Wired's unfortunate juxtaposition of advertising and editorial

Wired this morning is running a story on Autodesk. Above it, an ad reads, "Who is the liar?" in the version showing in my Web browser.

The story is about Autodesk's efforts to get into the maker niche, and has nothing to do with pointing out liars.

The article does not quote anyone from Autodesk says that "anyone" can  make anything; this is something the headline writer made up. If it were true, however, then Mr Anybody is bound to run afoul of copyright law and patents as he makes his anythings.

Still, the article does provide us with insights that we don't normally get to hear from Autodesk marketing:

- 123D series of software fell flat, because it was too dumbed down for professionals and too hard for amatures.

- ForceField is not doing well, even though it is free.  Well, ForceField is just to geeky, and its vector load calculations can probably be done on a TI calculator these days.

-  Maker communities are suspicious of the likes of Autodesk (and Siemens PLM, and Dassault by extension, I would guess) getting involved. "Autodesk can’t own a community. How can you motivate people from the top down? You can't."

The article starts off with a pretty interesting subplot about Autodesk ceo Carl Bass travelling to a secretive indoor rare tree grow operation in Oregon -- and the seller refusing to sell to Mr Bass... initially.

Source: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/09/ff-autodesk-and-the-big-make/all/

 

Comments

[Jon Banquer]

Can someone tell me how Autodesk can help "Anyone, anywhere make anything" when Autodesk doesn't have any software of their own to drive a CNC machine tool(CAM)?

Jon Banquer
CADCAM Technology Leaders group on LinkedIn

[Don]

Wrong headlines, wrong images, wrong everything.

[R. Paul Waddington]

Read the article and the phrase "a heap of twaddle" comes to mind!