Autodesk To Follow Adobe's 'Rent Our Software' Business Model? 89
dryriver writes "Autodesk will detail in October an 'evolution' of its business model that includes more options to rent its software, rather than buying it, CEO Carl Bass said in an earnings conference call yesterday. Bass promised an array of new rental options by the end of the year that he said will give customers more subscription options and increase the predictability of the company's revenue over time. Bass stressed that Autodesk wasn't upending its existing model, but augmenting it. 'Recall that, just 10 years ago, we added subscription maintenance to our revenue stream,' he said. 'That was a big change at the time, and there was no shortage of skeptics. Today, that's a billion-dollar business and represents over 40% of our revenue. Suffice it to say that transition was a huge success.' Analysts on the call immediately started drawing comparisons with Adobe's move earlier this year to a subscription-only pricing model for its Creative Cloud software. Bass said that Adobe's success made Autodesk more confident about the feasibility of rental pricing, but suggested that Autodesk's move wouldn't be quite as aggressive."
Re:Autodesk is as bad as they get (Score:5, Funny)
If the rep rings up the company running the software, asks if they have any problems, and gets minutes of hate about licence software fucking up then the client is sticking to the licence and using the software honestly.
If the client answers "fine, no problems" then the client has worked around flexlm and could be ignoring whatever licence restrictions have been imposed on them.
Flexlm is there to punish the honest. I still have a machine running redhat7.2 to keep an old piece of shit version of flexlm running so that I still have a licence server for an old application that gets used every now and again. The actual application will run on the latest and greatest linux, but not flexlm. It's the same reason the serious stuff is still all on RHEL5 instead of 6 - the application is happy on the new platform but not flexlm. It's a time waster to punish the honest.