Friday, February 06, 2015
Autodesk going subscription-only. Here’s how they can help the industry
fxguide: Autodesk has announced that they will stop selling standalone perpetual licenses of their desktop software beginning on February 1, 2016. This is only for standalone software, and the change does not impact the Entertainment Creation Suites or Network licenses at this point in time (expect news on that in the future).
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Personally, though I think that a lot of freelance users of Autodesk products will be very disappointed in the fact that they can no longer purchase software with a one time fee, I understand how Autodesk feels that only providing subscriptions to their software would be beneficial to everyone. Though their clearly is some financial incentive (they begin to see raised profit for every month on every subscription that lasts more than 24 months), The company isn’t voiding any of the licenses that they issue up to f\February 2016. With software as powerful as the AutoCAD, you would’t want to update annually anyway, so that 2016 software should last private users years. The other component is that according to the article, most people pay subscription fees to update their software anyway, so this wouldn’t effect the majority of Autodesk consumers. It certainly won’t effect me, I’m running off an educational version of the product (which unfortunately the article did not touch upon). So while as a consumer I would most definitely rather have the option to just buy in instead of paying regularly, I can understand why it makes sense for Autodesk to make this move.
Eh, logically I guess there really is not a lot to complain about. Cheaper fees, always up to date software, everybody wins. Yet, I can't help but feel that Autodesk should at least offer people the option to still purchase a standalone copy. There are definitely people out there that are vehemently against subscription based software purchasing. I am certainly on the fence. For software like Adobe Creative Suite, which does not have annual releases, I believe that a subscription model runs contrary to some organizations beliefs on purchasing software seats. On the other hand, it makes some sense for software with annual releases, such as Autodesk products, to have a subscription based purchasing scheme. You don't want to have to re-buy a similar product year after year, especially given the high cost. Yet, not "owning" what you are using can be disliked by some end users. I can't help but wonder if one of the more ulterior motives of this subscription ploy is to ensure that all users of Autodesk products are always running the most up to date software.
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