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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

I think I can speak for everyone when I say "Autodesk? Really?"

No, you can't.

Is Hacker News crowded out by kids these days?

Autodesk of now is a collection of products and companies that vary from CAD software to online photo editing to 3D Studio Max to Maya and a variety of video filter and processing.

Think about that for a second. They make professional grade video finishing software. Socialcam is a casual video sharing community with a variety of video finishing processes available.

"Is Hacker News crowded out by kids these days?"

I don't think Autodesk's plans are self-evident enough for this sort of thing.

Also, autodesk is getting into photogrammetry -- using photo and video recordings from mobile devices as the lowest-friction way to do 3D scanning.

Autodesk is actually a pretty cool company in the enterprise space. They're historically a CAD behemoth, but have been releasing a bunch of apps and experimenting with different business models. Their software is typically rough around the edges, but they could have something cool up their sleeves with this.

In the CAD space, Autodesk is anything but "rough around the edges." The only time that was a reasonable argument was when they rewrote AutoCAD to be object oriented in the mid 1990's and issued it as Release 13. Otherwise, relative to their competitors they are able to deliver solid applications and reliable implementations of new features (maybe it's their Lisp background?)

It's a big deal but not totally unknown for Autodesk. A quick look on the Play store shows they also own "Pixlr-o-matic", an image editing app. They've been experimenting with consumer-facing stuff for a while.

Looks like Autodesk may be purchasing talent. Seibel is certainly someone who could fit into Autodesk's executive succession track; Bartram has some pretty solid technical chops in video, and Luccisano has a strong Rails background.

As Autodesk reengages in multi-platform development, all three developers potentially deepen the in-house knowledge-base - I try to keep in mind that Autodesk is a mature company and has always seemed to have had a bit more of an academic culture than a typical software company (e.g. the use of Lisp in their flagship product).

I consider Adobe and Autodesk to be premium digital content creation tool company. It sort of (well, not really, but...) makes sense in that direction.

they did ok with Pixlr acquisition

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