[twelvechairs]

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

[jfindley]

Whilst that's true, there's also a question of degree. Revit, which is the source of complaint here, takes long enough to open your file you might as well go make a sandwich while it does so. The developers only found out that CPUs have multiple cores somewhere around 2017, and still haven't really worked out how to actually use more than one core for anything much. They still appear to be largely unclear what a "GPU" is, so don't bother putting anything fancy in your workstation.

It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.

[neutronicus]

Ha. I work on a competitor and our story is similar.

We're a little more aggressive with multi-threading but you have to understand these code-bases are massive legacy things whose value comes from a ton of business logic accreted over 25 years.

I assure you I've heard of multiple CPU cores (before this I did high-performance physics simulations across thousands of cores) but I still don't have the first idea how to get something to execute on a background thread in this codebase.

[MiroF]

Multithread is not as easy as you think for a legacy application this big.

[EdStanyer]

Working on an new project in a similar industrial market to most AD products, we've adopted a massively multi-threaded approach to development. But I'm starting to wonder if the product will come to fruition before I'm pushing trolleys 'round at Tesco.

[MH15]

With Adobe I'm extremely worried about their acquisition of Algorithmic, the makes of Substance Painter and Substance Designer. I use these tools in 3D animation/texturing, they are truly fantastic tools. Before Adobe bought them, they offered a purchase option, now it's just subscriptions of course.

[elliekelly]

I have such a love/hate relationship with Adobe. Their software is so useful. I want to love it. But they basically infiltrate my entire computer in order to install/run it and I’ve been burned by their shady billing practices so many times I now have a prepaid Visa from CVS that’s exclusively for my Adobe subscription. I fundamentally do not understand how a company can simultaneously be so awesome and so awful.

[esperent]

When I was younger, I used to pirate expensive software that I couldn't afford. It's what got me into 3D graphics and graphic design at a young age. Now I'm older and using some of this software professionally, and usually, I'm more than happy to pay for it. But I'll never buy into Adobe's shady subscription model, or any other company that does this. When I pay for a software license, that version of the software should become mine, the same as when I buy any other product. If a company refuses me that option, I steal the software with zero remorse. The idea of renting software is ridiculous, especially when I have zero need for support services.

[mcguire]

The problem with this: updates. You buy a version. They fix the bugs you report and release a new version. Do you pay full price for it? No, it's just an update. You'll pay a reduced upgrade price, but you want it for free. Your price probably doesn't pay for ongoing upgrades and might not pay for the updates. So no one is paying for updates. Every new version has to be sufficiently improved to get everyone to buy a new copy. Or the company could release a version and coast on it until revenue stops coming in.

Renting software is ridiculous, but at least the incentives are kind of pointed in the right direction.

[dredmorbius]

Progressive taxation is rents scaled to means.

[esperent]

Photoshop is extremely stable software. Other than a couple of new features and UI changes, there's not much difference between Photoshop now and ten years ago.

[tonyedgecombe]

That wasn't the case before Adobe switched to subscriptions. Just look at all the shit they poured into Acrobat to keep selling upgrades.

[patmorgan23]

Easy solution you either get A) all minor updates untill the next major version or B) free minor updates for X years.

[syshum]

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability

For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem

Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,

[ethbro]

> Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,

Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much!

Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.

[TallGuyShort]

Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.

[ethbro]

In my experience (~10 years of doing this sort of work) software engineers typically understand how their users use the software in the abstract, but not in the actual experience.

E.g. It is well understood that users rely on a hotkey "a lot." It is not understood that users are so familiar with a hotkey that, if you relocated it on the keyboard, productivity would decrease 40% for 3 months.

That distinction is fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.

[brutt]

UX design is done by designers and product managers. Developer just implemented ability to assign hot key X to function Y. How this ability used was not his/her concern.

[TallGuyShort]

Personally, I'd push back on such a change unless there was a very good reason. I feel like this violates the same kind of principle as "we do not break user space EVER". My point above is that a programmer should understand better than most how important muscle memory and shortcuts are to productivity.

[ethbro]

I've worked at both kinds of shops. I'd never work at somewhere that follows the above strictly again.

It's been my experience that you get crappy software, produced with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, if your developers don't know your users.

[syshum]

My Experience is software engineers understand how users SHOULD use the software, which rarely matches how users DO use the software

Most of the time I experience a scenario of the engineer or support person saying "Show me what you are doing" only for the user to show some weird and non-logical (to the engineer) way of doing some task, and the engineer or support person replying "Well you should be doing it this other completely different way"

[d4rti]

It's only reinforced my capslock is escape habit.

[zorked]

Software engineers do get that, they have been using vim, emacs for decades with few changes.

Product designers on the other hand.

[snoopen]

MS Office, or at least Word and PowerPoint have lacked innovation to the user experience on a fundamental level. Years ago they overhauled the UI because people weren't using many of the features on offer. What they failed to do is make those features easy to use. Prime example is numbered lists in Word which is still unnecessarily complicated to use. This isn't a compatibility issue, purely UX. Numbered lists are also buggy, like they were 15 years ago, and are still the best way to corrupt your document.

[grawprog]

It's not just lists, just about all word's auto formatting is buggy and unintuitive. Page numbers, tables, headings, tables of contents, paragraph layout on pages with pictures, just putting pictures in a document can be a pain in and of itself. Pretty much anything you do in word above some simple formatting starts to get buggy and unpredictable and the more of these things you have in a document, the more painful editing that document becomes.

[fendy3002]

The problem for microsoft, it's not a simply "fixing the auto formatting", but "changing how auto formatting behave". Nowadays the buggy auto formatting may be expected by some people and changing (fixing) it may distrupt their workflow (xkcd reference).

Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.

[NikolaNovak]

This nails it.

There's a class of software I want rapid improvements to.

And frankly there's a class of software I want to just work and not move the needle needlessly. Even with Adobe, I have NO idea why I have to have 27 processes constantly running to check for updates; why it actually performs updates that grind my system all the time; I can't honestly say that I have personally advanced and started using anything new or different in Photoshop in many many years, let alone MS Word. :-/

(understanding this is a different use case to original-original-poster; most of the software I DO want to advance - our database engine or process scheduler or OS monitoring software can always get better as far as I'm concerned, etc.

[cosmie]

> Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products,

Many people aren't just robotic, they're straight up ritualistic.

I've worked with several people that are absolute wizards at PowerPoint, love to get new features, and quickly integrate them into their workflows.

But those same people have absolutely no mental framework for how Excel works. They'll quite literally use a physical calculator (or their phone's calculator app) in tandem with Excel, treating Excel as a glorified text editor that lets you do cell-by-cell text placement/formatting. They have such a weak grasp of how Excel works that any tiny change whatsoever doesn't just cause extreme frustration, but also extreme anxiety as they scramble to re-establish the thin veneer of usability they previously held.

Having witnessed the above more than once, I've taken to heart the level of naivety that should be presumed when creating UX flows and documentation.

[chansiky]

> people that want innovation and people that want stability

Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,

[latentpot]

Could you share more about Esri? That's an unknown example to me.