CMU School of Drama


Thursday, August 02, 2012

Who Will Autodesk Buy Next?

 Wired.com: The company’s road map may be more ambitious than naysayers believe. Autodesk has released a host of great software for a variety of platforms that fall outside their standard offerings and says it plans to invest in cloud storage to host all of it’s new programs. In the flurry of press that followed the announcement, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass asserted that the company is making a bid to be the social hub where creators collaborate on projects.

3 comments:

Adelaide Zhang said...

Autodesk's pairing with Social Cam is, as noted in the article, a decidedly unusual one, but passing judgement on the move should probably wait until we know what it is that Autodesk plans to do with its new acquisition. For another thing, there's no rule that prevents companies from expanding in nonstandard directions, and though it might make more sense for them to merge with other companies who deal in similar areas, there's no telling what will happen until it does.
In any case, the best course of action for right now seems to be to do as the author does and simply ask, What next?

Samuel Stark said...

I'm actually all for Autodesk buying these companies. If all combined, then designers, architects, engineers, technicians, and even DYI-ers could have a great system to not only share their work, but also introduce new creators to CAD through minecraft and start a great community of CAD-ers. Also, this would give designers a simple way to communicate ideas as well in formats that are generalized across all platforms.

Unknown said...

My first response to this is simply, what???? However, I guess I can see how AutoDesk may want to use Social Cam as a means to help foster collaboration between designers. I suppose that the people over at Social Cam may have very good ideas on how digital social collaborations should work and AutoDesk is hoping to implement some of these features in their products. I do however hope that as a publicly traded company, AutoDesk has a very clear and well thought out plan for its new acquisition to allay investor fears.