Media Q&A with Carl Bass, CEO

Written by Martyn Day

Published Thu 12 Feb 2009

Carl Bass has been Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Autodesk since 2004. He originally joined the company back in 1993 when his 3D graphics company, Ithaca software was acquired by Autodesk. He has held a number of key positions over the years and has left the company a few times in between, most notably to set-up Buzzsaw, the collaborative project management solution, and secondly he was fired for refusing to fix AutoCAD R13! Fortunately he was re-hired and eleven years on, he has the top job. Since taking over Bass has focussed Autodesk on product development, acquisitions and new technology, and it shows.

Global economics 

Our first topic for discussion was the faltering global economy. This meeting occurred back in December and was before the outlook went from bad to ‘Armageddon’. Bass was quite pessimistic, saying things were going to get worse and it would be at least 12-18 months before things would stabilise or turn around. Since then Autodesk has announced a 10% reduction in staff which will take place in the next month. Indeed, trading times are tough for everyone, especially companies that rely on banks to get capital to invest in projects and tools. However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel in that it looks like governments are preparing financial stimulus packages that will invest in infrastructure, requiring the latest software tools. 

Bass went on to say that all market segments were being affected and in some geographies more than others. Autodesk invests about 20-22% of revenue in R&D and Bass stated that the company would keep to that level, while cutting expenses. There are places he feels that Autodesk has to invest in, like cloud computing and services, new innovative user interfaces, 3D sketching and making use of multi core CPUs etc. The net result, however, will be that Autodesk will slow new product introduction to the market, particularly those of speculative concepts, as the opportunity will still be there in two years time and Autodesk could make a more mature product in that timeframe. Bass highlighted Inventor Fusion as probably being one of those products that would now not be rushed to market.    

Harnessing compute power  

With Carl Bass’ background in computer graphics, and as a true technologist, I was interested to ask him about all the current messaging about GPU (Graphical Processor Units) which are being flagged up by graphics card companies as being the next big thing to speed up computing. Bass first admitted that his answer may be a tad awkward as one of the event’s key sponsors was Nvidia, a key proponent of the power of GPUs, but that didn’t really stop him saying what he wanted! In general, Bass is sceptical that GPUs will provide outside of graphics processing and doesn’t think they are the answer to all computing problems, as by definition they are not general purpose computers. He thought that companies were overstating what they were capable of doing. Bass believes what will drive computer speed is the ever-increasing multi-core processors that Intel is producing, combined with GPUs just doing the 3D graphics. To expand on that, Bass commented that Autodesk products like Showcase and 3ds Max (and project Newport), all depend on GPUs and asked the question (rhetorically) why should a $5,000 CAD application have worse graphics than a $50 game? He highlighted Autodesk Revit, an architectural CAD tool, as being one product that would look more like Call of Duty 3 than its previous incarnations in the future.

Low-cost CAD

Another intriguing issue was Autodesk’s recent re-introduction and update to the almost prehistoric low-cost drawing tool, AutoSketch. Bass stated that people kept asking for a low-cost product and explained that they had not got around to updating it as they had ‘lost interest, call it corporate attention deficit’ but finally settled on the fact that it probably fell below the threshold of scale in terms of income. 

Bass revealed that Autodesk even looked at doing an online drawing tool, an area which the company is obviously exploring if you look at the Autodesk Labs web site but settled on updating what was already out there.  

While we were talking about the low-end market, I asked about the free design tools that are out there like 3DVia, SketchUp, that Autodesk has ignored. Bass said, “I don’t particularly subscribe to the Bernard Charles (CEO of competitor Dassault Systemes, developers of 3DVia) view of the world, I think that’s goofy and particularly goofy for that company. I don’t think we have to do it that way.”

Interoperability and data 

One journalist asked about interoperability with competitors’ products, with Autodesk having agreements now with Bentley Systems, PTC and Siemens PLM Software. Bass responded, “We have a long standing belief that data interoperability is important for the community. In order to do that data has to be exchanged freely and with hi-fidelity and without boundaries introduced by the software vendors. Not all companies in the industry share that belief. Not even many people believe we have that belief! I have always said that we are willing to exchange our data, our formats and libraries with anyone in the industry, of any size, in order to have interoperability amongst customer’s products. It’s a reality that no project is ever done in one product; it could take five, ten, fifty, a hundred pieces of software. It’s ridiculous to think of one piece of software as an island. We should compete on applications not formats.”

Bass talked a lot about managing data and with only a few basic products in that arena, I asked what kind of data management tools Autodesk was working on. He replied, “I actually think that files are an incredibly good way to move data around. Over the years people have experimented with federated databases and others with means of centralised control. Within the Autodesk portfolio, I’d just like to use five sets of tools on the same set of data and have the data look the same way in applications, have the same engineering charcteristics and move that around, back and forth and retain its intelligence. We have been doing a huge amount of work on it. There’s geometry and materials but also levels of representation, while you may want to bring an Inventor model into Revit, you don’t need all the data, just the appropriate level.” 

Green design

Finally the discussion moved towards Autodesk’s current hot marketing topic of green and sustainable design. Autodesk sees great opportunity in building-in green analysis tools to many of its products to help product design and building design. By harnessing the multiple cores of a CPU, Bass envisaged future systems that automatically carried out analysis as the designs were being created, constantly giving feedback, even suggestions to the designer to produce products with the least environmental impact. 

Bass wrapped up the session by wishing for more green education and will be making it easier for designers to access design feedback in their products.