Projects names

[Patriiick]

Hi, projects names are a little bit confusing on my opinion and on Ralph Grabowky's one (pardon me if I am wrong but I think it's him who brought that first), For example "Project Butterfly" is certainly a nice name but it does not give a clue about what the project is about. It may be ok when you have two or three projects, but I must say I am lost when I find reference on the web about labs projects, I have to think twice and sometimes to go to the Labs site to realize what is the subject.

[scott.sheppard]

Thanks for bringing up this topic. There are a few things going on here.

1. We call many things projects because we want people to realize that these are technology previews and are not alphas or betas. As technology previews there's no guarantee they will ever become a product or make it into one of our products.

2. The project names start out as internal names. For example Brian Souder picked Dragonfly because he thought the insect was nimble but intricately constructed - much like our web service for floor planning. That name caught on and so the next project got the name Butterfly. These are just project names. You see that Project Dragonfly became Autodesk Homestyler. As another example, Project Cooper became AutoCAD Freestyle. The project names are only temporary, so we don't have a complicated naming committee-based process.

3. When you interact with Labs, it's like getting a backstage pass. You are working with us on the inside. We share our internal project names with you.

4. As I am sensitive to titles giving some sort of idea as to what a technology preview entails, please look at the Industry Tab or pull down menu of the Autodesk Labs Home page. I list the projects as "Butterfly DWG Editing" or "Freewheel DWF Collaboration" to try to remove some of the mystery around these projects.

It will be fun to see how your poll turns out.

[Steve Johnson]

There are so many Autodesk products already released, many with significantly overlapping capabilities, that anybody pretty much needs to be a full-time industry specialist just to know what they all are and what each product does that is somehow different from all the others.

Add in the various projects and previews that change names on release, get absorbed into other products or die off completely, the cloud-based projects and products, and Autodesk's habit of occasionally name changing and/or replacing even well-established products (quick, what's this year's name for the product for viewing DWF files?) and to an outsider it gives the impression of total product chaos at Autodesk. It's certainly beyond me to keep track of it all, so what chance do you have of marketing to people with even less idea of Autodesk's product lines and history?

Given that environment, it must be a nightmare trying to come up with a name that works descriptively and distinguishes itself from its mass of peers, yet also works as a marketing proposition. Scott, you have my sympathy, and I think it's kind of cool that your projects aren't named by committee.

[scott.sheppard]

With some of the recent changes to the Labs home page tabs, I have been trying to highlight what these projects do rather than just their names.