To put things into perspective ... maybe!

[aidanodr]

Hi Guys,

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090521/ap_ ... s_autodesk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Autodesk posts 1Q loss, plans job cuts

"Design and engineering software maker Autodesk Inc. posted a net loss for its fiscal first quarter Thursday, hurt by a sharp revenue drop, goodwill impairment and restructuring charges.

The company also said it plans to cut about 430 jobs and close some facilities."

"Revenue fell 29 percent to $425.8 million from $598.8 million."

One acquisition too many??

Aidan

[Thunderstone]

What the heck, do they mean by "goodwill impairment"??? Never heard of that before.

[Darkstone]

Yes I was thinking about this whole thing, and given what MS have been doing with a number of their software groups over the last 6 months, my guess is that they are actually in trouble. Closing down the TW, Halo and FlightSimulater teams is pretty serious. But add to that the Vista disaster, the growing IE8 problems, and the rapid development and release of Windows7 to deal with the Vista mess, combined with a general collapse in Corp. spending - I would say that TS was just unlucky.

My group develops and markets a corporate governance system used by large end corporates, and in the first 6 months of 2008 every pending US sale except 1 (that is 10 sales that were confirmed by the clients and awaiting final board signoff) was cancelled or postponed in the space of 2 months, as one by one the budgets were pulled. Fortunately we are in multiple countries and in multiple sectors so we shifted focus rapidly about the middle of 2008 and recovered from the loss, but the cost of sales that will not be recovered any time soon really hurt at the time. But we have basically pulled back from the US market at this point as it is a staggering disaster at the moment.

With marketing revenues way and media groups struggling, a glut of unsold or untenanted buildings, the traditional consumers of 3D art - design, media, construction are simply not buying. So the whole market is flat.

Add to that, google's retreat from the 3D space, has meant that MS no longer has the driving imperative to achieve a 3D presence to match it's greatest current threat.

A far greater concern to them must be the cloud computing drive, which threatens their server and desktop apps revenues.

Vista must have really hurt them. We have only recently shifted our product set to be Vista compatible, because there was (and in fact still is not) any corporate demand for Vista. We have only one client that has shifted to Vista as SDE and that was a month or two ago. And, in truth, the only reason we did it was because we discovered by accident that 98% of it worked on Vista without change, but all of our large clients were refusing to go Vista. So that is a lot of revenue the MS wasn't getting, because they have not officially been letting anyine buy XP for a while now.

I suspect the TS thing was not planned - just unfortunate.

They should never have made it free - that was completely unnecessary. Maybe they could have dropped the price, but totally free wasn't needed.

If you make an OS and you are going to make a product free, you should ship it with your OS, and make it downloadable in the WIndows updater service.

As a pure windows development firm we have a lot of time for MS, but of late they have made one bad decision after another. Office 2007, Vista, IE8, OneNote, Groove, TW, MS FSx, Halo, ActiveX crippling and now TS...the list goes on. IE8 just kills me - when we moved from IE6 to IE7 a huge number of web of sites broke. Ok, I thought, well that was probably necessary, but now we go to IE8 - and so many IE7 compatible sites break again that there is even an IE7 compatibility mode built into the browser. This is simply stupid.

With Vista and IE7 the internal security model destroyed the use of IE as in embedded browser in an application if the app was also embedded in another borwser - so for the first time in my life I started looking for a browser we could ship with our apps that was not IE. Sinve our apps are 100% tied to MS, that is a very extreme vendor screw up.

I reckon, MS is seriously vulnerable right now, for the first time in their history, and they are trying to get control of the internal mess.

Doesn't help us though. We are still going to have to find a TS replacement eventually. Has anyone tried TS on the Windows 7 RC yet? Because you can probably bet that when W7 comes out XP support will completely stop very soon after.

We may find we can not even run the TS - or we may be lucky.

[TheTomG]

Tests on Windows 7 so far have shown that tS works ok on there.

HTH!
Tom

[Thunderstone]

That's good news... I'm in no rush to migrate over to Win 7 in the foreseeable future. I had just recently migrated over (screaming and kicking) to XP. Used to be on the cutting edge of technology that I often bleed Micro$oft colors. Their recent blunders has given me cause to pause indefinitely.

[Steinie]

Roman has responded!
http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/s ... stcount=84" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Now it is a wait and see...
I have to cross everything again!

[First Light]

That's good news!

[Thunderstone]

tS 7.61 has been released!!!! go and grab the stuff before it goes bye bye....