Creation Engine

Autodesk Wants to Help Anyone, Anywhere, Make Anything

This Nike shoe was modeled in professional Autodesk software

BY BOB PARKS

Carl Bass is president and CEO of Autodesk, a publicly traded software company worth $7 billion. But he’s also an amateur woodworker, and he takes his hobby seriously. Last fall, for example, when searching for just the right wood to take back to his workshop, Bass and two fellow enthusiasts—his CTO, Jeff Kowalski, and a Berkeley, California-based carpenter named Gene Agress—flew to Portland, Oregon, to meet with one of the world’s most secretive dealers in rare timber. The dealer picked up the three men in an Audi SUV, then sped into the countryside, mentioning along the way that the vehicle was, in fact, bullet-resistant.

Inside an enormous climate-controlled metal building in the Oregon outback, the three browsed an astounding array of wood: rare finds like bird’s-eye maple, curly redwood, and 20-foot lengths of ebony. Speakers blasted jazz and classical music at the lumber, because the dealer believed it would make the wood resonate better when used in fine musical instruments. (The wood seller had some offbeat ideas, including a deep suspicion of the government—hence, perhaps, the armored car.) Bass picked out some striped curly redwood to take home with him. But the dealer was less impressed with his visitors than they were with his wood. After spending the afternoon with them and interrogating them on various subjects, he declined to sell them anything and packed them off in the SUV.

So, over the next four weeks, Bass mounted a campaign to show that he was worthy of the timber. He even sent pictures of boats he’d built professionally, during a year off from college (a period that grew to five years, before he returned to finish his math degree). The seller finally relented, set a fair price, and sent Bass a truckload of the wood he wanted.

For Bass, woodworking is a release from work, a firewall against the pressures of the job. Yet over the past few years, his hobby and his day job have become surprisingly aligned. What once was a refuge for the CEO has transformed into a strategic vision for Autodesk, one of the world’s leading makers of sophisticated 3-D design software for engineers, architects, and artists.

As interest in 3-D rendering has burst out of corporate design and engineering departments into the amateur realm, Bass has aggressively positioned Autodesk to cater to makers and garage entrepreneurs like himself. Now the company has launched four new products in its consumer-oriented 123D line, creating a suite of low-cost modeling apps for PCs and tablets. At the same time, Autodesk has also gone on a yearlong acquisition binge, buying Instructables (a design-sharing community), Pixlr (a photo-editing site), and Socialcam (an app for video editing and sharing on mobile devices).

Under Bass’ leadership, Autodesk has become the most prominent tech company so far to commit to a vision of the future in which makers—basement hobbyists, bootstrapped startups, boutique manufacturers—aren’t just a cultural force but a profit center too. Call it the Big Make: the pivot point when the maker movement, served for years by homely startups and open source projects, has grown large enough to catch the attention of serious and publicly traded players. “Some people see it as a niche market,” Bass says. “They claim that it can’t possibly scale. But this is a trend, not a fad—something seismic is going on.”

On paper, no firm is better positioned to take advantage of a maker-led future than Autodesk, whose 30 years of experience in computer-aided design give it unparalleled intelligence about the capabilities that designers want and need in their software. Despite some recent financial travails (in August, lower-than-expected earnings forced the layoff of some 500 employees), Autodesk’s core professional business affords it enviable leeway to pursue the consumer market without jeopardizing its solvency.

To pull off the Big Make, though, the design giant still needs to innovate its way past a pair of problems. The first is a design challenge of its own. It must streamline its industrial-strength tools into user-friendly apps—transform its Abrams tanks into bicycles, as it were. But the second, even more difficult challenge is cultural: Autodesk has to convince the most passionate members of the maker community, amateurs accustomed to dealing with small players more like themselves, that a multibillion-dollar public company has their best interests at heart. On both fronts, the question is: Can the kings of computer modeling learn how to remodel themselves?

Since 1982, when AutoCAD was first released, Autodesk has been the Microsoft of computer-aided design: not the highest-end products but always among the most popular—and the most profitable. Beginning in the 1990s, as it built and refined its 3-D design tools, Autodesk extended its market clout out past engineering and architecture into such fields as animation and visual effects. Some 12 million professionals use these products today, with their employers paying $1,000 to $50,000 per user for the privilege.

