Autodesk has done an excellent job in balancing concern for domestic markets with the attention the headquarters organisation must give to the health of the company's operations around the world. We must continue to do this, even if problems in the domestic market threaten to divert our attentions from the global performance of the company.
We've performed superbly overseas, but we should bear in mind that on a GNP basis, if our position in global markets equaled that in the United States, U.S. sales would be only 33% of global sales, not about half. The relative technological, commercial, and political importance of the United States has been eroding for more than forty years, and there's no reason to believe this will end at any time in the near future--particularly in a multi-polar world increasingly focused on competitiveness in a global market economy. Autodesk should deploy its efforts in various markets in proportion to their present and estimated future revenue prospects, not based on arbitrary divisions into territories.
Our products must continue to reflect the international nature of our market. Medium term goals to this end should include, in my opinion, the ability for any Autodesk customer in the world to order and obtain in a timely fashion any of the language editions of our products (in other words, I should be able to order a Czech language AutoCAD from my local Autodesk dealer in Osaka), and to support within AutoCAD and include with the standard product fonts that support all human languages in which engineering drawings are prepared.