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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

Good news for the Instructables team (I hope), but an odd choice for Autodesk - maybe they're trying to get a little hip and edgy?

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CAD today is like video editing 10 years ago: lots of legacy high-end pro level tools, faced with increasing consumer-friendly competition.

I used to cut on Avid, for instance. They made a push into consumer tools too-little, too-late.

I'm sure Autocad wants to put together an end-to-end toolchain for making things. Design, instruct, print, assemble. The HP of things.

There has always been consumer level competition for Autodesk products. The reasons they have not been successful are:

1. When you are designing things like bridges, little software bugs have big consequences and among the things Autodesk does well is software testing.

2. Autodesk started out with really stinking good software engineers and they have always kept up that tradition. It's no accident that they chose LISP as their first programming interface - the founders knew how to code and how to architect a piece of software.

3. They made an incredibly bold move almost twenty years ago when they rewrote the entire AutoCAD code base to be object oriented - and they took the heat then never looked back. It's what has allowed them to extend their flagship product to stay cutting edge.

I'll point out that CAD is significantly more mature than video editing was 10 years ago - actually it was more mature ten years ago than video editing is today. It's a market with no real consumer space - people will make and edit many videos, they will only draw up their dream house once or maybe twice - and if they are serious about it they will be using a bootleg version of AutoCad any way.

The difference now is that we are entering a period where it's not just houses. 3d printing is suddenly a real thing. That's the play here.

Most people who are interested in making objects as a hobby have machine tools so that they can be hands on - the idea of sitting in front of the computer rather than a table saw just isn't attractive. It's analogous to artists not running out to purchase HP Designjets and other large format printers - it's the craft which brings most people joy. Abstracting the process onto the computer only attracts a certain segment of the population as a hobby - work of course is another matter.

It may be that Autodesk wants to be part of the personalized design/customization/fabrication movement. Earlier this year they released PhotoFly[1], a consumer-focused application that creates very impressive 3D models from photographs. They also work closely with Shapeways, which prints out 3D models at low prices.

1. http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

AutoDesk has been trying to diversify their products beyond AutoCAD for hardware users. They have been acquiring a lot of game design tools. AutoDesk owns the two most popular 3D modeling tools: Maya and 3ds Max.

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