Akamai is an Internet/Cloud infrastructure company, used extensively by Autodesk. To be polite, my experiences using its services over several years have been somewhat negative. Back in March, when trying to download the AutoCAD 2012 trial, I went through the usual Akamai download manager struggles before being informed of the wonderful Opera workaround (thanks [...]
 3 November 2011, 10:19 am |  4 comments | Tags: Akamai, Cloud | Category: Autodesk, Cloud, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff The observant among you may have noticed that for many years, Autodesk’s free patches, service packs and updates haven’t added any new functionality. Bugs may get fixed, severe performance issues may be addressed, but design errors generally have to wait for the next release (at the earliest), and new features definitely don’t get added. The [...] 12 September 2011, 1:06 pm | 5 comments | Tags: Accounting, Autodesk, FASB, SEC, Service Pack, SOP 97-2, Update, VSOE | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Autodesk University, ClassicArray, Customer Service, Navel Gazing, Nostalgia, Other Products, Thoughts One of the more painful aspects of dealing with installations of recent releases of AutoCAD and related products is that although you might run a single setup routine to install what you think is a single application, the end result is a mass of different components being installed. Each of these components is considered a [...] 1 June 2011, 12:27 pm |  One comment | Tags: Installation | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Customer Service, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products, Rant Do you have a 3DConnexion device (3D ‘mouse’) and use it in AutoCAD or AutoCAD-based products? What do you think of the way it works in the most recent releases of AutoCAD? From AutoCAD 2011 on, Autodesk provided built-in support for these devices. Has that made things better or worse than in earlier releases? [...] 29 April 2011, 11:09 am | 8 comments | Tags: 3D Mouse, 3DConnexion | Category: 3D, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD 2012, Comments, Customer Service, Other Autodesk Products, Other Products Note: this post is not an April fool’s joke. It may be ridiculous and hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s all true. After I managed to overcome Autodesk’s obstructive download manger and download AutoCAD 2012, it became available on the Subscription site (when that site wasn’t running unusably slowly). Or it became kind-of available. Here’s [...] 1 April 2011, 11:47 am | 4 comments | Tags: Bloat, Download, Fail, Geography | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Performance, Rant, Subscription You may remember a month ago I raised the question What proportion of Autodesk customers really are on Subscription? Shortly after that, I sent Autodesk Subscription VP Callan Carpenter these questions following up on the interview: I have a request for follow-up information arising from this interview. I hope you can find the time [...] 29 July 2010, 10:32 pm | 5 comments | Tags: Callan Carpenter, Interview, Subscription | Category: Autodesk, Comments, Customer Service, Interview, Subscription The Civil 3D group within Autodesk has moved impressively quickly in providing a partial solution to the language pack problem I described earlier. What has been provided so far is a set of patches for Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011 that allow Civil 3D users to remove the spurious language pack flag by [...] 22 July 2010, 9:59 am | One comment | Tags: Civil 3D, Civil 3D 2011, Hotfix, Language Pack, Virus | Category: Announcement, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Bug, Customer Service, Other Autodesk Products, Win If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus: Now I [...] 19 July 2010, 4:06 pm | 6 comments | Tags: Civil 3D, Civil 3D 2011, Language Pack, Virus | Category: Bug, Customer Service, Customisation, Development, Fail, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products I will be airing my own views on the Autodesk discussion group changes in a future post. In the meantime, I have collected some reactions from other users. For the record, there has been only a little censorship in this area. Here are some of the comments that made it through unhindered: I’ve given it a fair shake [...] 30 June 2010, 12:36 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: Discussion groups, Fail, User Interface, User Reaction | Category: Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff Annoyed by telemarketers? Too polite to abuse them or just hang up? Can’t be bothered wasting their time in person? Then you need AstyCrapper. If you’re using the open-source Asterisk PBX, it will crap on for ages on your behalf. It works by detecting responses from the telemarketer and silence gaps and responding with [...] 29 June 2010, 1:32 pm | One comment | Tags: Fun, Linux, Open source, Telemarketing, Win | Category: Customer Service, Fun, Linux, Win After an interminable delay and a complete absence of information from Autodesk (no, “contact your reseller” doesn’t count, especially when they don’t know anything either), it seems Raster Design 2011 is going to be released on 20 July. If that’s correct, those of you who use, say, image formats not directly supported by AutoCAD [...] 