Autodesk is one of the granddaddies of the software industry. It has been around 30 years and
Those CAD tools have evolved and so has Autodesk. Over 30 years, the company has aggregated 12 million professional customers. Last year company revenues topped $2.2 billion. Today, it is generally recognized as the leader in 3D tools for design, engineering and entertainment professionals.
I have been interested in Autodesk primarily for research for a chapter in a book I am writing with Robert Scoble called Age of Context. The chapter called, The Contextual City, could not be written without discussing the design tools created by Autodesk.
I’ve taken two tours through the company’s remarkable San Francisco Autodesk Gallery, which is open to the public every Wednesday. There, I learned how the company’s tools are being used for the design and modeling of the new Bay Bridge, the world’s second tallest and most environmentally advanced building, the coolest, fastest cars from everybody, and the visual special effects that make movie audiences gasp. The last 17 Academy Award winners for the best visual effects all used Autodesk software. The memorable visual moments in movies like Toy Story and Avatar were created with Autodesk tools.
During my two private tours, Brian Mathews, Group CTO, Information Modeling and Platform
I was surprised to learn that in the past two years Autodesk has launched about 20 apps for iOS, of which 12 are designed for consumers. So far, over 100 million users have downloaded or accessed the company’s consumer apps and online properties. This number is growing at the rate of about 15 million per month.
Not only that, social media plays a key role in this success. Mathews conceded readily that the company was not making a great deal of revenue from mobile apps that could be downloaded for free or inexpensively. He made it clear the company’s interest was based not on revenue but on longterm strategy.
“Consumers make Autodesk a smarter company,” Mary Hope McQuiston, director of marketing and partnerships for the Consumer Products Group told me.
According to McQuiston, their consumer products have reversed the traditional product vetting strategy. Formerly, Autodesk used IT professionals for feedback on technologies. As a group IT
But now, Autodesk releases its new products first to consumers, thus turning the product vetting process upside down. Consumers pay less but they expect more. They can be far from polite or patient, and will only tolerate very short learning times—and few bugs—in new, untried products.
While IT professionals might be delighted with a 3D tool that lets them photograph a room for a 3D model in a single day, a consumer wants to shoot it in a few minutes and move on. Field test venues have changed as well. Instead of manufacturing facilities, the new venue is often the living room or home office.
And while the IT Professional chatted with an Autodesk representative about refinements to a product, consumers talk with each other on public social networks like Facebook. More often than not they will use any one of about 20 online communities hosted by Autodesk where, for the most part, the company steps back and listens while users share, support, advise and complain to each other with great candor.
“We just couldn’t scale to feedback from millions of customers if it wasn’t for social media,” McQuiston told me.
Autodesk was actually one of the first enterprises to develop online customer communities back in 2001. There are now thousands of these enterprise communities, many modeled after what Autodesk initiated. The company recently rehired Bill Johnston, who spearheaded the original Autodesk team, then left to join Dell. He has the newly created title of Director, Strategic Content & Community.
Among the most popular and interesting of these communities is instructables.com, which is sort of an online maker’s fair. People discuss and share information about building almost anything. The site is highly consumerized with contests and other gamification techniques. It is an Autodesk property and Autodesk tools are often being discussed, but the company plays its ownership role very unobtrusively so users will talk candidly with each other while company people listen.
According to Mathews, Instructables is “a place you go to get inspired.” That inspiration often leads to the download of Autodesk consumer products. And those tools directly result in Autodesk developing improved tools for professionals in its three professional areas: Home; Manufacturing; and Media & Entertainment.
Like so many great tech stories, the consumer group started without any grand scheme. According to Samir Hanna, Vice President, Consumer Products, it was started serendipitously. In September 2009, the company introduced SketchbookPro, its first mobile app, as an experiment. They hoped to see 100,000 downloads in a year. They got one million in 50 days.
A year later, they formed the Autodesk Consumer Products group and in two years the company has aggregated roughly ten times the number of consumer customers as professionals, although the professionals provide Autodesk with orders of magnitude more revenue.
These end users do more than just refine products: they are a living global idea lab. They are taking Autodesk into areas the company did not, and may never have, perceived as important or profitable. A few examples:
Bilal Ghalib, an American born to Iraqi parents who told him stories of their native land and who was aware of extended family who still live there. He grew up in Michigan and became active in American Hacker spaces, the maker community and open hardware. After the war, he visited Iraq, getting involved in similar technology activities in the Middle East.
Ghalib also visited an uncle whose leg had been amputated during the war because of diabetes. The operation had been performed by someone who had less than professional training. The stump had been severed from the limb in a way that made attaching a prosthetic impossible.
Ghalib turned to his hacker community for help. He used Autodesk 123D Catch to convert
Other user stories range from the useful to the surprising:
- In measurement, a contractor measures the volume of gravel online rather than with a measuring stick. Crime scene investigators use an inexpensive, off-the-shelf camera with Autodesk software to gather evidence faster and at lower cost. The Scripps Research Institute can measure the volume of coral reefs underwater for the first time without disturbing the reef.
- Louise Leakey, the fabled Kenyan paleontologist built a precise 3D model of a fossilized skull. Public educators can use 3D printers or laser cutters to make inexpensive copies out of plastic or cardboard at extremely low cost.
- Hunz, an Australian pop musician, created scores of 3D models of himself, using them as unique, dramatic props in a video production for his “I Get Chills” tune.
While no one at Autodesk mentioned it, I see another strategic component to what Autodesk is doing. There is a whole generation growing up and coming into the work place. Tens of thousands of them will be familiar with the amazing capabilities of Autodesk maker tools. In their lifetimes they will make things that you, Autodesk or I never dreamed of. Even if we had, there would have been no tools to empower us.
Now these tools exist and their users are likely to change the world in ways that can, and will, make it a better place.
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