Parkinson’s Law, as applied to software development, states that the number of features will expand to fill the available RAM. Additional menu items accrete to each release like bath salts at Christmas – and are just as likely to remain unappreciated by their intended users. Autodesk Inc’s chairman, president and chief executive Carol Bartz calls this the BWOS (Big Wodge Of Software) strategy and intends to stamp it out. The Sausilito, California-based company’s flagship product, AutoCAD has been a BWOS victim in the past she admits – the trend was exacerbated by the need for the computer-aided design software to appeal to everyone from architects to mechanical engineers to people building graphical information systems. If I had joined five years ago I would have done things differently says Ms Bartz, who joined the company, from Sun Microsystems Inc last April, but I can’t wave a magic wand. Ms Bartz manages to say this while simultaneously implying that AutoCad is the best thing since the pencil – it is just that in a perfect world the software would be more modular and less monolithic. She is tackling the problem in two, linked ways: the first is to rely on the company’s loyal band of value-added resellers and developers who customise AutoCAD for its various vertical markets. The strong implication is that after the release 13 due for launch sometime next year – AutoCAD’s core facilities will remain quite stable and it will be up to the business partners to add industry-specific bells and whistles. The second prong of the strategy is designed to aid this process – large chunks of Release 13 will have been completely re-written as object oriented C++ code. This allows much cleaner ways for partners to do add-ons in the form of applets says Ms Bartz. Taken to its logical conclusion, Ms Bartz speculates that one day Autodesk may even end up selling bespoke versions where a customer selects the exact capabilities required.
I Married an Axe Murderer
Currently Autocad and its allied products account for around 85% to 89% of the company’s revenue, split more or less evenly between MS-DOS and Windows; Unix; and Macintosh versions. Over the coming years the company predicts that this share will drop to around 60% as its virtual reality and multimedia offerings such as its 3D Studio and Cyberspace and Virtual Reality Toolkit products. Ms Bartz sums up the strategy in this area as volume, volume, volume, getting the developers kits out there in the hope that if I blow it into the market, then hopefully there will be someone out there in their garage building a killer application. There are no cast iron guarantees that the area will take off, she acknowledges – but if anyone does come up with the killer application, Ms Bartz wants to make sure that her technology is embedded in there. To date Autodesk’s multimedia presence has been fairly low-key, the company says that 3D Studio is picking up a healthy following in the smaller video production houses that are unwilling to spend cash on a high-end, dedicated, video production system. Around one third of the company’s multimedia business is coming from these videographics customers, and while the company seems to be one of the few without a claim on Jurassic Park, it did have a role in the film I Married an Axe Murderer recently, where it was responsible for the path taken by a flung hatchet. Last week the company launched 3D Studio release 3 which still seems to be developing in BWOS mode since it is described as offering more than 200 new features, including network rendering, and a variety list of lighting, modelling and animation enhancements for a list price of $3,000 in the US. The new offering is one of a whole raft of products that Ms Bartz says will appear over the next couple of quarter. Many of these will likely be data management products rather than graphics packages per se. Apart from the traditional computer-aided design and new multimedia applications, the firm has been working on a set of technologies internally named Anaheim which provide workflow a
nd workgroup facilities. The first embodiment of this technology is to be launched in the US this month in the form of AutoCAD Data Extension for $600. Though continuing to diversify, Ms Bartz says that she intends for the company to keep focused and avoid the gee, lets go and find some products acquisitiveness that characterised early stages of the firm’s development.
