Personal CAD

Looks like Greg Milliken, CEO of Alibre, has come up with a novel way of marketing his software. He calls it Personal CAD and is suggesting that the market for a personal CAD system is "immense". According to him, we live in times of oursourcing and off-shoring when an employee can be fired at a moment's notice, irrespective of the sweat and toil that he has put into the company. And so he suggests that designers should learn a personal CAD system, like his Alibre Design, in order to make themselves more employable in the unfortunate event that they are fired.

Sounds a little like FUD (Fear Uncertainity Doubt), something Greg has accused SolidWorks of doing to Alibre. So is Greg now using FUD to his advantage or is there is real need for a personal CAD system?

It is quite evident from his post that he is targeting 2D users, especially AutoCAD users - something which every other CAD vendor is doing. It is also quite evident that whichever vendor manages to get away with a sizable chunk of AutoCAD users is going to make a lot of money.

Over the past few years, I have seen many marketing campaigns specifically aimed at AutoCAD users. This is by far one of the most ingenious ones I have come across. It may sound like FUD, or maybe it even is FUD. Either way, it does make a lot of sense. Designers who stick to AutoCAD are going to go where AutoCAD goes. And right now I am not quite sure where AutoCAD is headed.

AutoCAD is and most probably will always will be a 2D CAD system. And Greg is asking AutoCAD users whether they want to risk being stuck in the 2D world. A question worth answering.

Unfair EULA's

A recent study conducted by Britain's National Consumer Council has questioned the End User License Agreements (EULA's) of 17 software companies, including Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, McAfee, Corel and Symantec.

14 out of the 25 products surveyed did not mention on their packaging that installation requires the user to accept a license agreement. I find this odd because one of the first things any installer shows the user is the EULA, and unless he clicks the "Accept" button, the installation does not continue. So obviously the product cannot be installed unless the EULA has been accepted. But I guess they were pissed with the fact that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 had a seal on the CD case with instructions to read an enclosed paper copy of the licence agreement before installing software. Actually, I see no problem with that either. Of course, if Kaspersky declines to give a full refund to a customer who does not agree to the EULA after openning the CD case, then they need to be given a lesson in consumer rights. That's precisely why I believe that the EULA should be freely available online for a prospective customer study and analyse before he decides to make a purchase. At SYCODE, we have a link to our EULA right next to the product download link.

The report goes on the suggest that even if the EULA was available prior to purchase, the legal jargon in it makes it hard for consumers to understand their rights and responsibilities. I think that is taking it too far. What do you expect? A beautiful piece of prose written for a 10 year old? Law, by definition, is complicated. If it were that simple, we would not need lawyers, now would we? It gets even more complicated when you are licensing something as opposed to buying it.

The report also suggests that the terms in the EULA are designed to protect the interests of the software companies to the detriment of end users. It cites Symantec's EULA wherein Symantec gives itself the power to suspend it's Online Backup service for a user's failure or suspected failure to comply with their EULA. To take things further, Symanted is not obliged to maintain any of the user's backups or transfer/migrate the same to any other backup service. I tend to agree. This seems heavily tilted towards Symantec, especially the term "suspected failure".

The full report can be downloaded here (PDF: 675 KB)

Contrary to popular belief, there are people who do take the time to read the EULA before placing their order. From my experience, very often these people are the ones who are interested in taking their work on the road and want to have the software working on their desktop in office and their laptop as well. Our EULA allows that, but still prospective customers contact us to seek clarification on that particular provision and we make it a point to answer their queries to their satisfaction.

A common argument is that the end users cannot individually negotiate the terms of the EULA and are forced to accept it. For fun, let us imagine that Carl Bass takes leave of his senses and decides that he wants to negotiate his EULA with all nine million Autodesk customers. I will leave you to calculate the legal bill that such negotiations will result in. And while you are at it, take a wild guess as to who will eventually be paying for that bill.

Bush Dollars

Bush Dollars - that is what the USD is now being called. I first came across the term when someone pointed me to an article at Bloomberg reporting that "Bush Dollars" are now not accepted at the Taj Mahal in India.

I am not quite sure who coined the phrase "Bush Dollar". A Google search pointed me to a guy called Dave Lindorff, a Bush basher. I found that his article, "The Bush Dollar " has been quoted in quite a few places and is definately worth a read.

Journalists and Bloggers

Roopinder Tara had begun discussing how the line distinguishing journalists from bloggers is becoming increasingly blurred. This is surely going to get interesting since he happens to fall in both categories. He intends to write a series of articles on this topic wherein he hopes to find answers to some very interesting questions. As usual, I happen to have some opinions of my own.

