Autodesk is full subscription going forward and this position is non-negotiable.
Oh Autodesk, I beg to differ. Everything in this world is negotiable; except this time, where Autodesk is concerned, I'll be negotiating with my money.
And when I say "negotiating," what I actually mean to say is: Autodesk will not be getting any of my money anymore.
You see, I actually have a couple of graphic designers over at my company; and when Adobe decided to pull off this exact same stunt several years ago, I put out a stop order on all Adobe-related purchases. And as it turns out, our graphic designers are more than happy to stick to Adobe CS6; a product which is soon to be six years old.
Prior to this I actually upgraded our Adobe licenses every two revisions. And now? Take a guess.
Soon after, when it became clear that Autodesk was headed towards the same direction, I also terminated the maintenance agreements of all our full AutoCAD Mechanical licenses. This was in addition to the fact that Autodesk have clearly run out of ideas with respect to how to make their products better. When I asked a sales manager at Autodesk "what new features have Autodesk integrated into AutoCAD over the past five years to increase productivity" the only answer I got was "cloud."
Yep. Cloud. That's it. What a joke.
The fact is that AutoCAD, and many of Autodesk's other products, have been feature-complete for years. In my company there's a policy to save all CAD drawings as "AutoCAD 2004 Compatible" because of the sheer number of entities out there who are still more than happy to use AutoCAD versions from a decade or more ago.
It's obvious that Autodesk is afraid. They're afraid that their lack of innovation is going to hurt the pockets of their shareholders.
And it should. Except that instead of pursuing innovation to rectify their dwindling profits, they're resorting to scum tactics in order to stay afloat. And this is an absolutely sickening and disgusting behaviour which I have neither interest nor tolerance in subscribing to.
Cloud and subscription-based software models offer a grand total of "zero" benefits to consumers.
And the vast majority of the time, there's a long list of "negatives." Having to register and sign-in to use our software is bullshit. Having our email addresses harvested by hackers because the likes of Adobe know fuck-all about securing web applications is bullshit. Having to always be online and then have the software stop working because of software vendors who know fuck-all about scaling their authentication services up with demand is bullshit. Having to endure yet another day of zero productivity because of software vendors who know fuck-all about QA forcing yet another needless, untested and unstable update down our throats is bullshit. Having to endure running a company with higher operation costs (yearly payments) and less net worth (perpetual licenses are assets, subscriptions aren't) is absolute bullshit.
So, to end what is a longer-than-anticipated rant; sure, by all means, go subscription-only. Just don't expect me to be part of it.