Autodesk Penalizes Loyal Customers with New, Punitive Upgrade Policy

I was reading a post over on Deelip’s Blog about the ill-timed punitive upgrade scheme Autodesk has decided to foist upon their customers, and decided it was about time to post something on it. The post over at Deelip was titled How To Piss Off a Paying Customer? and is in response to a very angry comment posted regarding Deelip’s original post on the subject titled Autodesk’s New Upgrade Pricing Policy. My comment can be found here.

I myself found out about this new policy a bit early because my subscription ran out last fall, and my VAR sent me a copy of the new policy trying to convince me that it would be wise to pay the subscription fee before the nastyness kicks in. The new policy is as follows:
“Autodesk is introducing a new upgrade pricing model that will go into effect on March 16, 2010. After that date, all upgrades, from any release level, will cost 50% of the price of a new license. This is a departure from the way upgrades have always been priced – which has been based on the “coming from” release level. For example, after March 15, customers upgrading from AutoCAD 2008, 2009 (or 2010) will all pay the same price: 1/2 the cost of a new license of AutoCAD.”
I explained to them that I cannot renew my subscription at this time as I would need to forgo paying the mortgage or not feed my children this month in order to do so. They responded warmly with another form letter urging a renewal. How sensitive. I think the Direct TV AD below describes the corporate ‘thinking’ behind this type of ‘strategy’ quite well…

..but penalizing loyal customers for not being as subservient as Autodesk would like them to be has a good chance at backfiring in ways that are not immediately apparent (to them). Forcing customers to pay half of the full price of the software for a one year lapse in upgrading is likely to make customers wait three years or so until the penalty matches the ‘crime’ of less-than-enthusiastic upgrading……….and many people will reconsider upgrading at all as the arrogance of the new policy is at it’s very best, off-putting. What would happen if Ford or another car maker adopted a similar policy? I’ve relied on Ford Trucks for my cabinet shop for many years, but would switch to another brand in a heartbeat if they were foolish enough to pull such a stupid stunt. Does Autodesk really believe they have a captive audience? It may be true for a couple of their products, but it is certainly not true for Inventor, AutoCAD, and most of the others.

And what about the competition? Autodesk’s competitors may, instead of jumping on the screw-the-customer bandwagon, go the other direction and liberalize their upgrade policies. What would happen if they offered a competitive upgrade policy that would allow switching to their software at a price that is less than the penalty that Autodesk is levying? This kind of thing happens when you deal with real people regardless of how awesome the Power Point presentation was that convinced Autodesk to pull the trigger on this turd. It makes one wonder if they even know what is going on outside of their corporate echo chamber. Its the economy stupid.

Here is an example of how even the current, milder, carrot & stick policy can go wrong. My version of Inventor (2010) has a bug that has been present for about two years now. In the real world, a defect like this normaly results in a recall, but this is software, and is therfore exists in an alternate universe called EULA

Upon start-up, I get the following MakeNurbsDataSurface error three times in a row…

…I just click OK (three times), put up with the annoying error sound (again, three times), and the program starts and runs just fine –I think. Not too much of a hassle except that you cannot start the program then run and get a cup of coffee as it loads (it takes a long time) as you need to sit there and babysit the annoying start-up. The 2010 version did not fix the bug that started a year earlier, and the 2010 SP1 failed to do so as well. Service Pack 2 is now out, and it may fixthis and other problems……. but I cannot apply the patch! As you can see on this website, I am doing a lot of iLogic tutorials and other projects, and in order to apply Service Pack 2, you also need to apply a service pack to iLogic –which is only available if you currently have a subscription! So I am shit out of luck as far as fixing the program goes, unless I am willing to dump iLogic, which I cannot do!

Having said all of that, I still love Inventor, and my reseller, Imaginit, has a Applications Engineer that goes way out of his way to help customers (much of it on his own time). I just hope the economy gets better by fall when the new draconian upgrade policy kicks in for me (there is a one year grace period on renewing the subscription, but even with that, the next renewal would follow soon afterwards, and there is a $100.00 fine as well!).

Note: After writing this, I went and read Deelip’s first post, and he brings up (in more detail) the same ‘wait three years or-so’ scenario along with the numbers to back it up. I’m sure it will be painfully obvious to others as well. If you go there, read the comments…