Press Space to continue
Curated tech Twitter/X posts on AI, startups, and product development—signal without the doomscroll, updated on weekdays.
Press Space to continue
Press Space to continue
Autodesk saw how well it’s going for Adobe to bully its customers (who turn from the biggest promoters to the biggest and most vocal haters after what feels like abusive behaviour from the vendor) and decided to do the same. Penny wise, pound foolish as the saying goes
This is a wild approach, @autodesk. We’re a small business paying $380 per user, per month. We’ve been paying customers for over a decade, and we make a deliberate effort to honor the license agreements for every product we use. Your software already requires authentication and an assigned license. What, specifically, prompted this email? Earlier today, I had two conversations on two separate podcast episodes about your direction with Fusion and why cloud-based API access makes sense for agentic MEP workflows. I was making the case for Autodesk. I think the product direction is right based on recent posts from @andrew_anagnost. Our company has been deciding where to invest our development effort: integrate our custom cloud agent harness into Autodesk, build on an open-source platform, or adopt one of the emerging cloud alternatives. That decision will lock in years of internal development and software spending. This decision is also central to our plans to expand @PermitZIP nationwide. An email like this becomes part of that decision. So does the time we have to spend responding to it.For more than a decade, we’ve paid for anywhere from 5 to 30 licenses each year. Autodesk is our single largest SaaS expense. This is a heck of a way to make our next platform decision easier. Starting next week, we’ll begin transitioning away from Autodesk products. We have nothing to hide and will cooperate with the audit. We’ll also be directing our future spending toward companies that earn our confidence as partners. I hope your audit goes well.