Heartless Post

Earl Kubaskie provided a comment, on my 2nd Annual Distract Pat Dearborn from doing actual work post (also known as an April Fool’s post), that got me thinking. Does Autodesk want customers who would react negatively to a new and improved civil design product? Based on Autodesk’s reaction to the post it would seem that they covet those users.

2009 April Fool’s post caused quite a commotion within the users of the program. It was definitely a feature they wanted to stay in the program and the post was forwarded onto others and posted on a discussion group (DG), providing a bump in traffic to the post (the DG thread was removed by Autodesk, so you won’t be able to find it). That year a total of 15 Autodesk visitors visited the site to read the post. This year the post spread within Autodesk for a total of 65 visits from coast to coast, providing the majority of the traffic bump to the site this year. Without the Autodesk bump I’d have to say the traffic to the blog would have been slightly above average instead of the most traffic ever for a Civil 3D related post. Thanks Autodesk for providing the motivation to do another April Fool’s post next year! I’m sure I would have stopped the April Fool’s tomfoolery without a bump in traffic.

Autodesk’s reaction appeared to be one of concern of the post causing fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). I even heard they were/are contemplating legal action against me (or it could have been their attempt at an April Fool’s joke on me).

Based on the reaction to this year’s post I’d have to say unscientifically the readers of this blog are forward looking and want to use the best technology available and didn’t cause much FUD. Earl called my post heartless because he would really want the features contained in the post in a Civil Design product. I’d have to agree with him. All of the new features in the fictitious product I’d want incorporated within Civil 3D. But what was Autodesk worried about? The people who have moved to Civil 3D want, as a whole, the best technology available. While the people who don’t are still using Land Desktop, or really late adopters of Civil 3D, and tend to be stuck in their ways. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of the late adopters stay on the first version of Civil 3D they learned on. Assuming its Civil 3D 2010 they probably have a fairly stable program that will do the work required for a long time. Personally I think Autodesk shouldn’t worry about the people stuck in their ways, I’d wish they’d worry more about providing a quality feature laden product, with most of my suggestions included of course.