What to Expect From Autodesk This Year

During yesterday's delayed conference call with financial analysts, Jay Vleeschhouwer of Ticonderoga Securities asked:

...I'd like to ask about the commitment you have, or your expectations of the various new and incremental initiatives you've spoken of in this past year, for instance, expanding the line of preconfigured suites, design-on-demand, simulation, Autodesk products on the Mac, so on and so forth.

Autodesk ceo Carl Bass replied:

You'll see suites [bundles of applications], you'll see on-demand applications [such as yesterday's Bluestreak], you'll see new applications on the Mac [I predict AutoCAD], all that will happen this year.

Comments

[Brian Benton]

This seems to be expected as they have begun leaning in this direction for over a year now. I also expect to see Autodesk begin development for other OS, like Linux and Chrome within the next few years.

[Tony Tanzillo]

I'd be willing to give odds that any AutoCAD for the Mac will have no LISP.

[Diego de Miguel]

AutoCAD on the Mac would be nice... but, of course, I wouldn't expect full feature parity. I'm betting on something in between AutoCAD LT and "full" AutoCAD. But then, I'm famous for being wrong in my forecasts.

Anyway, it would be a great validation on the Mac as a viable CAD alternative, given AutoCAD's mindshare as the standard CAD platform.