“Autodesk has decided to discontinue the development/sale/distribution of Architectural Studio. This has nothing to do with Tablet PC as a platform. It has everything to do with software business economics.”
Rats. It was an exciting product. Hopefully AutoDesk will change their mind as Tablet features become more mainstream–which I have no doubt they will. The Tablet isn’t going anywhere and from what Microsoft has told us so far, ink will play a solid role in the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn.
I can see why for an established company the numbers aren’t there. It takes a strong champion in an organization to keep everyone focused on tomorrow’s trends. Developing for a product that boasts a single-digit percentage of the market is tough.
The advantage goes to smaller developers. There’s no doubt in my mind that whereas larger companies can add tremendous volume potential, smaller developers will tend to take the greater risks and lead us into new product innovations. Yes, most will fail. But for those who manage to survive the new product marathon, there’s great opportunity.
I think a reasonable strategy for many established companies, such as AutoDesk, is to partner with 3rd party Tablet efforts for now. These products and services can be brought in to enhance a sale, but the quarterly numbers don’t depend on these leading edge products directly.
A lot of it has nothing to do with the products themselves but rather the processes that become entrenched in an organization. Take advertising, for instance. Imagine if you were managing ad placements for an extensive, well-established product line. What would you do for a fledgling Tablet product? You might set aside a percent or two of token advertising. But your food on the table depends on the other products, so they get almost all of your attention and planning.
Actually, the theoretical Tablet product probably doesn’t need any advertising at all. Well, kind of. It needs creative, or extremely lost cost thinking, which is a heck of a lot of work to add on to a team keeping the number one products going and growing.
What amounts to sweat advertising is very time consuming–or can be–but it’s a good match with a new product category. Blogging, talking up a storm, finding influential users to spread the word, are key to this effort. You can pay to get returns, but the numbers will probably look bad at the end of the quarter.
A smaller company would probably look at the situation quite differently. They’d blog about their product, persuade others to partner with them, talk to everyone they run into about their product. They’d do all this because they can’t afford the advertising in the first place. And at the end of each day–let alone quarter–they’d have a smile on their face when one more person hears or tries out their product. What a tiny Tablet product needs is the unrelenting enthusiasm of Hobie from MindManager or the infectiousness of Buzz Bruggeman and ActiveWords.
As the email in Iggy’s blog post indicates, it makes sense that AutoDesk might setaside a Tablet product for now, not because of issues with the Tablet platform, but rather because the market needs to grow some more before it matches the impedance of its business processes.
(Update: Here’s the AutoDesk discussion thread on Architectural Studio.)
Thanks for the kind words! I traded a bunch of E-Mail with one our new users in New Zealand tonight. Seeing people download ActiveWords from all over the world is truly remarkable.
Trying to change the world one user at a time is a challenge! But when great people say good things about you, it is all worth while.