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Goodby Autodesk date is set: 05/07/2021

So, the first thing people will need to know at new employee orientation is that everyone at the company is now named Bob Smith, and here are the name change papers?
 
This seems totally counterintuitive to me, wouldn't most companies consider employees "fungible" and prefer to hand out access on a license basis, not a "this specific person" basis? People come and go, why have to track them specifically?

Only benefit I see is the named employees having access to a license wherever they go during travel or home use, but surely that's still easy with a serial number based license?

[Not a management or IT guy, so if I'm totally missing something please enlighten me]
 
This seems totally counterintuitive to me, wouldn't most companies consider employees "fungible" and prefer to hand out access on a license basis, not a "this specific person" basis? People come and go, why have to track them specifically?

Only benefit I see is the named employees having access to a license wherever they go during travel or home use, but surely that's still easy with a serial number based license?

[Not a management or IT guy, so if I'm totally missing something please enlighten me]

I think the play here is not only forcing companies into more subs but also collecting data. I can't see how this works out well for Autodesk though. Their past performance was shady at best, with this now, who in there right mind stays with this company? Fuison being free is almost over, I guess a few stragglers who've invested too much time into that software may stick around but any other company surely would drop them and pick up a 'normal' offering.

edit....just to add to this a bit. If you've ever read there investment statements they are heavily worded on increasing the subscription rate...at all costs. If destroying a product would increase their overal subs, you know it will happen. Way back in the day I used to recommend using F360, I then backtracked to only new shops should use it then transition asap, I'm now at the position of no one should use any Autodesk product ever!
 
I had a compiler with a license system like that. It was a PITA to keep legal, the company hated it as users changed and we had to transfer "ownership". I can't imagine why anybody would do it that way.
 
Only benefit I see is the named employees having access to a license wherever they go during travel or home use, but surely that's still easy with a serial number based license?

Well, they have that ability right now with the current licensing method.

Make no mistake, there is absolutely NOTHING that Autodesk has done in the last 5 years with respect to their licensing which has any benefit to the customer!
NOTHING!
NOT ONE THING!

And yet, each and every change begins with explaining why it is a positive step in order to improve the customer's experience!
In this case, they are touting easier contract tracking by the account managers.....

Except even the moderators of the "Subscription Changes" forum have no idea how some of it will be handled.
 
Out of curiosity I just checked the link SD posted, and uhh, yeah, it's a clear cash grab by ultimately forcing users to buy more seats if they'd been using a floating license to cover more than two people. And it will certainly create more costly management issues than it will "save".

So I have to agree, No AD, no how. Will be interesting to see if there's a migration away, or if current users just bend over.
 
I have in the last couple of months given in (driven by the purchase of a new machine where I really need post support rather than losing time doing it myself, and finally admitting to myself that I have neither the time nor the desire to learn a new cam system) and signed up for a fresh seat of FeatureCam for the next three years. After that, we will see I suppose.

As the person responsible for purchasing this at our company I can see the way this works.

You have what is effectively an admin control panel where you can assign your products to specific users (each user has their own autodesk account). An employee leaves, you log in and reassign to a new user. You can split your workforce up into teams and monitor their usage to make sure you aren't paying for seats that aren't being used etc. etc.

For those of us with one or a handful of seats/products this is pretty much sugar coating on a bitter pill. I guess we're able to use our software at home without carrying a dongle around, and upgrade our workstations without dicking around with licenses.

For bigger companies this is fairly objectively a good thing, much easier asset management, much reduced IT overhead, software as an operating cost and so on and so forth. So as much as we would all like to see AD eat shit, I doubt there will be any large scale exodus, at least not from their big money customers.
 
Gregor, I am apparently missing something.

Please, explain!

Not much to add over what I already said; consider a company that has dozens or a couple of hundred seats of different pieces of AD software, then consider the old method with license servers and locked nodes and the IT overhead that went along with that to keep it all working and to transfer licenses as workstations turn over and keep everything updated and so on.

Now they just have to have each employee register an AD account when they start, and department heads can assign users to seats as they see fit. No IT overhead, no asset tracking, no downtime, assigned user can use the software on their own devices...

Note that I'm not claiming this doesn't suck for us, simply that this is an easy sell for AD to their big customers. We already knew they don't give a fuck about the one/two/three seat customers.
 
I'm amazed at the number of companies that now use generic photos of "people looking at screens" for their advertising. I'm guessing Getty Images has a billion of 'em.

How many machine shops have 4 people sitting at a table in what looks to be a loft like in Manhattan laughing and sipping their expresso like the picture dictates.
But I get it, they are trying to appeal to the young hipsters all the while remaining diverse in their depiction of users.
 








 
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