I know I said I wanted to avoid the “old man yells at cloud” mentality, but the Internet used to be a lot better… even with animated email GIFs (or perhaps because of animated email GIFs.)
I, of course, am not the only one who has noticed. Luckily people who are much smarter have been paying attention along the way. I just finished reading Enshittification. It was great. Highly recommended. Even with the sometimes-obtuse topics, the author tells a really good story. And I couldn’t help but think about how it applies to our industry, and the dominant software player in it.
The lather-rinse-repeat cycle of these big tech companies getting TOO big and killing innovation and putting out products that just make things worse is documented and on display, and something I think we all have seen.
In our little corner of the software world, I am curious what the leaders at Autodesk think about the book and its lessons. As someone who has never sat in on an Autodesk board meeting or stockholder call, Autodesk has always been in a funny spot for a software company: it seems like they want to be considered a Microsoft or Google or even Adobe, but their userbase needs and niche market (and high costs) limit this.
Following Doctorow’s Enshittification process, they certainly have followed their larger brethren: lock-in users, switch to subscription, control the competitive marketplace. Depending on the release year, an argument could be made about product quality decline, or at least lack of improvement over the years (looking at you, Navisworks). But the similarities start to break down pretty quickly. The book leans heavily on advertising as the monetization mechanism that degrade the user experience, and we just don’t have that problem. The tools we use from Autodesk are work tools… and that’s it.
The social angle doesn’t line up either. This is software to get a job done, not communities. As I tell all my coworkers, I like them, and I really like the work I do, but if I win the lottery tomorrow, they may never see me again.
And finally, the endgame for these platforms is death. The quality is such that it just needs to be taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery. People have historically been able to pretty quickly go from one platform to another, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the big A shuts down that quickly. Projects and business cycles take way too long. And despite the open-source community talking about it for years, there are not many alternative tools available.
So, while there are certainly parallels, I think that even where Autodesk’s behavior looks like enshittification, the mechanism is different. Doctorow’s examples heavily rely on social lock-in, meaning you stay on the platform because your people are there. Autodesk’s lock-in is format and workflow dependency. Your files are there. Your consultants are there. Your 20 (30?) years of project history is there. That’s a different kind of trap, and probably a stickier one. So maybe the better framing isn’t that Autodesk is following the enshittification playbook, it’s that the same tactics (eliminating competitive pressure, extracting value from a captive user base) show up differently depending on the type of company.
Either way, I’m watching closely. And I’d still love to know what Autodesk leadership thinks about all this.
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