Autodesk’s first foray into the consumer market was a total crapshoot. In 2009 a product manager decided to try building a version of Sketchbook Pro—a professional application for industrial designers and artists priced at around a hundred dollars per copy—for the iPhone. When word got up to Bass, he called it a “stupid idea,” grousing, “Who wants to finger-paint on a cell phone?” Two months later, roughly a million iPhone and iTouch users had downloaded Sketchbook, making it the fastest-moving software program in Autodesk’s history. In April 2010 the app came out on iPads for $7.99; in November it was on Android phones. In its 30-year history, Autodesk has sold only 12 million copies of its desktop software; now, in just three years, 10 million consumers have downloaded Sketchbook.

As Bass watched the numbers mount, and as he browsed the amazing and weird sketches that users were sending the company, the CEO had a sort of epiphany. “Here were vast numbers of people,” he says, “working together and connecting in ways we’d never seen.” He realized that there was a real market for consumer Autodesk products—and he, as a hobbyist, was part of it. “For years my making of physical things and my making of software were completely distinct activities,” he says. “But then I saw that there are all these other people out there trying to make stuff, and as a toolmaker I could help create the tools that they need.”

After that runaway success, and seeing the surging amateur interest in 3-D modeling technology, Autodesk set to work on a freeware modeling app, which would eventually be called 123D. By May 2011, when 123D launched, Autodesk had also begun to create a suite of additional (and also free) tools. 123D Catch allows users to take photos of an object and re-create it in 3-D onscreen. The acquisition of a small company called Skymatter led to 123D Sculpt, which allows users to manipulate colors and textures to make 3-D art. A collaboration with inventor Saul Griffith’s Otherlab resulted in 123D Make, which helps users to construct real-life versions of their onscreen creations by stacking or building with flat materials like cardboard or sheet metal.

Software that helps people design their own objects is a great start, but as Autodesk’s Kowalski points out, this capability has been around for years. In the professional sphere, the firm’s new generation of applications is taking the next logical step, predicting how the object will behave in the real world. “The acronym CAD means ‘computer-aided design,’” Kowalski says, “but that’s never been delivered”—i.e., the computer has never really aided the user in any meaningful way. By contrast, Autodesk’s latest professional software can analyze architectural designs for energy efficiency or tell you how a building would respond to an earthquake. It examines aircraft parts for structural strength and shows engineers where the pieces are most likely to break.

Kowalski says that Autodesk’s consumer apps will eventually use the same sort of technology to deliver feedback on how your design for, say, a new water bottle for hiking will perform in the real world. It may give hints on how to minimize wasted material, find subtle ways to make the bottle stronger, and give tips on how to optimize it for outputting to a 3-D printer. Better yet, it might create several variations of the design to illustrate trade-offs in efficiency, durability, and manufacturing costs. Kids could even do it for their Pinewood Derby cars, Kowalski muses. “An 8-year-old takes a photo of a car and is able to subject it to computational fluid-dynamics modeling on the screen.”

It’s easy to see how Autodesk, if it successfully adapts its professional feature set, can win the mass-market 3-D future. In the meantime, though, there have been speed bumps. 123D initially fell flat in Autodesk focus groups and is being tweaked. “People who had training with professional tools struggled with 123D because it’s designed to be intuitive,” says senior public relations manager Noah Cole. “Ultimately we decided we’re going to make this for 10-year-olds.” And yet it’s still too hard for nonprofessionals, according to Christy Canida, senior manager of partnerships and community marketing. “It’s still not accessible to people who don’t think of themselves as CAD jockeys,” she says.

On some level the problem is inherent to 3-D design, which will never be as intuitive as 2-D, a visual medium we all begin to work with as toddlers. To really think about a complex object in three dimensions, to turn it around in the mind and see how all the parts fit together, is hard for most people to do without getting a headache. So it’s perhaps inevitable that 123D hasn’t taken off with consumers the way Sketchbook has.

But there’s a clear opportunity for a software maker to bring 3-D to the masses. “The software still needs to be easier,” says Make magazine editor Mark Frauenfelder. “Someone needs to come along with a great 3-D modeling program that you don’t need a manual to use.” Autodesk is betting that by improving its 123D line, it might just be the one to crack this conundrum.

The Rise of “Big Make”

Autodesk isn’t the only big company that’s staking a claim on the maker movement going mainstream. Here’s a rundown of which companies have placed bets in which sectors.

