I’m not pretending this is a scientific survey. There is bound to be some self-selection and other sources of bias, as there must be with anybody’s survey processes (very much including Autodesk’s CIP). Looking at the logs, I haven’t detected any obvious attempts to interfere with the poll, although there’s nothing I can do to stop people voting multiple times if they have access to multiple IPs (e.g. a work and home account). There are fewer votes in the newer poll only because I didn’t let it run nearly as long; the rate of voting actually doubled this year.

Caveats aside, what can we say about the way in which poll respondents’ views have changed in the last 18 months or so? The most obvious change is a marked reduction in the proportion of people who now feel Hopeful. There is a small increase in the number of voters who are now Excited or Frightened, but a big leap in those who are Concerned.

Combining the two positive choices (Excited and Hopeful) to come up with a simple “Cloud approval rating”, in 2010 39% of voters were positive about CAD in the Cloud. In 2011 that number is down to 29%. In other words, people voting Cloud-positive are about a quarter down on last year.

Most poll respondents here are Autodesk customers, so I think it’s fair to say that this result reflects poorly on the effectiveness of Autodesk’s Cloud marketing. After a year of providing an increasing selection of Cloud products free of charge, and a big Autodesk Cloud launch and publicity immediately before the poll, one would expect a lot more people to be sold on the Cloud, rather than the reverse. I don’t see that Autodesk has done anything atypically bad with its Cloud marketing (certainly nothing like Dassault’s SolidWorks train wreck), so what’s going on? Is CAD on the Cloud really an unsellable prospect?

Here are your top ten “best ever” AutoCAD features:

• AutoLISP / Visual LISP (32%)
• Paper / Model Space / Layouts (21%)
• Xrefs (20%)
• Copy / Paste between drawings (19%)
• Dynamic Blocks (16%)
• Object Snaps (15%)
• Layer Visibility per Viewport (12%)
• Undo (12%)
• Grips (12%)
• AutoSnap (9%)

Something interesting I noticed is the age of these features:

• AutoLISP / Visual LISP – 1985 (significantly improved 1999)
• Paper / Model Space / Layouts – 1990 (significantly improved 1999)
• Xrefs – 1990
• Copy / Paste between drawings – 1991
• Dynamic Blocks – 2005
• Object Snaps – 1984
• Layer Visibility per Viewport – 1990 (improved 2008)
• Undo – 1986
• Grips – 1992
• AutoSnap – 1992

The youngest feature here is 6 years old, the oldest is 27. The average top-ten AutoCAD feature is over 20 years old. What does that tell you?

(Source: CAD Panacea).

I saw Shaan asking about this kind of thing a while back, but not getting much response. It looks like Autodesk is trying to work out exactly where its customers go these days for support, discussion, networking, training, etc. I can’t speak for other bloggers, but I’d be happy to provide my site statistics on request. Anybody can also get an idea of how much of a “community” a blog is by the number of comments.

One point I found strange in the survey was the order of “valuableness” in one of the questions. It went something like:

• Not at all valuable
• Not very valuable
• Valuable
• Somewhat valuable
• Very valuable
• Exceedingly valuable (or whatever)

The ordering of “somewhat valuable” and “valuable” was the opposite to what I would have expected. What do you think? Is “somewhat valuable” more valuable than “valuable”, as the survey suggests?

In related news, I have now closed the short-lived poll about the end of NNTP access to these groups. The results were:

Should Autodesk shut down NNTP access to its discussion groups?
Yes (8.8%, 5 Votes)
No (59.6%, 34 Votes)
Don’t care (31.6%, 18 Votes)
Total Voters: 57

This is a small sample and must have some self-selection bias, in that those who cared about this move were more likely to read my post on the subject and vote about it. I attempted to temper this by including a “Don’t care” option, but some bias is still bound to be there. There is also likely to be some bias in the opposite direction, because people are less inclined to bother voting to try to fight a decision that had clearly already been set in concrete and which was never going to change.

That said, it does seem remarkable that only 5 people could be found who supported Autodesk’s decision to drop NNTP access. According to my long-running What is your relationship to Autodesk? poll, There are at least 25 (claimed) Autodesk employees who are active enough on this blog to respond to its polls! Without wishing to compromise the private nature of my polls, I can reveal that the 5 Yes votes included Autodesk employees and at least one non-Autodesk person (that’s as specific as I will ever get). There did not appear to be any attempt to distort the voting from either camp. I mention this because the survey mentioned in my previous post was disrupted in this way.