Who knows more about the software, blogger or journalist?
There is a reason why my wife knows to cook better food than me and I know to make better software than her. Because she spends a lot of time in the kitchen and I spend a lot of time cranking out code at my computer. Common sense dictates that anyone who spends more time doing something will inherently be better than someone who does it once in a while. Moreover, a normal human being can either be a jack of all traits or a master of one. I find that bloggers usually are masters and journalists usually are jacks. And this works well for both, because bloggers usually write about the software they use to do real work and journalists end up writing about everything.

Who knows more about the industry?
Applying the same logic used above, I would say that the journalists know more about the industry simply because they are out there listenning for something to write about. But with CAD vendors giving equal importance to bloggers, and bloggers engaging the vendors and their customers at different levels, things are beginning to change.

Should bloggers be considered press?
Sure. If the output from both sides is more or less the same, why not? CAD vendors simply need people to make a noise about their offerrings. It really doesn't matter who does that job. And with the internet, they would prefer that the noise happens online. I don't think people are in the mood of waiting for next months issue of a magazine to read a review of a new version of a product. Thanks to wireless internet, bloggers blog in the middle of speeches and presentations and even upload photographs. Moreover, even journalists are also doing it now. I would turn the question on it head and ask whether journalists of today should be treated as bloggers. Funny thing is many journalists already are bloggers.

Does the press look down on bloggers?
Do bloggers look down on the press?
I am not sure whether they look down on each other, but I get the feeling that journalists feel threatened by the growing influence of bloggers. And that can lead to all kinds of emotions on both sides.

Who does better in quality? Quantity? Timeliness? Insight?
It really depends on the topic being written about. For technical stuff, I would prefer reading a blog that specializes in that software. For business issues and industry analysis, journalists seem to offer a better perspective. I am not quite sure what Roopinder meant by timeliness. It's really of no use if a journalist is first to report on something but his magazine is going to take a month to get printed and shipped. And speaking of quantity, for serious bloggers (the kind of people who would like to be treated as press), it would help to tone down the number of off topic posts. Have a separate personal blog if you must share your experiences. I have mine at deelipmenezes.com. The occassional off topic post can help to break the monotony. But too many of them simply adds to the nuisance value of the blog. This is precisely where journalists are looked upon a serious people doing serious stuff - because they are.

What is the role of blogger and journalist in the future?
I would have liked to say that bloggers and journalists will compliment each other in the future, but unfortunately I don't think things will go that way. As the print media gives into other forms of broadcasting, it seems like bloggers are going to get a larger share of the attention from companies. Autodesk has put the RSS feed of Shaan Hurley's blog right inside AutoCAD itself. That's a good indication of where things are heading.

Some food for thought. Readers hardly pay for magazines anymore. Magazines are paid for by the companies that put ads on them, and that inherently puts some obvious and understandable restrictions on what journalists write about them and their products. On the other hand, bloggers have the freedom to be loose cannons. To add a twist, blogs can have Google ads on them which can bring in some revenue. I know that the amount is nowhere close to what can be earned through print ads, but that is not my point. Suppose I have Google Ads on my blog (and judging by the traffic I think I should) and I write a blistering article on SolidWorks. I call them all sorts of names, crucify their software, their business model and curse the air that they breathe. Now I have no control over which ads get placed on my blog. Some fancy Google algorithm decides that. So it may very well be that SolidWorks itself ends up advertising on that particular article since the word "SolidWorks" will have been used many times in it.

Sure SolidWorks will not pay Google anything unless a user clicks on their ad. But the fact that a company's ad can be associated with something defaming it is something you are surely not going to find in the print media. The internet is a crazy place and thats probably what makes it so powerful.

Show Me The Money... in Euros

Four months ago, I ditched the US dollar for the Euro. Overnight I changed the currency of all the products at SYCODE from USD to EUR. Just like that! I didn't change the numbers. What was 195 USD became 195 EUR, basically an overnight price increase of 44%. Yes, I know it sounds like a crazy thing to do. But I was fed up with the consistent weakening of the US dollar against the Indian Rupee. So fed up that making the switch didn't sound crazy enough to stop me from doing it at that time.

Now OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) seems to be fed up as well. They are contemplating pricing their oil in Euros instead of US dollars. Several OPEC members are selling oil in dollars but buying commodities in non-dollar currencies. And with the US dollar dropping 44% against the Euro since 2000, it's quite easy to understand why they are so pissed off.

Iran is already pricing most of its oil in Euros and Venezuela appears to be going down that road as well. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has warned that if OPEC abandons the dollar that would sink it even further.

