"There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn"

I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves.

Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins.

DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption.

It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)

As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though.

Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)

I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp.

Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.

Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.

It's confusing, all right, and I don't think it makes for maintainable code.

Example: http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html

> I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations.

They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.

Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in.

That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.

That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.

Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets.

"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."

Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.

Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.

Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.

A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.

Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.

BIM software like Revit is pretty clever and would be difficult to build from scratch. AutoCAD is horrible but a lot of the horribleness is difficult to get rid of while providing the same functionality. So, I'm not sure I agree with your take.

They bought Revit and have somehow managed to regress it. Before owning Revit, and therefore only owning a small percentage of the nascent BIM tool marketplace, they drove the creation of IFC classes to ensure interoperability between BIM platforms. Now they practically own BIM, support for this has gone.

Auto desk are a vile company. A serial monopolist that make any of the othe offenders look tame. I'd love to see them go out of business. That said, I hope those that have lost their jobs find new ones soon.

I was commenting on "most CAD software", not just Autodesk products. Autodesk is not a sexy company (monopoly or otherwise) but I really wonder whether DWG/AutoCAD's key market, architectural drafting (as opposed to architectural drawing) is ever going to be a rewarding activity for anyone.

I've got years of diverse experience in the field of architecture and software, and Revit seems like a very clever toy but not a substitute for endless labour over details. Good architects draw every brick (or equivalent), and/or they also work in close experimental collaboration with the people fabricating the building elements. I'm thinking in the first case of Caruso St. John http://www.carusostjohn.com/ drawing every brick and in the second of a practice like Grimshaw http://grimshaw-architects.com/ using lost-wax casting (investment casting) to make components. The trade or craft knowledge involved means there are effective constraints which cannot even be expressed in Revit (individual bricks are not really an option in Revit, and you definitely wouldn't want to design a metal casting using Revit... It's an Autocad job, or better, a job for something more expressive like Maya or Mudbox (or whatever it's called) or whatever tool suits your aesthetic. You can't get to Rodin from Autocad.)

> They did, but once you buy it, it's yours?

Autodesk certainly doesn't think so, at least with respect to people who purchase copies of their software.

They also do a lot of interesting work via Autodesk Research (including on some things you might not expect, such as synthetic biology): https://autodeskresearch.com/

Publication list: https://autodeskresearch.com/publications

Compared to SolidWorks, SketchUp, and even parts of MS Visio. The UI and meta-data handling is very cumbersome and every time we use it we think how much better some parts could be. As with many mega-corps they tend to follow or buy the innovations of others, eventually.

Hmm, I tried to use SketchUp a month or so ago, after being a proficient AutoCAD user but not touching it since around 2005. I'm curious what parts of the UI are more usable in SketchUp than AutoCAD. For 2D drafting, I got up to speed fairly quick in SketchUp but it became apparent to me that in terms of drafting productivity, SketchUp in 2015 couldn't really compete with AutoCAD circa 2005.

Sketchup is designed for architectural sketches. The modeling grammar is nice for some operations but Sketchup is not really a well rounded modeling package. They are trying to move into construction.

IMO, main advantage of Sketchup over Autocad are a free API to access the model (although the domain model is not entirely well designed) and a fairly limited context of user interface operations (which makes the learning curve lowish).

The most critical difference though, is that Autocad supports actual analytic shapes while Sketchup handles only boundary representations (i.e. polygon meshes). No real cylinder for you! This may or may not be a problem.

IMO, Solidworks was more innovative than AutoCAD in the 90s and early 2000s. AutoCAD followed their lead by making Inventor. Today OnShape is innovating and AutoCAD is following with Fusion 360.

Actually, I believe Fusion 360 was around first. Having said that, trying to learn Fusion 360 was one of the worst experiences I've ever had learning software, while learning OnShape actually made me enjoy using CAD. Once OnShape gets to the level of maturity that Fusion 360 has, I am hoping they will be better at all levels.

I found learning Fusion 360 was painful. I'm dyslexic and need the big picture to understand how to put the individual pieces together. Fusion 360 uses terminology that is not defined anywhere. I worked with some of the support staff and they agreed that they lack this sort of documentation. It seems that some of the people I know that use Fusion 360 just hack around with it till they get it right. I don't have the time for that. Too many projects going at one time. I will ahve to look at OhShape. Thanks.

> Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X?

I can't comment on CAD, but in the world of 3D graphics I find SideFX's Houdini and The Foundry's Modo to be way more useable, extensible, and feature rich than Autodesk's Maya.

Arguably most of their more innovative stuff like XSI, Mudbox, etc have all been acquisitions and not original IP.

I can't speak to the entirety of their empire, but as far as their rendering command stream: not innovative. Well...maybe 30 years ago. To be fair, that's most of the workstation industry.

Compared to actually innovative CAD companies.

Autodesks MO for the last couple of decades is to just buy out any competitor in the market.