- ...hands.
- I deliberately reused this quote, which I
had previously used in Information Letter 10 (see page
) in 1983 to express the sense of urgency I
felt then about the coming confrontation between Autodesk and the
entrenched, well-financed, mainstream CAD companies. Seven years
later, Autodesk had prevailed over the then-giants of CAD and,
in doing so, had transformed CAD from an exotic vertical market
application to a rather conventional software product addressing
a broad variety of users and industries. The coming
confrontation, now, would be between specialised CAD companies such as
Autodesk and broadly-based software vendors such as Microsoft and
Borland who might view CAD as simply another product within
their broadly diversified portfolio of interoperable applications.
As in 1983, the inevitability of this coming conflict was generally
acknowledged, but proved an inadequate stimulus to make the
changes required to prepare for it.