To make matters worse, analysts are of the opinion that the US Fed's actions of cutting interest rates is going to help only in the short term. This was done mainly to stop stock prices of US financial institutions from collapsing. Sounds like a good thing to do. But in the long term, this may lead to the US dollar plunging even further.

According to one analyst, "When you lower interest rates in your country, you are effectively devaluing your currency. The US bond market is currently pricing another 100 basis point drop in interest rates. This will come within the next six weeks. When the Fed announces the same, the US dollar will drop in value and gold, priced in US dollars, will go up. This will lead to a vicious circle. Quite simply, no one can build a strong economy on a weak currency. If this were possible, Tanzania would have one of the strongest economies in the world."

Is this the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the dominant currency?

CAD Developers Allegedly Harvesting Data Using Trojans

Paul Waddington claims to have captured information that was generated using trojan software embedded in two CAD developers products. He tells me that he has submitted this information to the Australian Law Reform Commission. He is reluctant to disclose this information to the public because the captured information identifies his customers.

Paul tells me that he is not looking for a law suit here, but I think he is going to get one anyways. He only wishes that there should be a public debate on the issues he has raised on his blog. For his sake, I hope it ends at that - a public debate.

Autodesk Canadian License

I noticed this weird clause in the Autodesk EULA

CANADIAN LICENSE.
If You use this Software in Canada, You agree to the following: The parties hereto confirm that it is their wish that this Agreement, as well as other documents relating hereto, including Notices, have been and shall be written in the English language only. Les parties ci-dessus confirment leur désir que cet accord ainsi que tous les documents, y compris tous avis qui s'y rattachent, soient rédigés en langue anglaise.

I wonder what's the deal here. Anyone?

GStarICAD 2007 Woes

In my last article "Chinese IntelliCAD developer takes on Autodesk", I mentioned my investigations on GreatStar Software's claims of cloning 95% of Autodesk's ObjectARX SDK. I finally managed to get the developer version of GStarICAD 2007. As espected, the developer version came with their ObjectARX clone, bascially a bunch of headers (.h), static libraries (.lib) and dynamic libraries (.dll) files.

Next I set out to recompile one of our AutoCAD plug-ins with the cloned libraries. If all went according to plan the recompilation would eventually yield a GStarICAD plug-in. But that was not to be. The Half Chinese Half English Word document they sent me was hopelessly out of date. The file names specified in the doc did not match the files in the SDK. After some trial and error I finally put some parts in order. I had to eventually give up when the compiler started looking for a header file which was nowhere to be found in the SDK. I have now asked them for the source code of a working sample plug-in that actually compiles, builds and runs in GStarICAD 2007.

I am quite sure that their ObjectARX clone works for them. But the point is the it should work for us, the third party developers, for whom it has been developed. And the process should be simple, straightforward and well documented. I do not have the time nor the patience to figure things out on my own, and that too in Chinese.

This brings me to an important point. The new IntelliCAD's which are coming out with their own ObjectARX clones need to woo two sets of people. One set is the AutoCAD users who must be convinced to move to the AutoCAD clones. The second set is the third party developers that must be convinced to use the ObjectARX clones to help the first set of people make the move. If third party developers do not bite, neither will most of the AutoCAD customers. And they be find themselves in exactly the same position that they have been all these years.

I am far from impressed with GreatStar Software's ObjectARX clone. Their web site says a lot about their ObjectARX clone but nothing about how to get it. Their Chinesenglish document titled "Re-developing Manual" (whatever that means) is virtually useless. Their SDK does not come with any sample programs. That's the recipe for a programmer's perfect storm.

While I was fiddling around with GreatStar Software's ObjectARX clone, I noticed something that may interest Autodesk's lawyers. As I mentioned earlier, the SDK contains header files. These are the exact same header files that come with Autodesk's ObjectARX SDK, complete with Autodesk's copyright notice. And it is this copyright notice that adds a twist. Here it is.

(C) Copyright 1993-1999 by Autodesk, Inc.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software in object code form for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and the limited warranty and restricted rights notice below appear in all supporting documentation.

Let's analyse this a little. "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software in object code form for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted". The phrases "any purpose" and "without fee" will certainly sound good to GreatStar Software. But what about "object code"? As far as I know, header files are not object code. They form part of the source code. Object code is the static and dynamic libraries (.lib and .dll files) which GreatStar Software does not seem to be distributing. Source code is any sequence of statements and/or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. It is quite obvious that the header files being distributed by GreatStar Software in their ObjectARX clone are actually part of Autodesk's source code.

I can hear Autodesk lawyers grinding their axes already. Can you?