Innovator's dilemma of AutoCAD WS: interview with Tal Weiss

I started my company after service in the Army. The idea come from Iris Shoor to organize company called Visual Tao, which eventually become AutoCAD WS. She was working as an architect, not a software engineer. This was back in 2006, when all kind of things were happening in the online space, the whole move from web pages to web applications. She was actually playing around the Google Docs, which at that time just come out. Now it looks kind of trivial, but then it was amazing. So she was playing around with all that tools and collaboration capabilities they offered and come to idea that it would be great to add the same kind of capabilities to AutoCAD drawings, so they can be opened with web browser, viewed by other people accessing from anywhere. With all that stuff in mind she approached myself and couple of other guys and asked us can we do this, is it possible? We answered – send us batch of your drawings, we’ll take look at it. So she sent and we’ve said – no this is impossible! And she asked – why? We answered - all documents and spreadsheets have simple data structure, while drawings you’ve sent to us are huge and super complex. The thing I always like about non-technical people – they don’t get sweat with technical answer. So she still insisted – can we do something? So we finally came to point that it is not impossible, it’s just very hard to do. And with that idea in mind we created the company.

Nobody is starting healthy business with idea to give it off to somebody else. Selling it to some big corporation is not really good answer. We were looking to sell our product to the public using SaaS - similarly to Salesforce.com. So our business-model was that people are paying for this product as a service, using their web browser to access all information they need, specifically – design information.

Yes, now we charge only for products integrated to AutoCAD as a part of AutoCAD offerings, and don’t charge for services. Autodesk senses changed fundamentally in the way we now using computing, similar to that shift back in 90-s, when everybody moved from large UNIX workstations to desktop PC with Windows. Now we shift again to data stored in the clouds and mobile computing. And it is very important for us to be dominant in that area, to force that market, to help to end-user to move to mobile solutions.

The way we look at this is so called innovator's dilemma. Something new is happening but you still have all existing stuff which you want to sell. So easy way out of this is to trying to take your existing stuff and cut out of it, stick it to other platform – on a web browser, on mobile phone, on iPad. But with this approach you’re always in danger to do not satisfy end-user expectations. What we decided to do – let’s look to all these new platforms from the fresh prospective to provide users with best possible experience on those platforms.

There is nothing intentional about maintaining the gap. It’s all about prioritizing what makes the sense, which function on the mobile phone or tablet will give user most amount of value. So we shall work according to our roadmap, you can’t implement all at once, no matter how large is your organization – there always is some limit of resources. So we have to put in the first row the most relevant features for each platform.

I think that there is nothing which should stop us from business or a legal point of view. We should be sure that we‘re investing in and stuff we put in the product gets used by people. This is approach similar to the Apple for example. They really focus on the things, which are important, making product very simple and easy and crispy in use.

From a hardware prospects mobile devices certainly are weaker than high-end desktop workstations in ration of 1:4 or even 1:5 because of faster processors, graphics cards, bigger amount of memory. From another hand you see the large pace of technological advance when we comparing with situation just two years ago, when there were no iPad. Now it creates full new category of devices, vendors come with new, bigger and faster versions every year or even every six months. I do think that there is the race between Google and Apple and, even Microsoft to get things to the point where tablets will can do everything desktop computers can. Couple that with cloud architecture which offloads a lot of heavy-duty computing and situation is changed, it does feel to me that in the future we’re not too distant from use mobile devices for majority of tasks we can do now on desktops.

I would say iOS and Android are going head-to-head. It’s really differs by the geography. In North America Apple has huge advantage, while in Asian countries like Korea and Japan Android is huge, because it’s supported by local vendors like Samsung. From another hand in countries like Brazil the web is stronger.

I think it would be hard to avoid such collaboration. In fact mobile applications offload a lot of its work to the cloud where AutoCAD runs. It reads and writes DWG files and does a lot of other work. Basically we not only consume AutoCAD we work close with AutoCAD team on number of different tasks to provide end-user with particular functionality and features. So there is very close collaboration between WS and AutoCAD teams.

I’ll show my personal opinion. Unfortunately to make applications run on ARM you have to recompile them because of very different architecture. That’s put a big barrier on porting existent applications to ARM, because by all of vendors things aren’t run very smoothly, so people will have to invest a huge amount of time. If we look from a user prospective, who is going to win o specific mobile devices - banking, finances or the design? So I’m not sure about such kind of changing.

Right now I’m mostly focused on AutoCAD WS. A reason is not because I think that there is no demand for Inventor but because AutoCAD today is biggest selling product. From another hand we only just begun to create AutoCAD solutions for mobile platforms, so I hardly to expect to see four different products and get lost with their releases. We started with just 2D because there is huge number of 2D drawings created in the past. Sure, 3D support will be coming to WS.