LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), December 2, 2008 - Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, addressed the press in a Q&A session at Autodesk University. Though Autodesk now seems to be favoring separate "press events" for journalists, several seemed to make it to AU anyway and Carl was not afraid to face a room full of them by himself, rather than being flanked by senior management as is the norm in the industry.
Overall, Carl put came across as comfortable, casual yet candid. By the end of the session, he had proved himself as someone who is where he wants to be: a visionary in a position to have his vision turned into product.
Highlights of the session, paraphrased:
- The economy
"It's going to get worse. It will be 12-18 months before there is a turnaround."
"A friend who is charge of Singapore's money and who has access to the best economic advice explained the problem this way 'banks lent money to people who could not afford to pay them back' " - Which segment is most affected?
"It's not so much a segment but has more to do with geography. AEC, manufacturing, entertainment are all equally affected, all being affected by credit crunch." - How is the economy going to affect Autodesk internally?
"Some of the things we would rush to market we can take our time with." - What about GPUs?
"I'm skeptical of their general acceptability...despite our sponsors." [NVIDIA is a big sponsor of AU]
"Still , why should a $5000 application look worse than a $50 game." - Why the revival of AutoSketch?
"People needed a low end product" - Then why was it ever discontinued?
"We lost interest. Corporate AD [attention deficit, a new meaning of CAD is coined] - Is there going to be a brand new AutoCAD?
"You're going to see some brand new products, new bundles of products. There's going to be interoperability of data between our products." - Interoperability
"Data needs to be exchanged freely. We'll gladly share our file libraries with anyone, no matter their size, as we did with Bentley. We said 'You give us the rights to your files, we'll give you rights to our files.'
"We should compete on the basis of the usefulness of our applications [not on proprietary formats]." - Is Autodesk going to get into the hardware of cloud computing
"I prefer to leave it to others." - Acquisitions
On Revit, "The ratio [of acquisition cost/customers] was infinity." - Interoperability within Autodesk applications:
"Some of the things in this building can be best made in Inventor whereas Revit is best for the building itself." [suggesting how all Autodesk applications need to be able to share data] - Sustainable design:"We need to more green in our operations, we are doing more green education (sponsoring programs on PBS), we are making it easier to be green when using our products (making autos more aerodynamic or buildings more energy conserving.) [It was the first mention of sustainability, the main topic of last year's press conference]
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