Autodesk
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Autodesk, Inc. Template:Nasdaq, a design software and digital content company, was founded by John Walker in San Rafael, California 1982.
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Organization
Autodesk is organized into two segments: the Design Solutions Group and Discreet. The Design Solutions Group (DSG) encompasses Autodesk's core competency of design technology applications while Discreet provides media and entertainment solutions.
The Design Solutions Segment is divided into five industry-specific business divisions: the Platform Technology Division (PTD), the Manufacturing Solutions Division (MSD), the Infrastructure Solutions Division (ISD), the Building Solutions Division (BSD) and Other, which includes Autodesk Collaboration Services and Autodesk Consulting.
Portfolio
The principal product offerings from the Design Solutions Segment are described below:
- The Platform Technology Division develops and manages Autodesk's flagship product, AutoCAD, and AutoCAD LT.
- The Manufacturing Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Inventor Series and AutoCAD Mechanical.
- The Infrastructure Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Map, Autodesk Land Desktop, Autodesk Civil3D and Autodesk MapGuide .
- The Building Solutions Division develops and manages Autodesk Architectural Desktop and Autodesk Revit.
The principal product offerings from the Discreet Segment are 3ds max, flame, inferno and smoke.
Other products include the Autodesk Subscription Program and Autodesk LocationLogic.
History
Autodesk featured AutoCAD (formerly named MicroCAD) at COMDEX in 1982. Initially AutoCAD was written for multiple operating systems, focusing on the CP/M architecture, but also made a branch for DOS and Unix.
The company's ultimate goal was to achieve a major software brand (AutoCAD) running upon IBM's recently born PC platform. Thus, its power was its weakness: a relatively mediocre CAD application (due to Intel and MS-DOS limitations those days), available on a widespread platform. It made a CAD tool, good enough to create detailed technical drawings, possible and affordable to many smaller design, engineering, and architecture companies.
The further versions and implementations (Release 2.1 introduced a new (for those days) concept in CAD and software industry: the open platform software, by means of the introduction of a built-in Lisp interpreter with a custom dialect of the Lisp Language: AutoLisp, customized to program built-in particular AutoCAD solutions. Furthermore, they also implemented a C subset of its own libraries and made it available to developers.
This brought as a result the "evolutionary" growth of a large collection of minor software companies developing solutions for AutoCAD as the main platform (as a operating system one could say). Since then, Autodesk has profited greatly from these developments by buying the cutting edge companies that made major improvements to its software. These companies' code is then brought into the Autodesk codebase where it can be retooled for use in new products.
Since Release 12, the company abandoned the Unix environment, and since Release 14 it discontinued the MS-DOS releases and worked closely together with Microsoft sharing its base technology to achieve superior performance in the Windows operating system.
Now AutoCAD lies back as a basement-CAD multi-purpose solution, for a great catalogue of vertical specialized solutions that constitute, in fact, whole CAD packages by themselves with its own terminology, interfacing standards and also "learning curve". It is the de facto standard non-specialized CAD solutions and its file formats "DXF" and "DWG" are the most common for CAD interchange.
Autodesk has now ventured into the world of midrange 3D CAD with the introduction of Autodesk Inventor [1] (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=4246282) and Autodesk Revit[2] (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3781831). Autodesk's largest competitors in this category are Solidworks, owned by Dassault, and Pro-E, owned by PTC.
External links
- www.autodesk.com
- Early AutoCAD information (http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_36.html)