Specialized and Mainstream MCAD
Today Brad Holtz of Cyon Research pointed me to an interesting white paper published in 2007 titled “A Fresh Look at the Value Proposition of High-End Mechanical CAD“. This white paper is a followup to a similar one published back in 2003 and aims at determining whether the conclusions drawn in the 2003 white paper are still relevan

Carl Bass on Digital Prototyping
Carl Bass is the President and CEO of Autodesk. His earlier positions at Autodesk include CTO and Vice President of the AECAD group, responsible for the design and development of AutoCAD and AEC products. Previously Carl co-founded Ithaca Software, the developer of HOOPS, which was acquired by Autodesk in 1993. So Carl is basically one hell of a technical guy. I am told that inspite of being the CEO of Autodesk he actually uses a lot of the software that his company develops and sells. Digital Prototyping is a term that is closely associated with Carl Bass and his vision for Autodesk. So I decided to ask him a few questions on Digital Prototyping and the issues surrounding it.

Buzz Kross on Inventor
Robert “Buzz” Kross is the Senior Vice President of the Manufacturing Solutions Division at Autodesk. He joined Autodesk in 1993 after Woodbourne Inc., a company he co-founded, was acquired by Autodesk. I met Buzz a couple of times at COFES. From my conversations with him I get the impression that he is extremely passionate about one thing – Autodesk Inventor. And he knows a hell of a lot about it and what it can do. After all, Woodbourne used to develop parametric design tools for AutoCAD and over the years Buzz has greatly influenced Autodesk’s MCAD products like AutoCAD Mechanical and MDT, not just Inventor. That is why I was quite surprised when I read

Autodesk DevDays 2009 – Part 4
Here are a few pictures of the Autodesk DevDays 2009 event in Bangalore. Click the images to view them in full size. Jim Quanci, ADN Director, on the right with Stephen Preston, DevTech Americas Manager, on the left getting ready to give a presentation. Stephen focuses on AutoCAD and works very closely with the AutoCAD team in Engineering. From my conversations with him, I get the feeling that he has the unique ability of dreaming in C++ and .NET. If you have any problem related to ObjectARX or any other AutoCAD API, Stephen is the guy.

Autodesk DevDays 2009 – Part 3
I am sitting at the Bangalore airport waiting for my flight back home to Goa. Thought I’d give you some more information about the Autodesk DevDays event that I cam here to attend. The DevDays events are a series of day long developer conferences held all across the globe. Contrary to popular belief, none of the Autodesk developers from Engineering attend these events. At least, I have not met any. By Engineering, I mean the programmers that actually write the software at Autodesk. The software development side of things at Autodesk is structured more or less like this. There are programmers who sit in various development offices in countries spread across the world. Some of