Autodesk Needs to Lead in Technology, Too

If you look at financial metrics, Autodesk is a clear market leader. It is closing in on $2 billion annual sales. But what of technological leadership?

At a recent press event, Autodesk was asked about haptics - -a technology that would allow the ability to "feel" a design, arguably a technology on the frontier of CAD research. The question seemed to reflect an genuine expectation, asked by a member of the press who sees a lot of new technology of an Autodesk VP, who might be expected to know of it. We'd all seen a lot of gee-whiz graphics by that point, including "real-time" ray tracing. Call me jaded, but lately, the changes in visualization seemed to be incremental, each version eking out a tiny bit more realism than we had before. But a real engineer will pick up a product, feel it, truly interact with it. Haptics might be a way to get that interaction.

Autodesk knew nothing of haptics. Ditto, virtual reality. The press member stopped short of asking about nanotechnology, another ground breaker.

A minor point or an indication of a larger problem? If a market leader cannot explore leading edge technologies, who will? Autodesk has long been flush with cash, why not use it to advance the state of the art by applying it to R&D?

Autodesk may argue that its acquisition of small technology-intensive companies is sufficient to keep it on the leading edge. But I doubt if many small companies can invest in pure research, the research-for-research's-sake from which there are many flops but also huge discoveries. Some companies are famous for their research, such as IBM, GE or 3M, from which we got Big Blue (the chess-playing super computer), Lexan, or yellow sticky notes. That kind of trial and error takes a lot of money.

It seems like universities are still doing pure research. I had attended the recent CAD Conference last June, in which much pure research was given a spotlight. For example, a couple of presentation were given on shape-based search engines. But none of the major CAD companies were in attendance. What a lost opportunity, it seemed, as all that CAD research being done for free, so to speak. If I was a CAD vendor VP, I'd make sure to monitor such proceedings. Just cherry picking the best and brightest would be worth the price of admission but latching onto an idea that has been hatched and nurtured in a CAD lab that can make lives easier for all your users would be a jackpot.

Comments

[jaivardhan]

Hi sir pls take Action for Pirated Autocad 2007 use 6 to 7 PC, Architect Rajinder

Rajindera Associates
Studio-201, sahota complex,garha road, near bus stand ,
Jalandhar City, Punjab India

[dave]

autodesk needs to fix the technology that it already offers before diving into anything new. Their #1 priority should be to fix the existing bugs and implement a paradigm that makes structured (skeletal) modeling easy & intuitive rather than making the opposite (in-context 'birds-nest' modeling) the easy intuitive option.

[Steve]

How do you know that none of the major CAD companies have undercover scouts attending these conferences?