Autodesk burns the village to feed AI and the Cloud – cuts 7% of workforce

https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/22/autodesk-burns-the-village-to-feed-ai-and-the-cloud-cuts-7-of-workforce/

by zdw • 6 months ago

42 21 6 months ago

blog.adafruit.com

Autodesk can just die at this point.

It's an anti-customer, anti-industry, anti-everyone succubus riding on tired legacy trash and incompetent court rulings that allow it (and other corporations) to steal from customers and creators of all kinds... even musicians.

rurban2• 6 months ago

That's why I took over the abandoned LibreDWG and revived it. The format must be freed. I was there since the 90ies.

VerifiedReports3• 6 months ago

I was there '90s-2000ish.

Meanwhile, kudos to you for working on LibreDWG. I use FreeCAD quite a bit; do you think your work will be incorporated there?

quickthrowman• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, they have a monopoly on architectural, CAD, and BIM software with AutoCAD and Revit. You’re completely locked in with no choice, everyone uses it so you must also use it.

Trimble isn’t far behind in the ‘shitty and expensive construction software’ market, but they aren’t as ingrained as Autodesk.

I’m not familiar with Autodesk in other industries but I assume it’s just as bad as their AEC software offerings.

VerifiedReports3• 6 months ago

They're as bad as they can be; it's just that in others there's at least some competition.

- former employee

BoredPositron• 6 months ago

It's Autodesk they would burn anything for more money.

simianwords3• 6 months ago

Very emotional article. I keep seeing this trope but I wonder how people reconcile this: autodesk is enshittifying its product. Users are leaving. But also wall street likes it. But also Wall Street is this powerful institution that keeps making money.

How does all this add up? Is Wall Street so stupid to encourage all products to enshittify thereby leading to their own loss of investments?

rankdiff• 6 months ago

Maybe they believe too much in — user hates the new feature before loving (and adapting to) it. Just like UI revamps.

And, sometimes, they are right.

e402• 6 months ago

Wall Street are made up of people with incentives. The incentives drive the behavior and not some collective will.

Wall Street will be the last to find out the emperor has no clothes. That is called a stock crash.

simianwords3• 6 months ago

a crash will hurt wall street too. if you believe incentives drive behaviour then believe that they don't want the crash.

miohtama• 6 months ago

It's vendor lock-in. Same for Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.

It would cost too much for customers to switch.

simianwords3• 6 months ago

the post doesn't say this though..

watwut• 6 months ago

autodesk is enshittifying its product. Users are leaving. But also wall street likes it. But also Wall Street is this powerful institution that keeps making money.

Enshittication makes earnings go up. Not infinitely, but for long. Enshittication is not done for fun, it is done for shorter term profit and Wall Street is all about that. Eventually it will go down and Wall Street will desert the company, moving money into something else to enshittify it.

SilverBirch• 6 months ago

It's quite a simple story, wall street likes companies that make profits - and by that I mean that they receive more in revenue than they spend. Now there's really a few ways of making more profits.

You can invest (spend more) and hope that that investment yields more revenue down the line. This is bad. Wall street doesn't like this, because you're definitely making less profits now because you're investing money you could've given back in profits, you might make more in the future - but no guarantee. Risky! Wall street hates this!

You can raise margins. This can be good. As long as demand is fairly inelastic this will pretty directly translate into profits. But you can only do this for so long, by definition you just always want to do this until you can't any more, so you've probably already pulled this lever as much as you can.

You can cut costs. This is good. Wall street likes this. You definitely get more profits right now. It could impact your ongoing growth, but that's just maybe! You can be more efficient right? And even if it does impact your future growth that's not going to show up for years. So right now, you're more valuable!

KellyCriterion• 6 months ago

20 years ago when I was in 3D graphics/rendering/gaming they were the absolute "must-have-tools" - is that still the case today?

thot_experiment• 6 months ago

No, still used by some major studios for sure but the community energy is all behind Blender. Houdini is goated in the space, all the Autodesk art stuff is basically only used because of vendor lock in and inertia. Fusion360 is the gateway drug of choice for CAD still but there's headway being made in the foss community on that front (as mentioned in the article)

Dig1t• 6 months ago

Why does everyone seem to hate Autodesk?

I’m new to hardware stuff but have been putting in a lot of time in fusion 360. It seems to work well on Mac and Windows and it’s free for me just starting out.

I got a year subscription for $350, which was not a horrible price.

I will say it is very weird to me that there isn’t an open source program with all the features that Autodesk has.

garyclarke27• 6 months ago

Autodesk is an evil rapacious company. Competition authorities should not have allowed them to buy Revit, to create a monopoly for Architecture software, enabling them to get away with charging outrageous prices to Architects, especially considering how poorly paid they are.

Autodesk burns the village to feed AI and the Cloud – cuts 7% of workforce

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