Design Software

3-D Printers

3-D Printing Services

Design
Community Sites

AUTODESK
(ADSK;
$7.1B market cap)

123D

Ponoko, Shapeways (partnerships)

Instructables

3D SYSTEMS
(DDD; $2.4B market cap)

Alibre, Cubify Invent

Cube

Cubify Cloud 3DProparts

Cubify

PTC
(PMTC; $2.6B market cap)

Creo Sketch

PlanetPTC

MAKERBOT
(private)

Replicator2

Thingiverse

Normally, Carl Bass works alone in his West Berkeley shop, making his pieces of custom furniture. But from time to time the 55-year-old CEO brings in kids, often players from the youth baseball teams he coaches, to help teach them about woodworking. Recently he posted a slew of photos for Instructables, the how-to sharing site for makers that Autodesk purchased in August 2011, showing how to make a wooden baseball bat.

Even before the acquisition, Bass was an Instructables enthusiast. But it’s also clear that he sees his presence on the site as important for putting his newly bought community at ease. After all, the dollar value ($30 million) that Autodesk placed on Instructables derived not from any proprietary technology but from all the site’s devoted users. The Pixlr and Instructables purchases gave Autodesk around 35 million monthly unique Web visitors, putting it ahead of sites such as Pinterest (around 23 million) and Tumblr (27 million); adding Socialcam’s estimated 16 million users could give Autodesk the total online reach of a Twitter or LinkedIn. Autodesk executives say they’re hoping to connect with what they call hero makers, people whose word carries to thousands of peers.

But some of those makers look on Autodesk’s motives with suspicion. The proprietary nature of Autodesk’s software is definitely the biggest sticking point. Not long before my visit to his workshop, Bass had uploaded a digital model to the site, but in his haste he posted it only as DWG and IPT files, proprietary Autodesk formats. “I took endless amounts of shit in the comments,” he says. “I replied to them all—ugh, just tell me what you want.” He wound up reposting the project in half a dozen formats.

For similar reasons, some makers have become uneasy about Autodesk’s recent investment in TechShop, a chain of nouveau workshops where independent makers share access to high-end software and hardware tools. As with Instructables, there’s not the slightest indication that Bass wants to lock members into Autodesk products. But again, the culture clash is real: As maker spaces become more expensive and more geared toward entrepreneurs, the pure hobbyists worry they’ll get pushed out. At Noisebridge, a competing space in San Francisco’s Mission district (do not hack the electrical panel, reads a weary sign), I meet Will Sargent, who thinks that top-down pressure from companies like Autodesk can disrupt maker communities like TechShop and Instructables. “The more you tighten things up and push toward a specific goal, the more you lose casual interest,” he says. “Communities always have a balance between acceptance and effectiveness. Companies tilt the other way.”

On the Instructables acquisition, Sargent is more sanguine—he doesn’t care whether it succeeds or fails—but his reasoning might give Carl Bass chills: “Autodesk can’t own a community,” he says. “How can you motivate people from the top down? You can’t.”

Bass admits he hasn’t quite figured out how Autodesk will make money from all these consumer ventures. But he sees them as playing a crucial strategic role. For one thing, the combination of new tools and web communities can be an in-house bellwether for Autodesk’s future business model. The company anticipates that it will someday have to transition even its $10,000-per-user professional products from software on physical discs to software available only in the cloud. As Bass sees it, this shift—in part to increase clients’ computing speed and power, in part to stem software piracy rates that currently exceed 75 percent in China—can be guided by lessons Autodesk learns from its consumer apps.

So the company keeps experimenting and learning. At a recent meeting with executives, Bass exhorted his team to keep looking for more complementary technologies to acquire. He also led a frank discussion of sluggish software download numbers—in this case, for ForceEffect, a free app that lets users model reaction forces and motion. “That feels like an order of magnitude low,” Bass said on hearing the figures. There was an awkward pause. One executive suggested that perhaps the problem was that the software was free; with a previous app, they had discovered that charging actually drove up downloads. Bass thought the solution was to promote ForceEffect with other products, to help push it into the right community of users.

On a brainstorm about another potential product, Bass brought up the idea of acquiring a startup to build it—new talent to help attack the problem with fresh eyes. “Being such geeks,” he said, “I know we’re all more comfortable with the what than the who. It would be nice to inject ourselves with a bunch of people who have thought about the problem rather than just listen to a bunch of mechanical engineers.”

“Though,” he added, with a wry smile, “some of my best friends are mechanical engineers.”