• AutoCAD 2010 users’  Ribbon use: 44% (AutoCAD 2010 users’ CIP on: 36%)
• Ribbon love: 28%
• AutoCAD 2010 menu bar non-users: 23%
• Inventor Ribbon use: 44% (Inventor 2010 users’ Ribbon use: 59%)
• Revit Ribbon use: 42% (Revit 2010 users’ Ribbon use: 58%)
• AutoCAD Ribbon use: 32% (AutoCAD 2009/2010 users’ Ribbon use: 38%)
• CIP on: 27%
• AutoCAD 2009 menu bar non-users: 21%
• AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon one of 3 best new features: 11%
• AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon turned on in some way: 29% (fully visible 13%)

The polls were run at different times over the past couple of years with different questions being asked in different ways about different releases, and responded to by very different numbers of voters. Don’t expect consistent or directly comparable results; this is not a scientific study. As with all polls here, there is a self-selection bias; those people who feel most strongly about a subject are more likely to find these polls and make the effort to vote in them.

The more recent polls generally have significantly greater sample size than the early ones. The smallest poll (AutoCAD 2009 best new features) has 37 voters, the largest poll (AutoCAD users generally using Ribbon) has 751. While the former certainly qualifies as Shaan’s “a few dozen”, the latter does only if you consider 62 to be “a few”. In which case, can I give you a thousand dollars and you give me a few hundred back?

Here are the poll details, which you can also see in the Polls Archive. If you think any of these questions or the available responses are in any way biased or leading , I’d be interested to hear your reasoning.

AutoCAD 2010 users, what are your Ribbon and CIP settings?
Start Date: 15 March 2010

Ribbon
Start Date: 16 January 2010

AutoCAD 2010 users: pull-down menus – is your menu bar turned on (MENUBAR=1)?
Start Date: 14 September 2009

Inventor users: are you generally using the Ribbon?
Start Date: 11 September 2009

Revit users: are you generally using the Ribbon?
Start Date: 9 September 2009

AutoCAD users: are you generally using the Ribbon?
Start Date: 9 September 2009

Do you enable CIP (Customer Involvement Program) in your Autodesk products in production?
Start Date: 23 February 2009

AutoCAD 2009 users: pull-down menus – is your menu bar turned on (MENUBAR=1)?
Start Date: 28 November 2008

Choose the best things about AutoCAD 2009 (up to 3)
Start Date: 11 July 2008

AutoCAD 2009 non-Ribbon users: why don’t you use it?
Start Date: 20 June 2008

AutoCAD 2009 users: in what state do you usually have your Ribbon?
Start Date: 28 May 2008

• Performance (online)
• Performance (offline)
• Search results
• Content completeness and accuracy
• Ease of manual browsing
• Efficiency of user interface
• Concept of online Help
• Anything else you want to mention

Please comment to express your views and use the poll on the right to provide an overall rating of the new system.

While I’m on the subject of polls, I’ll repeat some comments I made a while ago. Back then, I noticed that more than one person had been voting multiple times. While this is technically possible for people who have access to the Internet via multiple IP addresses, it’s obviously not desirable. The idea is that you have one vote each. While you might be able to work around that restriction to give yourself a little extra influence on the result, doing so is less than honest.

I accept that people who have access via home and work might accidentally vote twice on occasions, but if I perceive a continued pattern of deliberate abuse I will remove the offenders’ access rights to this site. As I respect everybody’s privacy I will not reveal any identities, drop any hints or make any announcements about this, I will just do it.

Just to make the privacy issue completely clear, I will not, under any circumstances in public or private, reveal who has voted for what. To anybody. Similarly, I will not reveal to any party any identifying information behind any of the users of this site, with the exception of spammers.

Fortunately, the influence of dodgy votes on poll results has so far been small and in most cases statistically insignificant. That is, it does not invalidate any conclusions that might be drawn from the overall poll results. The more valid votes there are, the less influence the multi-voters will have, so go to it and have your say. Once, please!

Recent data on other Autodesk applications having both the new and “classic” UI show about a 2 : 1 split in favor of the new UI.

I would be interested to know the full details behind this assertion. Whenever I see a baldly-stated statistic like this, my first thought is “where did it come from?” Without full details of the data and how it was obtained, every statistic like this is suspect at best. It could just as easily be useless or misleading. I’m afraid I’ve become rather cynical whenever I see any kind of Autodesk statistic. When challenged in the past, Autodesk has consistently failed or refused to back up its marketing statistics (or even vague assertions that certain secret Autodesk-supporting statistics exist) by providing the comprehensive details required to make them useful. I’d love to be proven wrong in this case, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Instead, I’ll just ask you and we’ll see how the numbers compare. Over on the right, there are two new polls on Ribbon use; one for Revit and one for AutoCAD. If requested, I’ll do similar polls for Inventor and 3ds Max. Please add your vote and feel free to comment.

There’s a poll on the right that asks a specific question about the default state of AutoCAD 2009 and 2010, but I’d also like to see some comments on this. What do you think of these messages? Are they useful? Do they get in the way? Do you take any notice of them? Are there too many? Do we need any others? Do you turn them off? Is it easy enough to control them?

