in the two polls” is unclear in their origin beyond a small sample straw poll of those who come to the blog.

-Shaan