That’s a big reduction in work force. Considering their Engineering/Architecture division is much larger than M&E, I wonder how much came from M&E and what it means for the future of smaller (or even larger) products…
Best of luck to anyone affected on here!
FTA:
“As part of the ongoing platform shift, it’s clear to us that design and engineering software will move to cloud and mobile platforms. Cloud and mobile has been a major investment area for Autodesk over the past couple of years and this restructuring will accelerate our progress as we intend to further invest in employees with expertise and skill sets essential to this transition.”
I don’t get this. Are they really thinking engineers are going to build bridges and skyscrapers on a tablet? And that we are going to make games and vfx on 10 inch screens with our fingers? Using cloud-based software??
Cloud doesn’t mean tablets and mobile mean more sketchbook type programs.
There are a couple of things that cloud can do good and bad:
[ul]
[li] A means to stop piracy, if the app in in the cloud then you don’t have it locally. The only way that you can use it is to login.
[/li][li] They can build the software for fixed hardware; hardware in the cloud runs on their systems (less work, less testing, cheaper to do)
[/li][li] “Cheaper” user machines (cheaper spec)
[/li][li] Works everywhere, pc, mac, tablet, phone.
[/li][li] Prices could go down for software
[/li][li] We don’t have to freekin download 2Gb updates and re-install the app, very little storage space on disk if any
[/li][li] If the net goes down, we can’t work (kinda the same if the the intranet goes down and we are on a licence server)
[/li][li] They can track everything we do, how often we use tools, if it crashed, what scripts we use, see our custom scripts/plugins, renders we make. (This would be interesting to see what they have in mind for privacy)
[/li][li] Collection of stats could improve the software
[/li][li] and more…
[/li][/ul]
I think they will still let people download and use their products locally (I can’t image that would stop anytime soon) but maybe for the same price you can use it online… (cheaper licensing but paying for their “blade”) I would also say that there would be some limited online storage available as well.
I could go on, but it’s late.
meh. cloud. This whole announcement makes me sad. As if cloud features were THE big thing that’s missing in Autodesk’s products. But I guess it opens the wallets of investors when they hear about the magical “cloud”. Also it seems like we’re going back to the old mainframe/terminal days…
I supsect the big announcements made over the last few months about “Autodesk going full cloud” in the future had scared away many long term users and studios alike. At least alarmed them to a degree, where they decided to hesitate buying into the next round of releases or subscription contracts for the time being. Of course the Euro crisis does’nt help either, Europe being their weakest spot, besides Brazil and India (to quote Carl Bass: “weakness in Europe has been unforeseen”, really ? ) . Add on top of that the general lackluster subscription benefits and product evolvement…
The M&E sector got the biggest hit ( down 10% compared to last financial yrs Q2 ), so i’m worried about what strange product related ( 3ds Max in my case) decisions might spawn from upper managment being currently in stock plunge panic mode…
what’s that story about killing the golden goose…
[QUOTE=Butters;17570][ul]
[li] and more…
[/li][/ul]
[/QUOTE]
And lag. I used my work computer remotely, with Max, from both the same city and from another country. Sure, when you are close the lag is not a big problem if you just want to do a couple of things quickly, specially if you are writing code. But it’s simply not practicable to use it on a daily basis. Even with an “OnLivish-lag” instead of a remote desktop lag, it’s terrible. Unless you render the viewports on the client, and still have all the costs of a descent workstation, I can’t see this happening. And if companies have the costs of workstations, which these days are trivial anyways, it doesn’t make sense to use a remote software with lag instead of a local one. Cloud is great for many things like Google docs, calendar, emails, etc, but for high-end software I don’t see any advantage, other than storing data on the cloud. But then, there’s Github, Dropbox or source control for that.
I get the feeling that all this mammoth companies investing in cloud, tablets and portable computers (I heard Intel R&D in desktop CPU’s is minimal now) is just an investor fad bubble, like RobertKist said, that still has some room to grow before bursting. And it probably won’t burst completely, tablets are nice to have around, like phones. They are great for occasional browsing, taking to class, or some on the road gaming, but that’s it. I doubt they will ever replace the big screen space of a desktop, just like rendering your viewport locally won’t be replaced by a 10ms rotation lag.
The Onion: “HP Offers ‘That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About’”
True, true… Maybe cloud is more a loose term and more a catch phrase… We have a portion of our app online, in the “Cloud”. Come to think of it, it could be all moot, they might not be talking about the 3D packages we use, more along the lines of Sketchbook and special little viewer apps?
I think it would make sense for apps like sketchbook. I’m just wary when I hear the “cloud” buzzword. Originally it was meant to describe distributed, location aware storage for fast access to your data everywhere - in practice it’s usually just a server, and when people think “cloud” the next stuff that follows are “social features” and tablet-ification; which are things I don’t need in a professional application.
If they add “cloud” features which run via e.g. the server in our own company, and if you could tweak them, then I’d support that. But stuff that runs over AD’s servers in the US is pretty much a no-go: poor connection from China and security issues when it comes to 3rd parties.
