After Revit was purchased by Autodesk in 2002, I spent a grand total of a few months there. I’ve not written much publicly about my experiences there because they have a reputation for long institutional memories. I am sure that this post isn’t going to make them love me any more than they already don’t.
Before Autodesk bought Revit, I always wondered about the apparent favorable bias among the CAD press towards them. In my time in the industry, they were pushing their boots into customers’ and partners’ heads (something I suspect they’re still pretty good at) but portions of the CAD press always seemed to give them a bye. Truth be told, there were some CAD journalists who hated them unreasonably, but by and large, they got a pass.
Still, the “professional” CAD press was careful to hide it. Very careful. But it was there. In an incident that blew up on Autodesk, a letter that Revit sent to ADT consultants ended up in the hands of a journalist who told me Autodesk’s PR department had faxed it to him. They were simply reprinting whatever they were sent by Autodesk.
But now, and for the first time, we got ’em. Dead to rights. Check out this quote from Deelip Mendez, one of the arrivistes in the CAD press, a blogger who would have little traffic if not for the fact that Ralph and Roopinder have been promoting his blog:
But I know that Autodesk Marketing is the best there is and when they say something, I listen and wonder.
This comes in a long, unfocused post in which Deelip tries hard to make something out of nothing between Dassault and SolidWorks. But there it is: the slavish, unthinking bias that Autodesk is…wait for it…a thought leader. And that that leadership comes from…squeeze your eyes shut in case you are blinded by the revelation…the marketing department.
In being so overt, Deelip has blown everyone’s cover, the thin veneer of independence that has been carefully nurtured for a long time. The CAD world is a small place…there’re only so many vendors to bill. Between dissing startups as irrelevant (they said that about both Revit and Seemage) and kowtowing to ADSK’s marketing department, it must get monotonous drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid all the time.
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