28 June 2010, 6:34 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: 12-Month Release Cycle, Delay, Raster Design, Release date | Category: Announcement, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Raster Design, Subscription The Autodesk discussion groups have quite a few problems at the moment, which I will discuss at length in future. One unnecessary problem that has been added to the mix is censorship. Having praised Autodesk in the past for allowing discussion to go unhindered, it’s only fair to slam heavy-handed moderation when I see [...] 28 June 2010, 1:24 pm | 9 comments | Tags: Censorship, Discussion groups, Educational version, Plot Stamp, Rant | Category: Autodesk, Cadalyst, Comments, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Spin, Thoughts, Web Stuff On 4 June 2010, Autodesk turned off NNTP access to its discussion groups as part of the process of updating its software to use a different engine (the new one is from Lithium – here are its own forums). I am preparing a large post about what I think of the new web interface, [...] 11 June 2010, 12:00 pm | 10 comments | Tags: Autodesk, Discussion groups, Newsgroups, Polls | Category: Autodesk, Comments, Customer Service, Polls, Web Stuff It was good to see Autodesk react to criticism of AutoCAD 2011′s browser-based Help with an acknowledgement of the problems and an attempt to provide a workaround by making a zip file of CHM files available for download. That’s much better than ignoring people’s concerns, denying the validity of those concerns or shooting the messenger, [...] 7 May 2010, 1:18 pm | 6 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, CHM, Civil 3D, Download, Express Tools, Help, Subscription, Tip | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Bug, Cloud, Customer Service, Customisation, Development, Other Autodesk Products, Subscription, Tip, Web Stuff A couple of days ago, my web hosting server was down. This is pretty unusual with the hosting company I use, but these things can happen to the best from time to time. This site was up again after a couple of hours, during which I received the excellent customer service that is par [...] 7 May 2010, 11:18 am | 3 comments | Tags: Comments, Downtime, Web Hosting | Category: Comments, Customer Service, Web Stuff There are areas of Autodesk’s treatment of customers that leaves much to be desired, and I will most likely continue to be critical of that until a) I die; b) Autodesk dies; or c) the bad stuff stops happening. One thing for which Autodesk deserves praise is the distribution of bug fixes to its [...] 30 April 2010, 2:03 pm | 6 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, Customer Service, Service Pack, Update | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, Autodesk, Bug, Customer Service, Win In a comment in response to my AutoCAD 2011 Help system is not popular post, Autodesk’s Diane Serda acknowledged the problems, offered apologies and posted a link to a CHM version of the Help. From Diane’s comment: We have posted the zip file for download here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?id=15068206&siteID=123112&linkID=9240618 Instructions: 1. Download the AutoCAD2011CHMHelp.zip to your [...] 28 April 2010, 2:27 pm | 7 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Documentation, Help, Listening | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Comments, Customer Service, Web Stuff I’m still looking for your questions about Autodesk Subscription and upgrade policies and pricing. No matter what you think about that, you have to admit that Autodesk’s current policies are less anti-customer than those inflicted on SolidWorks users. Disallowing bug fixes for non-subscription customers is reprehensible, no matter what kind of spin is put [...] 18 April 2010, 9:26 pm | 12 comments | Tags: Customer Service, SolidWorks, Spin, Subscription | Category: Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Other Blogs, Other Products, Spin, Subscription Credit where credit is due. Following my rant about the uselessness of using a 16-minute YouTube video as the AutoCAD 2011 system requirements resource, the relevant people at Autodesk quickly fixed it and let me know. Now we just need the other releases covered and we’ll be all set. Autodesk is still officially supporting [...] 16 April 2010, 1:46 pm | One comment | Tags: Communication, Documentation, Feedback, Knowledge Base, Positive feedback, Rant, Win | Category: AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Customer Service, Web Stuff, Win |
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Cloud concerns – trust
Using any software involves some degree of trust in the vendor. Using the Cloud requires a much higher level of trust.
Autodesk boss Carl Bass is a maker of carefully crafted things, so I’ll use that as an analogy. Using standalone software requires the sort of trust that a maker has in a tool [...]