But still… hire people to work on Maya and Max!
[QUOTE=RobertKist;17586]hire people to work on Maya and Max![/QUOTE] ++
HP RGS was pretty good for me, but I was in the same country. Maybe there will be local servers for each country.
For ‘cloud’ read ‘you must subscribe and pay us every month…’
Cloud would be nice if it meant some kind of reliable, distributed version control – work from home without some stupid vpn, etc. — but the security implications are significant and even though I think they’re not insurmountable, it’s not going to happen in games or film until a generation of people who grew up with ‘everything on the net’ are in charge of IT. No old school IT guy would let you put your asset base ‘in the cloud’ unless you roofied him.
OTOH, I keep all my production metadata, asset tracking, etc, in the cloud and nobody minds. But the actual files… not for a while. And not with the company that still can’t for example CAST A FREAKING NORMAL MAP RELIABLY. Sorry, i generated about 100 crash reports for those suckers in the last 48 hours and I’m grouchy – though I guess they’re probably sitting unread in the inbox of some poor pinkslipped QA guy.
what will be awesome is when “cloud maya” gets a backend upgrade, and tools go kablewy…
Sucks for the people who lost their job, but I have to wonder what the layoff means in terms of “tech-artist” work that woln’t be solved by the engineering team.
I also think sketchbook pro for the ipad has probably made quite a pretty penny, and I have to agree with the “pay us every month” subscription. Look at what adobe has done with the creative suite. Between maya and photoshop, the piracy is probably at an all time high.
[QUOTE=Theodox;17597]metadata, asset tracking, etc, in the cloud[/QUOTE]
So how would you go about this if it was “VPN” Access. You would have to setup an outward facing DB so they could see it, or login to your work VPN (as would have to anyway if you were working from home) and then log into Maya…
[QUOTE=Theodox;17597]For ‘cloud’ read ‘you must subscribe and pay us every month…’[/QUOTE]
I would agree that its more like photoshop, there will be a AutodeskID that everyone will have, thus a means to “slow down” Piracy.
[QUOTE=UncCheezy;17602]Sucks for the people who lost their job, but I have to wonder what the layoff means in terms of “tech-artist” work that woln’t be solved by the engineering team.[/QUOTE]
Yeah it does, I don’t wish it on anyone. Would be interesting to see what types of people they let go, maybe replaced with outsourcing teams or it could be more managerial positions. I know that Max had a major re-write by outsources.
It’s funny then mentioning the ‘cloud’ many just automatically assume that it means that they’ll be using their software remotely and not installed locally, lol.
But whilst we’re all getting you knickers in a twist over running software over the cloud, lol, I should point out that while I’m not refuting Carl’s claims, the article that followed in which Carl was originally quoted, Marc Petit is also quite rightly quoted as saying that the migration will be way more difficult for Autodesk’s M&E products, so personally I think it will be some time yet before we see Carl’s vision in our space.
Reminds me of two interesting things we already know:
Media and Entertainment are a small section of Autodesk. Your app of choice is a smaller slice of that, even. People that actually want to extend Autodesk software is a minuscule slice of Autodesk customers. We already know this but seeing some charts about Autodesk revenue numbers reminds me about how little anyone at Autodesk management cares what we think.
Media and Entertainment has been flat growth in general and less than it was a few years ago. So if you get at all depressed about the above, take comfort that we’re actually winning (or at least, they’re losing- that’s the same thing, right?).
[QUOTE=Rob Galanakis;17622]Autodesk “execution challenges” lead to flat second quarter, 500 layoffs – GfxSpeak
Reminds me of two interesting things we already know:
Media and Entertainment are a small section of Autodesk. Your app of choice is a smaller slice of that, even. People that actually want to extend Autodesk software is a minuscule slice of Autodesk customers. We already know this but seeing some charts about Autodesk revenue numbers reminds me about how little anyone at Autodesk management cares what we think.
Media and Entertainment has been flat growth in general and less than it was a few years ago. So if you get at all depressed about the above, take comfort that we’re actually winning (or at least, they’re losing- that’s the same thing, right?).[/QUOTE]
I guess that’s one way of putting it, another is something perhaps more simple. Q2 has always tended to be a slow quarter business wise in Europe/EMEA, for many companies not just Autodesk. Dunno why, perhaps its something to do with people on vacation.
Also M&E revenue is down as the data shows and although Carl didn’t offer an explanation, I think much if this was to do with the reorganization of sales and marketing around industry groups, as is indicated in the article.
[QUOTE=Bellsey;17635] Q2 has always tended to be a slow quarter business wise in Europe/EMEA, for many companies not just Autodesk. Dunno why, perhaps its [/QUOTE]
The revenue drop (for M&E) that toggled investor and AD panic switch occured actually relative to Q2 of financial yr 2012, so this is not just a seasonal effect… and it was a 10% drop