subscription vs buying every few years

[JRBOURNE]

Right now we are at a crossroads at my office, we are running winXP and autocad architecture 2008 & autocad Civil3D 2008.

in the past we have always used a version for about 3 years (basically until we cant get support for it anymore) and then upgraded, so our previous version was 2005.

We have a total of 9 work stations with 11 autocad installs

3 Autocad Arch.
2 Civil3D
2 that have both
2 that have Autocad Arch. but really arent heavy users
so..
thats 7 with autocad arch & 4 with Civil 3D (two of which overlap)

we are trying to figure out our options right now since we want to upgrade to Win7 and autocad 2010/11.
Since autocad 2008 does not work on win 7 we have to do both, or save Win7 for later but its cost is not as big of a deal compared to Autocad so prob just do both.

How can i compare cost of subscription to cost of upgrading every few years as well as different versions cost? If the two light users used CAD LT would we experience any compatibility issues from someone working on a drawing, saving it and so on?

also, we are an engineering firm who uses autocad architecture for its Steel detail library but dont use any of the architectural functions. is this worth it? we have older versions, is it possible to pull the steel detail library into a new version of regular Autocad?
what do people reccommend?

[Ed Jobe]

I'm not going to quote costs, but from my last evaluation, the way pricing is done these days, It's cheaper to be on subscription over a 3 yr period vs upgrading at the end of 3 yr. That said, from your description, it seems like you haven't considered a network license. A single floating lic could be use among all the casual users. I'm guessing you could get away with 2-3 arch lic and 1 civil lic.

[Hotpants Longbottom]

"Since autocad 2008 does not work on win 7 we have to do both, or save Win7 for later but its cost is not as big of a deal compared to Autocad so prob just do both."

AutoCAD 2008 will work with the 64 bit Windows 7 OS. I found a work around and am glad I did because so far I absolutely hate 2010 on Win 7.

Here is exactley what i did, get orca from here:
http://www.technipages.com/download-...si-editor.html

and then follow these steps:

1. Download and install Orca from Microsoft.
2. Copy the installation files to your hard drive or a network folder.
3. Backup the files ACA.msi and Setup.ini
4. Edit the ACA.msi with Orca and delete the action found in the table
"InstallExecuteSequence" that is called "CheckFor64BitOS" Delete the same
line under table "CustomAction"
5. Save and close the ACA.msi
6. Edit the Setup.ini with Notepad. Delete the line under
"#==================== Platform Requirement" that is labeled
"PLATFORM=NO_WOW_64_PROCESS"
7. Double-click the Setup.exe and you should be able to install without any
problems.

MAKE SURE YOU COPY ALL THE FILES FORM YOUR CD OR DVD TO YOUR HARD DRIVE...I HAD TWO CDS AND I COPIED BOTH TO A NEW FOLDER WITHOUT CHANGING NAMES, WHEN PROMPTED TO "FILE ALREADY EXIST" I CLICKED YES TO ALL. IT WILL NOT ERASE IT WILL ADD THE FILES TOGETHER. AND AFTER MODIFYING THE FILES USE THE ICON CALLED "ACAD" NOT THE SETUP ONE. actually i did not bother modifying the steup file i just did the "aca" one and used it and it worked perfectly. when registering the program at the end it will freeze on you... left it for a few minutes shut down the program, restarted and it worked. hope that helped
Source(s):
google
http://discussion.autodesk.com/forum...hreadID=562426
http://www.technipages.com/download-...si-editor.html

[cadtag]

the ongoing cash outlay of being on Sub is lower than the periodic expenditures of an every-third year upgrade. Sub support may be useful, although I get better and more accurate information at other sites than Adesk subscription support. YMMV. There are also online training materials at the subscription site, although quality and usefulness are questionable. (Why does a 2009 Map tutorial download a 2010 dwg file? QA/QC is not just a funky acronym, at least it's not supposed to be. And FWIW, the Adesk Business Center was informed, and have done nothing to fix that over the past half year)

If you are in the US, there may be significant tax benefits to going on Sub. That gets treated as a normal business expense, just like buying paper, and come off this year's revenue. Upgrades on the other hand, are treated as a capital expenditure, and have to be deprecated over several years. Talk to your local CPA for specifics in your situation.

That's probably the single biggest reason subscription took off -- it evens out the annual expenditures for your organization's budget process. From the vendors point of view, it's a more reliable revenue stream than selling upgrades. And they really don't have to make the upgrade compelling, since you already bought it!

That said, despite the benefits, going on Sub is buying a pig in a poke. No guarantees whatsoever that you gain any benefit from the expenditure. You give the vendor money, and he pockets it, and says that he might, or might not, release an upgrade before your subscription expires.

Presuming he does in fact release a point upgrade, there's no warranty that you will benefit from the upgrade, that any of the features will improve your bottom line, or that it will be usable without needing to invest in new hardware, OS, or network infrastructure.

IMHO, a strong argument can be made that software subscription programs have had a strong negative impact on the utility, quality, and reliability of the software. Bugs persist, testing is rushed to meet the annual cycle, half-baked features are put in and never really finalized, customer feedback is ignore (since you can't vote with your wallet, why on earth would they bother listening?)


Best thing we could do for AutoCAD, as customers, is to cancel the subscriptions we currently have, and only purchase the upgrade when there's a compelling business advantage to us as individual users/companies. The vendors, all of them, not just Adesk, would have to raise their bars and do a better job of releasing compelling upgrades.

[dgorsman]

The downside being, that when we say theres a problem the response will be "Thanks, we'll look into it. A fix should be available in place for the next release, three years from now, or whenever we feel justified in a new release." Its also entirely possible there will be a new OS release during the delay, where users are asking "Why don't you support the new OS? Stop dragging your feet, we need this NOW!" And we end up back in the whole yearly release cycle. While the bar can be raised, its usually easier to find an something else to do that preserves the income flow.

A better solution, I think, would be a more modular platform that allows for fixing and updating specific sub-components without needing to deal with other parts of the program. This would allow updates and fixes to be parcelled out into smaller, nimbler working groups that can release when *they* are ready without having to wait for another group to finish their fixes. This would also reduce the chances of one fix causing problems elsewhere and the need for extensive cross-checking. Updates would also be simplified, allowing companies to run V5.1 of this, V2.0 of that, and V1.1 of the other (the new fixes break our work flow, so we need the old version).

[cadtag]

"Thanks, we'll look into it. A fix should be available in place for the next release, ....

Replace "should" with "might", and that's pretty much what subscription support tells me now! Along with "We can't replicate the problem" & "Have you tried re-installing".

It's probably to late for AutoCAD to be modularized. If they tried that level of massive re-write the most probable result would be a Netscape situation -- where the rewrite takes forever and kills the company. Not necessarily bad for users in the long run, after all Netscape became Mozilla, and Firefox is a definite improvement over the 1998 era browsers. But Netscape itself didn't survive the process, and I would like to see Autodesk survive.

Thanks to tax laws, subscription looks like a good deal to bean counters, and is sadly not likely to go away. As long as the vendors have a steady revenue stream without making better products, we won't see better products. Maybe the best thing to happen in the DWG world lately is competition -- from Intellicad 6 and eventually 7, Bricsys, & Graebert.