I haven’t used Autocad for some years now, and thought it would be a good idea to check what are the new features (or the old ones I overlooked).
To the autodesk website!
And so I went. After some time browsing the site, I had a weird feeling… Then it hit me: I can’t find what I’m looking for! The whole site looks like a cheesy infomercial!
Here, look at this Autocad really cheesy video. It has some music, shows the cover of the software’s box and zoom on empty marketing keywords. Oh, and there’s revision clouds!
Now back to the general aspect of the site. Every element of a bad publicity is there!
- Stupid green and environmental words
- There’s a whole section named “Sustainable design”, which contains “Sustainable Buildings & Infrastructure”, “Green Manufacturing & Product Design” and “Clean Tech”. As an engineer, I know most of the green jargon is only to sell overpriced product with a bad return on investment. The more keywords like this you have, the more I will doubt anything you say.
- Testimonies
- It would be OK if there some specifics, instead of vague “Oh, seeing in 3d really helped us in our project!”.
- Visible minority and women
- To be politically correct, you must show a visible minority. More importantly, you must show women. Always. Bonus point if you can show more than men.
- Colorful yet uninformative pictures
- (Which would result in the designer obtaining a degree in marketing with flying colors! Ah-ah! Am I funny or what?).
- Publicity within a publicity
- http://adskmedia.com/autocad-2012/ More than half of the new Autocad introduction is about a new Intel processor. Why is it even there? How much did Autodesk receive to talk about their buddies at Intel?
More rants: They even show how they have an auto-complete feature in the command line. Wow! It’s not like the 35 years old text editor I’m using to write this blog has it too. Oh snap!
I know it isn’t the developers’ fault. Marketing people always try to dumb down information, so that the common man can watch a 30 seconds commercial and understand “all of it”. Usually it’s not so bad, but when your making products for technical people, it really stinks.
How am I going to get the info I need? Youtube of course! There’s countless videos made by ordinary people (read: not filtered by a marketing team), showing what it’s really like working on this software. Careful though… Autodesk has been busy spamming the site with their own videos.
frozenlock 