Reading Deelip’s post and subsequent comments more carefully, it becomes clear that he doesn’t mean what a casual glance might lead you to believe he means. Deelip makes a specific distinction between “bugs” and “known issues”. He states that if a bug is discovered and the software is then adjusted such that it does not abort the software in a badly-behaved way, and this is then documented, then the bug ceases to be a bug and becomes a “known issue”.

I disagree. Bugs can cause crashes or not; they can cause “nice” crashes or not; they can be known about prior to release or not; they can be documented internally or not; they can be documented publicly or not. As far as I’m concerned, if the software doesn’t act “as designed” or “as intended”, then that’s a bug. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say, and I concur:

A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect or unexpected result).

That doesn’t mean that software that is “as designed” (free of bugs) is free of defects. Defects are things that make the software work in a way other than “as it should”. They can be bugs, design errors or omissions, performance problems, user interface logic failures, API holes, feature changes or removals with unintended undesirable consequences, and so on. Unfortunately, defining “as it should” isn’t a precise science. You can’t just compare the software to the documentation and say that the differences are defects. The documentation could be faulty or incomplete, or it could perfectly describe the deeply flawed way in which the software works.

While I disagree with Deelip’s definition of bugs, I couldn’t agree more with a more important point he makes in his blog post. That point is of a fixed 12-month cycle being the root cause of a plethora of bugs/issues/whatever making it into shipping software, and this being an unacceptable situation. This is a view I expressed in Cadalyst before I started participating in Autodesk’s sadly defunct MyFeedback program, and it’s a view I hold even more strongly today.

In conclusion, I would have to say that the fixed yearly release schedule is not good for AutoCAD. It is good for Autodesk, certainly in the short term, but that’s not at all the same thing as being good for AutoCAD or its users.

I’m not alone in thinking this. The polls I’ve run on this subject, discussions with many individuals on-line and in person, and many comments here and elsewhere, indicate that a dislike of the 12-month cycle is the majority viewpoint. For example, when asked the question, “Do you think the 12-month release cycle is harming the quality of AutoCAD and its variants?”, 85% of poll respondents here answered “Definitely” or “Probably”. In another poll, 71% of respondents indicated a preference for AutoCAD release cycles of 24 months or greater.

Somebody please tell me I’m wrong here. Somebody tell me that I’ve misread things, that customers really think the 12-month cycle is great, and that it’s not actually harmful for the product. Anyone?

* Or hundreds. Or thousands.

You would think that Autodesk would be rubbing its corporate hands together at the prospect of the ODA being distracted like this. Or maybe not, if the bunfight throws up more little gems like this:

Autodesk had at least once gone to the ODA website, agreed to the click-through membership agreement, received their access password via email, downloaded each and every library on the ODA’s website, then denied they did it. (The ensuing conversation about this, between the ODA and Autodesk, was pretty interesting, to say the least.)

If that’s true (and I would welcome evidence from either party) it certainly puts an interesting slant on what Autodesk thinks about the enforceability of click-through agreements.

On a related subject, see the polls on the right. There has been one running for a while about whether you even read such “agreements”, and I’ve added two more. They ask if you feel morally and legally bound by the terms that lie under that “let me get on with the installation” button.

There are some who have expressed a deep dislike of the Big Red A, although it never offended me greatly. I just wished the features hidden under it worked better than they did in 2009. Personally, I generally prefer what’s under the A in 2010 than what’s there in 2009, but you may not. I know that when the 2009 user interface was being attacked, its most prominent defenders were those keyboard-heavy users who turned both the Ribbon and the menu bar off, giving themselves more screen space. On the infrequent occasions when a pull-down menu was required, those people were content to provide an extra click.

When I found out about the Menu Browser’s death a few months ago, I expected there would be a severe adverse reaction from such people. Maybe there will be one when people hold get the shipping product and notice it’s gone. But after my poll showed only 7% of respondents used it instead of the menu bar, I’m now expecting that adverse reaction to be smaller than I originally thought.

If you want to use AutoCAD 2010, want to work without a menu bar but still have access to menu items occasionally, what can you do? You can add a button to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), or any other toolbar, that toggles the menu bar on and off. Use the CUI command to add such a button.* The following macro will do the job:

'menubar $M=$(-,1,$(getvar,menubar))

There are a couple of downsides to this method. First, although this macro has been written in such a way that it should be transparent, it doesn’t currently work that way. When you push the button, AutoCAD will still cancel any command you’re in. Second, the screen resize forces a redraw, which could slow you down in very complex drawings. However, under most circumstances that redraw will still be quicker than waiting for a reaction from AutoCAD the first time you pick the Big Red A. By the way, that reaction time is better in 2010 than the very tardy 2009. As a result, even AutoCAD 2009 users might prefer to use the QAT-button method and forget the Menu Browser ever existed.

* If there is enough interest, I will do a video tutorial explaining how to add such a button to the QAT.